State of Constantinople
Such was the state of things when, in 398, he began the charge of a city which, in corruption, party spirit, and unquenched enmities of long-standing, surpassed, if it were possible, his own native Antioch. It is true, that instead of the small remnant who listened to St. Gregory eighteen years before in the Church of the Resurrection, the whole city was, in name at least, Catholic. Its bishop was seated in a magnificent church, with a clergy more numerous, perhaps, than in any episcopal see in the world: with vast revenues, and a position second only to that of the emperor. But the court of the East was the focus of endless rivalries: of eunuchs who were ministers of state exercising the terrible autocratic powers of an emperor scarcely of age, and dominated by an imperious empress, whose splendid beauty held him in thraldom, while her lust of power was endless and her vanity excessive. And then there were foreign and barbarian generals, whose struggle with each other for mastery was always keeping the empire in disquietude. And lastly, the rivalry of the Gallic Rufinus, whom Theodosius had left to advise his son in the East with the semi-barbarian Stilicho, to whom he had given both his favourite niece Serena for wife, and his younger son Honorius for pupil in the West, was preparing the ruin of Constantine’s empire by its own hands.
In such an atmosphere the preacher and the saint was placed to struggle as he might against court intrigues, and to correct and purify a clergy whose conduct left much to be desired. He showed himself throughout an admirable bishop. Pursuing himself the most simple and ascetic life, he bestowed his whole great income as patriarch on the poor. He founded hospitals and homes. He celebrated the divine service with the utmost care and splendour. He watched over discipline among his clergy. He was unwearied in preaching. Nor did his vigilance end with the limits of his own see. He sent missionaries to Phœnicia and Palestine; to the Scythians, also, and the Goths. For the latter he established a special service of their own—he did all he could to deliver them from the fatal error which the deceit of the emperor Valens had infected them with, in presenting them with Arianism instead of the Christian faith. He exerted also the very questionable claim of his see—which the council of 381 had attempted to exalt to the utmost—by judging the case of the Exarch of Ephesus, and removing several faulty bishops from their seats in that exarchate.