Leaves from St. John Chrysostom

by Saint John Chrysostom

Two men—I know not if there be any others in all history—have had their personal name merged by posterity in the name which expressed their special qualities. As the son of Pepin is for ever Charlemagne, so John, the son of St. Anthusa, is for ever Chrysostom, the Golden Mouth. It is thus the world calls the one great and the other eloquent.

To return to the facts of John of Antioch’s life. As he grew up he had lessons from the renowned heathen rhetorician Libanius. He studied philosophy, and distinguished himself, at twenty years of age, in preparation for the bar. Libanius considered him the best scholar he had, and even wished to be succeeded by him in his office.

Named Preacher at Antioch

But John speedily renounced this and all worldly renown. He practised a most strictly ascetic life, and gave himself up to the study of the Christian religion. He was a pupil of that Diodorus, afterwards bishop of Tarsus, who was then held in high repute as a Scripture commentator. He was also under St. Meletius, patriarch of Antioch. From him he received baptism in 369, at the age, therefore, of twenty-two years; and the minor order of Lector three years later. The bishops who met at Antioch in 373 designated him, with his friend Basil, for the episcopal dignity. In his humility he took flight to the anchorets who dwelt in the mountains near Antioch. With them he spent four years, and two years after that in a cavern, until his health failed, and he was obliged to return to Antioch. Here the patriarch Meletius made him a deacon in 380; and his successor Flavian gave him the priesthood in 386, in his fortieth year, and named him to be preacher in the cathedral.

Then during ten years the great see of the East wondered at the eloquence, the teaching, and the zeal of the greatest preacher it had known. In her sorest time of need he was at hand to comfort and support the city of his birth. When a great riot broke out, and led the citizens in their haste and anger to insult the statues of the emperor Theodosius and his wife, the most pious Flaccilla, and Antioch trembled lest this act of treason should be followed by summary destruction; when her patriarch Flavian hurried across the five hundred miles to Constantinople, that if possible he might soften the wrath of the emperor before the bolt was launched, St. Chrysostom preached some of his most famous sermons, those entitled, ‘On the Statues’. He kept up the courage of the fainting people, and when Flavian returned with a pardon which left untouched the privileges of the city, the preacher shared with the patriarch the gratitude of those who were saved.

After ten years of incessant labours by the preacher, which form a large part of the writings preserved to us, the see of Constantinople fell vacant by the death of the patriarch Nectarius. Theodosius had died in 395, leaving the great eastern empire in the hands of his elder son Arcadius, scarcely out of his boyhood. The young emperor was unwilling to trust the see of his capital to any one of his clergy, and he listened to the advice given to him to call from Antioch the man whose genius was as great as his character was stainless. The great officer who carried out the imperial invitation, or command, at Antioch, was obliged to use artifice for the purpose of securing the preacher. His people would not knowingly have suffered him to leave them. He was taken out of the city under a plausible pretence. ‘Asterius, count of the East, had orders to send for him and ask his company to a church without the city. Having got him into his carriage, he drove off with him to the first station on the high road to Constantinople, where imperial officers were in readiness to convey him thither.’[1] Thus he was carried across Asia with all possible speed. Upon his arrival at Constantinople he was chosen bishop with one voice, and consecrated on the 26th February, 398. His consecrator was Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, who very unwillingly performed this office. He had striven to get a certain priest who was devoted to himself appointed. His subsequent enmity to St. Chrysostom was a main cause of the banishment and death which befel the man whom he had consecrated.

Archbishop of Constantinople

Thus, at fifty years of age, St. Chrysostom was placed, not only without seeking for it, but against his wishes, upon that see which, through the residence of the emperor, was already become the most conspicuous of episcopal thrones in the East. From the moment that Constantine, sixty-seven years before, had made Byzantium Nova Roma, and founded, in fact, a new empire, all the ambitious spirits among the prelates of the East sought to seat themselves on that perilous height. This new centre of temporal power was from that time forth the centre of trouble, heresy, and disaster to the Church. Eusebius left his former see, Nicomedia, to possess it, and to be the emperor’s bishop. One after another Arian heretics succeeded. In 379, when the small number of Catholics remaining in the new capital invited St. Gregory Nazienzen to come to their aid, he could only open in a private room a small church, which he called by the significant name of Anastasia, the Resurrection. In that year Theodosius was promoted by the young Gratian to share his throne, upon the destruction of his uncle Valens by the Goths. Valens had all but destroyed both empire and Church in the East. It was the great effort of Theodosius to restore both. In fifteen years of unexampled energy, terrible trials, and almost miraculous success, he did what valour, piety, and prudence could do. These years were all that the Divine Providence had allowed him for a work almost transcending human power; and when he died, not yet fifty years old, in 395, the great empire of Rome, both in East and West, may be said to have fallen into orphanage. His two sons, Arcadius and Honorius, one a youth of nineteen and the other a boy of eleven, proved to be utterly incompetent. Even Theodosius had failed to overcome the deep degeneracy and rooted party spirit to which the Arian heresy had reduced the eastern episcopate when St. Athanasius and St. Basil had been freshly laid in their tombs. The council called by Theodosius at Constantinople in 381 suffered St. Gregory to give up the see, which was surrounded by envious rivals. For when Meletius, the patriarch of Antioch, died, in presiding over that council, instead of extinguishing the Antiochene schism by the election of Paulinus, the bishop who was already in communion with Rome and Alexandria, according to an actual agreement, they suffered the schism to be prolonged by the election of Flavian. Nectarius took the place which St. Gregory had vacated, and St. Chrysostom was called after about fifteen years to succeed to his patriarchate.

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.