It was very natural that the woman, who, before marriage, was cooped up like a child in the parental home, should break out afterwards into extravagance, dissipation, and frivolity, if not worse. An inordinate amount of time and money was bestowed upon dress, though perhaps not more than by the fashionable ladies of modern times. Women loaded themselves with ornaments, under the delusion that these added to their charms, whereas, Chrysostom observes, if the woman was naturally beautiful, the ornaments only concealed and detracted from her charms. If she was ugly, they only set off her ugliness by the glaring contrast, and the effect on the spectator was ludicrous or painful. But the adornment of the virgin who had dedicated herself to God was altogether spiritual. She arrayed herself in gentleness, modesty, poverty, humility, fasting, vigils. Incorporeal graces and incorporeal beauty were the objects of her love and contemplation. She treated enemies with such perfect courtesy and forbearance, that even the depraved were put to shame in her presence. The goodness of the soul within overflowed into all her outer actions.[199] From this rapturous description of a highly spiritual kind of life, Chrysostom passes, with versatile quickness, to a somewhat ludicrous picture of the petty cares of life in the world. “The worldly lady thinks it a fine thing to drive round the Forum; how much better to be independent, and use her feet for the purpose for which God gave them! There was always some difficulty about the mules: she and her husband wanted them at the same time; one or both were lame or turned out to grass. A quiet and modestly-dressed woman needed no carriage and attendants to protect her in her passage through the streets, but might walk through the Forum, free from any annoyance. Some might say it was pleasant to be waited on by a troop of handmaids; but, on the contrary, such a charge was attended with much anxiety. Not only had the sick to be taken care of, but the indolent to be chastised, mischief, quarrels, and all kinds of evil doings to be corrected; and if there happened to be one distinguished by personal beauty, jealousy was added to all these other cares, lest the husband should be so captivated by her charms as to pay more attention to her than to her mistress.[200] If it was replied to all these objections against married life, that Abraham and other saints in the Old Testament were all married men, it must be remembered that a much higher standard was required under the New Dispensation. There were degrees of perfection. When Noah was said to be ‘perfect in his generation,’ it meant relatively to that age in which he lived, for what is perfect in relation to one era becomes imperfect for another. Murder was forbidden by the Old Law, but hatred and wrath under the New. A larger effusion of the Holy Spirit rendered Christian men fully grown as compared with the children of the Old Dispensation. Degrees of virtue, impossible then, were attainable now; and as the moral standard under the Old Dispensation was lower, so the rewards of obedience were less exalted. The Jews were encouraged to obedience by the promise of an earthly country, Christians by the prospect of heaven. The Jews were deterred from sin by menaces of temporal calamity; the Christian, of eternal punishment. Let us, therefore, not spend our care upon money-getting and wives and luxurious living, else how shall we ever become men rather than children, and live in the spirit? for when we have taken our journey to that other world, the time for contest will have passed; then those who have not oil in their lamps will be unable to borrow it from their neighbours, or he who has a soiled garment to exchange it for another robe. When the Judge’s throne has been placed, and He is seated upon it, and the fiery stream is ‘coming forth from before Him’ (Dan. vii. 10), and the scrutiny of past life has begun: though Noah, Daniel, and Job were to implore an alteration of the sentence passed upon their own sons and daughters, their intercession would not avail.”[201]
The long treatise “De S. Babyla contra Julianum et Gentiles” presents several interesting subjects for consideration. In the history of the grove of Daphne we have a singular instance of the way in which Grecian legend was transplanted into foreign soil. Daphne, the daughter of the Grecian river-god Ladon, was, according to the Syrian version of the myth, overtaken by Apollo near Antioch. Here it was, on the banks, not of the Peneus, but of the Orontes, that the maiden prayed to her mother earth to open her arms and shelter her from the pursuit of the amorous god, and that the laurel plant sprang out of the spot where she disappeared from the eyes of her disappointed lover. The horse of Seleucus Nicator, founder of the Syrian monarchy, was said to have struck his hoof upon one of the arrows which Apollo had dropped in the hurry of his chase; in consequence of which the king dedicated the place to the god. A temple was erected in his honour, ample in proportions, and sumptuous in its adornments; the interior walls were resplendent with polished marbles, the lofty ceiling was of cypress wood. The colossal image of the god, enriched with gold and gems, nearly reached the top of the roof; the draped portions were of wood, the nude portions of marble. The fingers of the deity lightly touched the lyre which hung from his shoulders, and in the other hand he held a golden dish, as if about to pour a libation on the earth, “and supplicate the venerable mother to give to his arms the cold and beauteous Daphne.”[202] The whole grove became consecrated to pleasure, under the guise of festivity in honour of the god. A more beautiful combination of delights cannot well be conceived. The grove was situated five miles to the south-west of Antioch, among the outskirts of the hills, where many of the limpid streams, rushing down towards the valley of the Orontes, mingled their waters. The road which connected the city with this spot was lined on the left hand with large gardens and groves, baths, fountains, and resting-places; on the right were villas with vineyards and rose-gardens irrigated by rivulets. Daphne itself was, according to Strabo,[203] eighty stadia, or about ten miles, in circumference. It contained everything which could gratify and charm the senses; the deep impenetrable shade of cypress trees, the delicious sound and coolness of falling waters, the fragrance of aromatic shrubs. Such a combination of all that was voluptuous told with fatal and enervating effect upon the morals of a people who were at all times disposed to an immoderate indulgence in luxurious pleasures. Roman troops, and even Roman emperors, fell victims to the allurements of the spot.[204] The annual celebration of the Olympian games instituted here by Commodus was especially the occasion of shocking excesses of every kind. But by the order of Gallus Cæsar an attempt was made to introduce a pure association into the spot hitherto abandoned to the licentiousness of pagan rites. The remains of Babylas, the Bishop of Antioch, who had suffered martyrdom in the reign of Decius, were transferred from their resting-place in the city to the grove of Daphne. The chapel or martyry erected over the bones of the Christian saint stood hard by the temple of the pagan deity. Here it confronted the Christian visitor, as a warning to him not to take part in pagan and licentious rites, abhorrent to the faith for which the Bishop had died. But the remains of the martyr were not permitted to rest in peace. When Julian visited Antioch, he consulted the oracle of Apollo at Daphne respecting the issue of the expedition which he was about to make into Persia. But the oracle was dumb. At length the god yielded to the importunity of repeated prayers and sacrifices so far as to explain the cause of his silence. He was disturbed by the proximity of a dead body: “Break open the sepulchres, take up the bones, and remove them hence.” The demand was interpreted as referring to the remains of Babylas, and the wishes of the crestfallen oracle were complied with.[205] But the insult done to the Christian martyr was speedily avenged. Soon after the accomplishment of the impious act, a violent thunderstorm broke over the temple, and the lightning consumed both the roof of the building and the statue of the deity. At the time when Chrysostom wrote, some twenty years after the occurrence, the mournful wreck was yet standing; but the chapel again contained the relics of the saint and martyr, and conferred blessings on the pilgrims who resorted thither in crowds. The ruined and deserted temple, side by side with the carefully-preserved church of the martyr, thronged by devotees, presented a striking emblem of the fate of paganism, crumbling and vanishing away before the presence of the new faith, blasted by the lightning flash of a mightier force. A great portion of the treatise of Chrysostom is occupied by an analysis of his old master Libanius’s elegy over the fate of the stricken shrine of pagan worship. The affected and inflated tone of the sophist’s composition deserves the sarcasm and scorn which his pupil unsparingly pours upon it.
CHAPTER VIII.
ORDINATION TO THE PRIESTHOOD BY FLAVIAN—INAUGURAL DISCOURSE IN THE CATHEDRAL—HOMILIES AGAINST THE ARIANS—ANIMADVERSIONS ON THE CHARIOT RACES. A.D. 386.
Chrysostom had used the office of a deacon well. The lofty tone of Christian piety, the boldness, the ability, the command of language manifested in his writings, marked him out as eminently qualified for a preacher. His treatises, indeed, are distinguished by a vehemence and energy which belong more to the fervour of the orator than to the calmness of the writer. No doubt also men had not forgotten the talent for speaking which he had displayed when he began to practise, nearly twenty years before, as a lawyer. The Bishop Flavian ordained him a priest in 386, and immediately appointed him to be one of the most frequent preachers in the church. The bishop of a see like Antioch at that time rather resembled the rector of a large town parish than the bishop of modern times. He resided in Antioch, and discharged the duties of a chief pastor, assisted by his staff of priests and deacons. Where the whole Christian population amounted to not more than 100,000 souls, as in Antioch,[206] that division into distinct districts, such as were formed in Alexandria,[207] Rome, and Constantinople, with separate churches, served by members of the central staff in rotation, or by pastors especially appropriated to them, does not seem to have been made. Chrysostom officiated and preached in the great church, where the bishop also officiated. The less learned and less able priests were appointed to the less responsible duties of visiting the sick and the poor, and administering the sacraments. The vocation of Chrysostom, however, was especially that of a teacher. It will be readily acknowledged how difficult, how delicate an office preaching was, in an age when Christianity and Paganism were still existing side by side, and when the opinions of many men were floating in suspense between the old faith and the new, and were liable to be distracted from a firm hold upon the truth by Judaism and heresies of every shade.
Either on the occasion of his ordination, or very soon after it, Chrysostom preached an inaugural discourse, in the presence of the bishop. It is distinguished by that flowery and exaggerated kind of rhetoric which he occasionally displays in all its native oriental luxuriance, and which is due to the school in which he was brought up, rather than to the man. On such a public and formal occasion he appears less as the Christian teacher than as the scholar of Libanius the Rhetorician. His self-disparagement at the opening of his discourse, and his flattering encomiums on Flavian and Meletius at the close, would to modern, certainly at least to English, ears sound intolerably affected. No doubt, however, they were acceptable to the taste of his audience at Antioch; and, indeed, the whole discourse contains nothing more overstrained or ornate than is to be found in some of the most celebrated performances of the great French preachers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
A few paraphrases will suffice to illustrate the character of his discourse.
“He could scarcely believe what had befallen him, that he, an insignificant and abject youth,[208] should find himself elevated to such a height of dignity. The spectacle of so vast a multitude hanging in expectation on his lips quite unnerved him, and would have dried up fountains of eloquence, had he possessed such. How, then, could he hope that his little trickling stream of words would not fail, and that the feeble thoughts which he had put together with so much labour would not vanish from his mind?