There are other passages in which the idea, no less prominently set forth, is that of a holy feast. Elijah bequeathed his mantle and a double portion of his spirit to Elisha, “but the Son of God, when He ascended, left us His own flesh.... He who did not decline to shed His blood for all, and imparts to us again His flesh and blood, what will He refuse to do for our salvation?”[729] Again: “Consider, O man, what kind of sacrifice thou art about to touch, what kind of table to approach; reflect that thou who art but dust and ashes receivest the body and blood of Christ.”[730] The sedulous care with which he urges the duty of moral cleansing before venturing to approach the holy table proceeds chiefly from regarding it as a holy feast. “How shall we behold the sacred passover? How shall we receive the sacred feast? How partake of the adorable mysteries with that tongue whereby we trampled on the Law of God and defiled our soul? for if one would not touch a royal robe with defiled hands, how shall we receive the Lord’s body with an unclean tongue?”[731]
These passages, which are but a few specimens extracted from a large number on the same subject, are yet sufficient to show how easy it would be for the partisans of contending schools to press the language of Chrysostom into support of their own system. The truth is, that in the case of this, as of other subjects, we find in Chrysostom and his contemporaries the raw material, which has been wrought out by the toil and strife of later times into definite sharply chiselled dogmas. Nothing, therefore, can really be more unfair than to regard, as a direct friend or opponent, one who lived and wrote long before controversy had arisen on the subjects of which he treated. He might innocently employ expressions which we should deem it incautious to use, because we know the interpretation of which they are susceptible, or because we see in them incipient symptoms of an idea which in process of time grew into a mischievous error. It is instructive also to notice how harmless doctrines which afterwards became mischievous were when they were not pushed to an extremity, not made integral parts of a system of belief. It does not occur to us, for instance, for a moment to suppose that such invocation of saints as was manifestly approved by Chrysostom was the least detrimental to that free intercourse which ought to exist between the soul of man and God Himself. As Dr. Pusey has observed: “Through volumes of St. Augustine and St. Chrysostom there is no mention of any reliance except on Christ alone.”[732] There is not the least approach to that system of stepping-stones or halting-places between God and man, which the Roman Church established by means of confession, saint-worship, and, above all, Mariolatry.
There is no trace in Chrysostom of priestly confession as an ordinance of the Church. When he speaks of the misery which ensues on the commission of sin, he urges the sinner to relieve his conscience by a free confession with repentance and tears. “And why are you ashamed to do so?” he proceeds, “for to whom do you confess? Is it to a man or a fellow-servant who might reproach or expose you? Nay, it is to the Lord, tender and merciful: it is to the physician that you show your wound.”[733] Again, in speaking of prayer, he contrasts the freedom of access to God with the difficulties and impediments which encounter the delivery of a petition to some great man. “This last could be reached only through porters, flatterers, parasites; whereas God is invoked without the intervention of any one, without money, without expense of any kind.”[734] This reads like a prophetical sarcasm on a Church which ultimately made a traffic of dispensing what cannot really be dispensed by man, because it is the free gift of God.
Nor is there any symptom in Chrysostom of a tendency to the theory of Purgatory. The condition of man after death is always represented by him as final and irrevocable. His tone, when exhorting to repentance, is always in harmony with the following passage: “For the day will come when the theatre of this world will be dissolved, and then it is not possible to contend any longer: this is the season of repentance, that of judgment; this of contest, that of crowning; this of labour, that of repose.”[735]
But of all medieval additions to the purer faith of primitive times, Mariolatry has grown to the most extraordinary dimensions.[736] Of any tendency to this error there is in Chrysostom a remarkable absence. In fact, his notices of the Blessed Virgin, not very frequent, are on the whole, we might almost say, unnecessarily disparaging. In his commentary on the Marriage Feast at Cana, he suggests that the Virgin, in mentioning the failure of wine to our Lord, may have been anxious to draw out His miraculous powers, partly to place the guests under an obligation to Him, partly to enhance her own dignity through the display of her Son’s divine powers. He considers that the appeal sprang from the same feeling which prompted His brethren to say, “Show Thyself to the world;” and he proceeds to observe that our Lord, while never failing to manifest dutiful reverence and affectionate care towards His mother, has taught us, by His conduct and language to her, that the tie of mere earthly kindred entitled her not to higher privileges, and placed her in no more intimate spiritual relationship with Himself than any one might through love and obedience enjoy. “Who is my mother, and who are my brethren? and looking round about on His disciples, He said, Behold my mother and my brethren; for whosoever shall do the will of my Father, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.” “Heavens!” Chrysostom exclaims, “what honour! what reward! to what a pinnacle does He exalt those who follow Him! How many women have blessed the Holy Virgin and her womb, and have longed to be such mothers! What then prevents it? Behold, he opens a broad way for us: not women only, but men also are permitted to be placed in the same rank.” “The demand to see Him was made by His mother in an ambitious spirit: she wished to show to the people how much authority she possessed over Him; at any rate, the request was unreasonable and unseasonable. If she and His brethren desired to speak with Him on matters of doctrine, they might have done so in the presence of the others; but if on private matters, it was an ill-timed interruption to His discourse on weightier subjects.”[737] Again: “When a woman in the company cried out, ‘Blessed is the womb that bare Thee!’ He instantly corrected her: ‘Yea, rather blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it.’” It is possible that the general sentiment of the age may have regarded the Virgin with more veneration, but Chrysostom could not have ventured to use such language had the cultus been in any but its very earliest stage, if then. She is called holy by him; she intercedes[738] for Eve, who is a type of herself, but of worship paid to her there is not the slightest evidence.[739]
It is almost superfluous to observe that Chrysostom knew and acknowledged nothing of papal supremacy, in the sense which those words conveyed to the minds of later generations. In common with the rest of Christendom, he paid great deference and respect to the metropolitan at Rome, and he was quite free from those feelings of jealousy which were entertained by the patriarchs of Constantinople, as time went on, owing to the increasing pretensions and exactions of the Roman See. If he respects Innocent, as occupying the chair of St. Peter, he equally respects Flavian, bishop of Antioch (who was not in communion with Rome), for the same reason; he calls him “our common father and teacher, who has inherited St. Peter’s virtue and his chair.” The letter written to Innocent during exile was addressed also to the Bishops of Milan and Aquileia. In his commentary on Galatians ii. he proves the equality of St. Paul with St. Peter. No doubt he assigns an eminent rank to St. Peter, speaking of him as “leader of the band” (κορυφαῖος) of apostles, and as intrusted with the “presidency” (προστασίαν) of the brethren: but these words do not imply absolute authority, and the same appellations are applied to St. Paul also.
Scattered up and down the discourses of Chrysostom there are abundant references to the liturgical forms, and manner of using them, which were in vogue in his time. If we had no other authority, we could learn from him alone that the service consisted of two parts—the first, called Missa Catechumenorum, because the catechumens were permitted to be present at it, which included an opening salutation of “Peace be with you,” with the response, “And with thy spirit;” psalms sung antiphonally; appointed lessons according to the season or the day (as Genesis was read during Lent, the Acts of the Apostles in Pentecost, that is, during the fifty days between Easter and Whitsun Day); the sermon, frequently in Chrysostom’s case on the lesson for the day, the preacher usually sitting, and the people standing; then prayers, announced by the deacon, for the catechumens, the “possessed,” and the penitents; the benediction by the bishop, and dismissal by the deacon, who bade them “depart in peace.” The second part of the service then began, called Missa Fidelium, because the baptized only were permitted to be present. Chrysostom strongly denounces an increasing tendency on the part of many to remain during this second and more sacred portion without participating. He plainly declares that all those who were baptized should communicate, and tells them, if they were not worthy to receive the Eucharist, neither could they be worthy to join in the prayers which preceded the reception, and therefore they ought to quit the church, with the catechumens and penitents, when the deacon commanded all unbaptized, ungodly, and unbelieving persons to depart.[740] The usual order of the Missa Fidelium was “the silent prayer” (εὐχὴ διὰ σιωπῆς), on part of the priest and people (which the latter too often abused, Chrysostom feared, to imprecate vengeance on their enemies[741]); then a prayer somewhat equivalent to our bidding prayer in form, and to our prayer for the Church Militant in substance, the deacon bidding or proclaiming the forms, and the people responding; then a prayer of invocation made by the bishop, which was also called “collecta,” because in it the prayers of the people were considered to be gathered or summed up; the oblations of the people presented by the deacons; the kiss of peace, the reading of the diptychs, the ablution of the priest’s hands, the bringing of the elements to the bishop at the altar, while the priests stood on each side, and deacons held large fans to drive away the flies; a secret prayer offered by the bishop; the benediction, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” etc., to which the people responded “And with thy spirit;” followed by “Lift up your hearts”—“We lift them up unto the Lord;” “Let us give thanks to our Lord God”—“It is meet and right so to do;” a long thanksgiving, terminating with the Ter Sanctus, in which the people joined; the consecration prayer, including the words of our Lord at the time of institution, and an invocation of the Holy Spirit to make the elements become the body and blood of Christ; a prayer for all members of the Church, living and dead; the doxology, the Creed; a prayer of the bishop for sanctification; the words pronounced by him, “Holy things for holy people” (τὰ ἅγια τοῖς ἁγίοις); the reception by the clergy and laity in both kinds, taking the elements into their hands; concluding prayers, and dismissal by the deacon proclaiming, “Go in peace.” Nearly all of the forms indicated in this sketch are more or less clearly referred to or quoted in Chrysostom’s works, and from these, with the aid of other contemporary writers and documents, we might construct a liturgy which would more nearly resemble that actually used by him than the liturgy called by his name resembles it.[742] For in this, as in the so-called liturgy of Basil, it is impossible now to determine how much was actually composed by the Father who gave his name to it. It cannot be proved that Chrysostom actually corrected or improved at all the liturgy which he found in use at Constantinople. It may only have come to be called after him as being the greatest luminary who ever occupied the see. The statement, however, made in a tract ascribed to Proclus, Patriarch of Constantinople in the fifth century, is not in itself improbable, that Chrysostom found the existing liturgy so long that many of the congregation, being men of business, and pressed for time, left before the service was concluded, or came in after it had begun, and therefore he abridged and otherwise altered it. In any case, many alterations were made by different churches and bishops in the course of time, as in other liturgies, so also in those which bear the name of Basil and Chrysostom; and hence, as Montfaucon, Savile, Cave, and others have remarked, you cannot find any two copies which are exactly alike.
A critical estimate of Chrysostom’s value as a commentator hardly falls within the scope of an essay on his life, but a few general observations on this head may not be deemed out of place here. The same fact was the cause in him of much excellence and some defect in this department. He was a preacher whose primary object was to convert souls. This earnest, practical aim, of which he never lost sight, helped to protect him from lapsing into idle, fanciful, mystical interpretations of Scripture; but, on the other hand, it hindered his entering so fully into all the historical, grammatical, or even doctrinal questions which might be raised about a passage as he would have done had he been exclusively a commentator. His dominant aim being to affect the heart and the moral practice of his hearers, he is content when he has elicited from the passage all that will be most useful for that purpose, and the continuity of the commentary is frequently marred by sudden digressions. His ignorance of Hebrew was of course fatal to his being an accurate interpreter of the Old Testament, since he was entirely dependent on the Septuagint translation. And even in Greek, though few would deny him the merit of fine scholarship on the whole, though his command of the language as an orator is masterly, his style luminous, his diction copious and rich without being offensively ornate or redundant, yet his hold upon the language for critical purposes is neither that of a man who spoke it when it was in its purest stage, nor that of a scholar who, living in a later age and speaking a different tongue, has made a careful, laborious study of it as a dead language.
But two invaluable qualifications for an interpreter Chrysostom did possess—a thorough love for the Sacred Book, and a thorough familiarity with every part of it. There is no topic on which he dwells more frequently and earnestly than on the duty of every Christian man and woman to study the Bible; and what he bade others do, that he did pre-eminently himself. He rebukes the silly vanity of rich people who prided themselves on possessing finely written and handsomely bound copies of the Bible, but who knew little about the contents. Study of the Bible was more necessary for the layman than the monk, because he was exposed to more constant and formidable temptations. The Christian without a knowledge of his Bible was like a workman without his tools. Like the tree planted by the water-side, the soul of the diligent reader would be continually nourished and refreshed. There were no difficulties which would not yield to a patient study of it. Neither earthly grandeur, nor friends, nor indeed any human thing, could afford in suffering such comfort as the reading of Holy Scripture, for this was the companionship of God.[743]
The honest, straightforward common sense which marks his practical exhortations was a useful quality to him also as an interpreter. One of his principles is, that sound doctrine could not be extracted from Holy Scripture but by a careful comparison of many passages not isolated from their context.[744] Allegorical interpretations were by no means to be rejected, but to be used with caution; men too often made the mistake of dictating what Scripture should mean instead of submitting to be taught by it: they introduced a meaning instead of eliciting it.[745] Thus, though he often accepts popular types—as Boaz and Ruth are figures of Christ and His bride the Church; and Noah, Joseph, Joshua, are all in different ways representative of our Lord; though sometimes particular expressions in Messianic prophecies are forced, for instance, in Isaiah’s description of Immanuel, the “butter and honey” there spoken of he supposes to be intended to indicate the reality of our Lord’s humanity[746]—yet his customary aim is to discover the literal sense and direct historical bearing of the passage. At the same time he fully recognises a general foreshadowing of Jesus Christ, and the complete fulfilment in Him ultimately of prophecies which immediately refer to persons and events nearly, if not quite, contemporaneous with the utterance. He fails not also to point out the moral aspect of prophecy as a system of teaching rather than prediction, as preparatory to the advent of Jesus Christ in the flesh, not only by informing men’s minds, but disciplining their hearts to receive Him.[747] Hence the holy men who lived, under the Old Dispensation, in faith on God’s promises, knew Christ as it were by anticipation, and were to be reckoned as members of the one body.[748]