Saint John Chrysostom, His Life and Times / A sketch of the church and the empire in the fourth century

by W. R. W. Stephens

The reply of Innocent to this letter from the clergy of Constantinople is dignified as well as sympathetic. He exhorts, as usual, to patience, and to the derivation of comfort from the remembrance of the sufferings of all God’s saints in past times. But he deeply deplores their wrongs, and again expresses his reprobation in the strongest terms of the illegality of the late proceedings. “The canon which prohibited the ordination of a successor during the lifetime of the reigning bishop had been grossly violated. The Canons of Antioch, on which the synod had relied, were invalid, having been composed by heretics, and they had been rejected by the Council of Sardica. The Canons of Nice alone were entitled to the obedience of the Church; but adversaries and heretics were always attempting to subvert them.”... “What steps, then, should be taken in the existing crisis? Plainly a General Council must be convoked: that was the only means of appeasing the fury of the tempest. He was watching an opportunity to accomplish this: meanwhile, they must wait in patience, and trust the goodness of God for the restoration of tranquillity and good order.”

To Chrysostom Innocent wrote, as friend to friend, as a bishop to a brother bishop, a letter of Christian consolation and encouragement, not entering into the legal questions of the case, and not pledging himself to decisive action of any kind. It was not necessary to remind one, who was himself the teacher and pastor of a great people, that God often tried the best of men, and put their patience to the severest tests, and that they are firmly supported under the greatest calamities by the approving voice of conscience.... A good man may be severely tried, but cannot be overcome, since he is preserved and guarded by the truth of Holy Scripture. Holy Scripture supplied abundant examples of suffering saints who did not receive their crowns until they had undergone the heaviest trials with patience. “Take courage, then, honoured brother, from the testimony of conscience. When you have been purified by affliction, you will enter into the haven of peace in the presence of Christ our Lord.”[611]

Innocent, however, not only wrote commonplace letters of condolence, but exerted himself to obtain the council which he had recommended to the Church of Constantinople as the only means of redressing her wrongs. He wrote a letter to Honorius, then at Ravenna, representing the lamentable condition of the Church of Constantinople, which elicited from the Emperor an order for the convention of an Italian synod. This synod, after a due consideration of all the circumstances, was to submit its decision and suggestions to himself. The result of the deliberations of the Italian bishops, swayed no doubt by Innocent, was to request the Emperor to write to his brother Arcadius, urging the convocation of a General Council to be held in Thessalonica, which would be a convenient meeting-point for the prelates of East and West. Honorius complied, and the letter was despatched under the care of a deputation from the Italian Church, consisting of five bishops, two priests, and a deacon. The Emperor calls it the third letter[612] which he had written relative to the affairs of Constantinople. He professes great solicitude for the peace of the Church, “on which,” he observes, “the peace of our Empire depends;” and with a view to this object, he urges the convocation of a council at Thessalonica, and specially entreats that the attendance of Theophilus, who was, he is informed, author of all these disturbances, should be insisted upon. He commends the deputation to the honourable care of Arcadius; and that he may know the sentiments of the Italian Church on the present state of affairs, he sends him two letters as samples of many, one from the Bishop of Rome, the other from the Bishop of Aquileia.

The only bishop on the deputation whose see is mentioned was Æmilius, bishop of Beneventum. The Oriental refugees, Cyriacus, Demetrius, Palladius, and Eulysius, accompanied the Italians. They were the bearers not only of letters from Honorius, Innocent, and the bishops Chromatius of Aquileia and Venerius of Milan, but also of a memorial from the Italian synod, which recommended that Chrysostom should be reinstated in his see before he was required to take his trial before a council. He would then, it was observed, have no reasonable excuse for declining to attend it. The deputation was absent four months. On their return the members had a pitiful tale to tell of failure in their errand, and of personal suffering from maltreatment. They touched at Athens on their voyage out, whence they had intended to proceed to Thessalonica, and lay the letters first of all before Anysius, bishop of that place; but at Athens they were arrested by a military officer, who placed them on board two vessels under charge of a centurion, to be conveyed to Constantinople. A furious southerly gale sprang up soon after their departure, and, after a voyage of some danger, they arrived, late on the third day, at the suburb of Constantinople called Victor. But, instead of being allowed to proceed to the city, they were shut up in a fortress named Athyra, on the coast—the Romans in a single chamber, the Orientals in separate apartments. No servant even was permitted to attend them. They were commanded to deliver up the letters which they had brought, but refused, as being ambassadors, to surrender them to any but to the Emperor himself. Secretaries and messengers were sent in succession, but the ambassadors steadfastly adhered to their refusal. The letters were at length wrested from their possession by sheer violence: one bishop’s thumb was broken in the struggle. On the following day a large bribe was offered them if they would recognise Atticus (the aged Arsacius was now dead) as Patriarch, and say no more about the trial of Chrysostom. This base proposal was firmly resisted; and, seeing the utter hopelessness of their mission, they requested to be released as soon as possible, and suffered to return to their dioceses in safety. The Italians saw no more of their companions from the East. They themselves were thrust into a miserable vessel, with twenty soldiers of various grades, and conveyed to Lampsacus, on the Asiatic coast, where they embarked in another vessel, and, after a tedious voyage of twenty days, arrived at Hydruntum, in Calabria.[613]

Neither the Papacy nor the Empire of the West was sufficiently powerful at this time to insist further upon justice being done to the Patriarch, in the face of the determined animosity of the ruling powers at Constantinople; but the friends of the martyr deemed that they read unequivocal signs of the Divine displeasure in the misfortunes which befell some of Chrysostom’s greatest personal enemies. Thrace and Illyria were ravaged by an incursion of Huns, and the Isaurians, a predatory barbarian race, which inhabited the fastnesses of Mount Taurus, committed fearful havoc in Syria and Asia Minor. Cyrinus, bishop of Chalcedon, one of the four who had taken on them the responsibility of Chrysostom’s condemnation, died in great agony from the wound in his foot, originally caused when his foot had been trodden upon by Bishop Maruthas, more than a year ago, just before the Synod of the Oak. At the end of September, Constantinople was visited by a destructive fall of hailstones of extraordinary size; and on October 6, A.D. 404, died the Empress Eudoxia. Nilus, one of the most eminent anchorites of the day, once prefect of Constantinople, who had abandoned wealth, family, and position for the solitudes of Mount Sinai, addressed two letters of reproof and warning to Arcadius on the iniquitous banishment of Chrysostom and inhuman persecution of his followers. “How can you expect to see Constantinople delivered from visitations of earthquake and fire from Heaven, after the enormities which have there been perpetrated; after crime has been established there by the authority of laws; after the thrice-blessed John, the pillar of the Church, the lamp of truth, the trumpet of Jesus Christ, has been driven from the city? How can I grant my prayers (Arcadius had apparently begged the intercession of the saint to remove the national troubles) to a city stricken by the wrath of God, whose thunder is every moment ready to fall upon her?”[614]

But human and divine warnings were alike wasted; the enemies of the Patriarch had complete sway over the Court, and suffered it not to swerve from the path of persecution. The Western bishops and presbyters, after the disastrous termination of their embassy to Constantinople, returned home, without honour indeed, but unmolested. Their Eastern colleagues did not escape so easily. They were conveyed to places of exile in the most distant and opposite quarters of the Empire. Cyriacus was confined in a Persian fortress beyond Emessa; Eulysius in Arabia; Palladius on the confines of Ethiopia; Demetrius was to have been confined in one of the Egyptian oases, but died of the harsh treatment to which he was subjected on the journey. The exiles suffered such brutal insults and indignities from the soldiers who conducted them to these places, that the desire of life was extinguished. The little money which they had collected for the expenses of their journey was taken from them by their guards, who divided it among themselves. They were forced to perform in one day the distance of two days’ journey. They were not permitted to enter any churches on their route, but forced into Jewish or Samaritan synagogues, and lodged at night in low inns, where their ears were shocked by the filthy conversation of abandoned characters of both sexes. Yet even some of these degraded people were won to a more respectful behaviour, if not actually converted, by the Christian exhortations and instruction of the captives. The “Word of God was not bound.” Some of the bishops friendly to Theophilus bribed the soldiers to hurry the exiles out of their dioceses as quickly as possible. Distinguished among these malignants were the bishops of Tarsus, Antioch, Ancyra, and of Cæsarea in Palestine. Most of the bishops of Cappadocia, on the other hand, especially Theodorus of Tyana, and Bosporius of Colonia, accorded them a compassionate and courteous reception.[615]

Arsacius died in November A.D. 404. Out of many ambitious candidates for the vacant throne, Atticus, a presbyter, who had taken an active part in the persecution of Chrysostom, a native of Sebaste in Armenia, was appointed. He was a man of moderate abilities and generally mild disposition, but relentless in his determination to crush out the party of the exiled Patriarch. By his influence an Imperial rescript was obtained, which decreed that “any bishop who did not communicate with Theophilus, Porphyry of Antioch, and Atticus, should be ejected from the Church, and his property confiscated.” The wealthy, for the most part, bowed to the storm; the poor sought peace of body and of conscience in flight either to Rome or monasteries. This rescript, aimed at the bishops, was followed up by another directed against the laity. Any layman who refused to recognise the above-mentioned prelates was, if a civilian, to be deprived of any office which he might hold; if a soldier, of his military girdle; if an artisan, to be heavily fined or banished. Bishops and presbyters were dispersed as fugitives into all parts of the Empire. Some sought retirement in some secluded little country property of their own, and obtained a precarious livelihood by manual labour, farming, or fishing.[616]

But, in spite of all the various means of coercion at Constantinople, in spite of trials, torture, imprisonment, banishment, the bulk of the people could not be brought to attend the ministration of Atticus and his clergy. Their churches were comparatively empty, while the persecuted adherents of the exile persistently held their services in some sequestered valley, or on some lonely hillside. In fact, persecution, as has always been the case, only intensified the attachment of many to the person and the cause which it was intended to crush, and so far defeated its own object. Chrysostom himself observes,[617] that many of those who had enjoyed a high reputation for piety were the first to fall away when brought to the test of persecution; whereas others, who had formerly been abandoned to frivolity and vice, now renounced the theatre and circus, hastened into the desert to attend the assembly of the Catholics at worship, and displayed the greatest fortitude before the judge when brought to trial, in the face of torture, and with the prospect of imprisonment or exile.