Here he differs, as far as I can judge, from his
brother saints and doctors of the Greek Church,
St. Basil and St. Gregory Nazianzen. They were
scholars, shy perhaps and reserved; and though
they had not given up the secular state, they were[{25}]
essentially monks. There is no evidence, that I
remember, to show that they attached men to
their persons. They, as well as John, had a
multitude of enemies; and were regarded, the
one with dislike, the other perhaps with contempt;[{30}]
but they had not, on the other hand,
warm, eager, sympathetic, indignant, agonized
friends. There is another characteristic in
Chrysostom, which perhaps gained for him this great
blessing. He had, as it would seem, a vigor,[{5}]
elasticity, and, what may be called, sunniness of
mind, all his own. He was ever sanguine,
seldom sad. Basil had a life-long malady, involving
continual gnawing pain and a weight of physical
dejection. He bore his burden well and[{10}]
gracefully, like the great Saint he was, as Job bore his;
but it was a burden like Job's. He was a calm, mild,
grave, autumnal day; St. John Chrysostom was
a day in spring-time, bright and rainy, and
glittering through its rain. Gregory was the full[{15}]
summer, with a long spell of pleasant stillness, its
monotony relieved by thunder and lightning.
And St. Athanasius figures to us the stern
persecuting winter, with its wild winds, its dreary
wastes, its sleep of the great mother, and the[{20}]
bright stars shining overhead. He and
Chrysostom have no points in common; but Gregory was
a dethroned Archbishop of Constantinople, like
Chrysostom, and, again, dethroned by his
brethren the Bishops. Like Basil, too, Chrysostom was[{25}]
bowed with infirmities of body; he was often ill;
he was thin and wizened; cold was a misery to
him; heat affected his head; he scarcely dare
touch wine; he was obliged to use the bath;
obliged to take exercise, or rather to be[{30}]
continually on the move. Whether from a nervous or
febrile complexion, he was warm in temper; or
at least, at certain times, his emotion struggled
hard with his reason. But he had that noble
spirit which complains as little as possible; which
makes the best of things; which soon recovers[{5}]
its equanimity, and hopes on in circumstances
when others sink down in despair....
II
Whence is this devotion to St. John
Chrysostom, which leads me to dwell upon the thought of
him, and makes me kindle at his name, when so[{10}]
many other great Saints, as the year brings round
their festivals, command indeed my veneration,
but exert no personal claim upon my heart?
Many holy men have died in exile, many holy
men have been successful preachers; and what[{15}]
more can we write upon St. Chrysostom's
monument than this, that he was eloquent and that he
suffered persecution? He is not an Athanasius,
expounding a sacred dogma with a luminousness
which is almost an inspiration; nor is he[{20}]
Athanasius, again, in his romantic life-long adventures,
in his sublime solitariness, in his ascendancy over
all classes of men, in his series of triumphs over
material force and civil tyranny. Nor, except
by the contrast, does he remind us of that[{25}]
Ambrose who kept his ground obstinately in an
imperial city, and fortified himself against the
heresy of a court by the living rampart of a
devoted population. Nor is he Gregory or Basil,
rich in the literature and philosophy of Greece,
and embellishing the Church with the spoils of
heathenism. Again, he is not an Augustine,
devoting long years to one masterpiece of thought,[{5}]
and laying, in successive controversies, the
foundations of theology. Nor is he a Jerome, so dead to
the world that he can imitate the point and wit
of its writers without danger to himself or
scandal to his brethren. He has not trampled upon[{10}]
heresy, nor smitten emperors, nor beautified the
house or the service of God, nor knit together the
portions of Christendom, nor founded a religious
order, nor built up the framework of doctrine, nor
expounded the science of the Saints; yet I love[{15}]
him, as I love David or St. Paul.
How am I to account for it? It has not
happened to me, as it might happen to many a man,
that I have devoted time and toil to the study of
his writings or of his history, and cry up that[{20}]
upon which I have made an outlay, or love what
has become familiar to me. Cases may occur
when our admiration for an author is only
admiration of our own comments on him, and when
our love of an old acquaintance is only our love[{25}]
of old times. For me, I have not written the
life of Chrysostom, nor translated his works, nor
studied Scripture in his exposition, nor forged
weapons of controversy out of his sayings or his
doings. Nor is his eloquence of a kind to carry[{30}]
any one away who has ever so little knowledge
of the oratory of Greece and Rome. It is not
force of words, nor cogency of argument, nor
harmony of composition, nor depth or richness of
thought, which constitute his power,—whence,
then, has he this influence, so mysterious, yet so[{5}]
strong?
I consider St. Chrysostom's charm to lie in his
intimate sympathy and compassionateness for
the whole world, not only in its strength, but in
its weakness; in the lively regard with which he[{10}]
views everything that comes before him, taken
in the concrete, whether as made after its own
kind or as gifted with a nature higher than its
own. Not that any religious man—above all,
not that any Saint—could possibly contrive to[{15}]
abstract the love of the work from the love of
its Maker, or could feel a tenderness for earth
which did not spring from devotion to heaven;
or as if he would not love everything just in that
degree in which the Creator loves it, and[{20}]
according to the measure of gifts which the Creator
has bestowed upon it, and preëminently for the
Creator's sake. But this is the characteristic
of all Saints; and I am speaking, not of what St.
Chrysostom had in common with others, but what[{25}]
he had special to himself; and this specialty, I
conceive, is the interest which he takes in all
things, not so far as God has made them alike,
but as He has made them different from each
other. I speak of the discriminating[{30}]
affectionateness with which he accepts every one for what is
personal in him and unlike others. I speak of his
versatile recognition of men, one by one, for the
sake of that portion of good, be it more or less,
of a lower order or a higher, which has severally
been lodged in them; his eager contemplation of[{5}]
the many things they do, effect, or produce, of
all their great works, as nations or as states;
nay, even as they are corrupted or disguised by
evil, so far as that evil may in imagination be
disjoined from their proper nature, or may be[{10}]
regarded as a mere material disorder apart from
its formal character of guilt. I speak of the
kindly spirit and the genial temper with which
he looks round at all things which this
wonderful world contains; of the graphic fidelity with[{15}]
which he notes them down upon the tablets of
his mind, and of the promptitude and propriety
with which he calls them up as arguments or
illustrations in the course of his teaching as the
occasion requires. Possessed though he be by[{20}]
the fire of Divine charity, he has not lost one
fiber, he does not miss one vibration, of the
complicated whole of human sentiment and affection;
like the miraculous bush in the desert, which, for
all the flame that wrapt it round, was not thereby[{25}]
consumed.
Such, in a transcendent perfection, was the
gaze, as we may reverently suppose, with which
the loving Father of all surveyed in eternity that
universe even in its minutest details which He[{30}]
had decreed to create such the loving pity with
which He spoke the word when the due moment
came, and began to mold the finite, as He
created it, in His infinite hands; such the watchful
solicitude with which he now keeps His
catalogue of the innumerable birds of heaven, and[{5}]
counts day by day the very hairs of our head and
the alternations of our breathing. Such, much
more, is the awful contemplation with which He
encompasses incessantly every one of those souls
on whom He heaps His mercies here, in order[{10}]
to make them the intimate associates of His own
eternity hereafter. And we too, in our measure,
are bound to imitate Him in our exact and vivid
apprehension of Himself and of His works. As to
Himself, we love Him, not simply in His nature,[{15}]
but in His triple personality, lest we become mere
pantheists. And so, again, we choose our patron
Saints, not for what they have in common with
each other (else there could be no room for choice
at all), but for what is peculiar to them severally.[{20}]
That which is my warrant, therefore, for particular
devotions at all, becomes itself my reason for
devotion to St. John Chrysostom. In him I
recognize a special pattern of that very gift of
discrimination. He may indeed be said in some sense to[{25}]
have a devotion of his own for every one who
comes across him,—for persons, ranks, classes,
callings, societies, considered as Divine works and
the subjects of his good offices or good will, and
therefore I have a devotion for him.[{30}]
It is this observant benevolence which gives to
his exposition of Scripture its chief characteristic.
He is known in ecclesiastical literature as the
expounder, above all others, of its literal sense.
Now in mystical comments the direct object which
the writer sets before him is the Divine Author[{5}]
Himself of the written Word. Such a writer
sees in Scripture, not so much the works of God,
as His nature and attributes; the Teacher more
than the definite teaching, or its human
instruments, with their drifts and motives, their courses[{10}]
of thought, their circumstances and personal
peculiarities. He loses the creature in the glory
which surrounds the Creator. The problem
before him is not what the inspired writer directly
meant, and why, but, out of the myriad of[{15}]
meanings present to the Infinite Being who inspired him,
which it is that is most illustrative of that Great
Being's all-holy attributes and solemn dispositions.
Thus, in the Psalter, he will drop David and Israel
and the Temple together, and will recognize [{20}]
nothing there but the shadows of those greater truths
which remain forever. Accordingly, the
mystical comment will be of an objective character;
whereas a writer who delights to ponder human
nature and human affairs, to analyze the[{25}]
workings of the mind, and to contemplate what is
subjective to it, is naturally drawn to investigate
the sense of the sacred writer himself, who was the
organ of the revelation, that is, he will investigate
the literal sense. Now, in the instance of St. [{30}]
Chrysostom, it so happens that literal exposition
is the historical characteristic of the school in
which he was brought up; so that if he commented
on Scripture at all, he anyhow would have
adopted that method; still, there have been
many literal expositors, but only one[{5}]
Chrysostom. It is St. Chrysostom who is the charm of
the method, not the method that is the charm
of St. Chrysostom.
That charm lies, as I have said, in his habit and
his power of throwing himself into the minds[{10}]
of others, of imagining with exactness and with
sympathy circumstances or scenes which were
not before him, and of bringing out what he has
apprehended in words as direct and vivid as the
apprehension. His page is like the table of a[{15}]
camera lucida, which represents to us the living
action and interaction of all that goes on around
us. That loving scrutiny, with which he follows
the Apostles as they reveal themselves to us in
their writings, he practices in various ways[{20}]
towards all men, living and dead, high and low,
those whom he admires and those whom he weeps
over. He writes as one who was ever looking
out with sharp but kind eyes upon the world of
men and their history; and hence he has always[{25}]
something to produce about them, new or old,
to the purpose of his argument, whether from
books or from the experience of life. Head and
heart were full to overflowing with a stream of
mingled "wine and milk," of rich vigorous thought[{30}]
and affectionate feeling. This is why his manner
of writing is so rare and special; and why, when
once a student enters into it, he will ever
recognize him, wherever he meets with extracts from
him.
Letters of Chrysostom, written in Exile
"To Olympias