Byzantine Culture

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John Chrysostom

John Chrysostom was the greatest preacher of the ancient church and the most copied Greek Christian author. His preaching, his social teaching, his two exiles, and the liturgy that bears his name.

John of Antioch, called Chrysostom — “golden-mouthed” — from the sixth century onward, is the most widely copied Greek Christian writer in history. More manuscripts of his works survive than of any other Greek Father, and more of his writing survives than of any other: something like 1,500 sermons and treatises and 240 letters.

He was not a speculative theologian. He contributed nothing to the doctrine of the Trinity or the person of Christ. What he did was preach, at length, several times a week, to large urban congregations in Antioch and Constantinople, on the biblical text in sequence, with an unsparing attention to how his listeners actually lived.

Antioch

He was born in Antioch around 347 to a well-off Christian family and educated in rhetoric, probably under the great pagan teacher Libanius, whose training is audible in everything he wrote.

After his mother’s death he spent several years as a hermit in the mountains outside the city, including two years in a cave where, according to his biographer, he did not lie down and permanently damaged his stomach and kidneys. The ascetic period ended when his health failed; he returned to the city, was ordained deacon in 381 and priest in 386, and preached in Antioch for twelve years.

This is his best period. The Antiochene homilies — on Genesis, Matthew, John, Romans, the Corinthian letters — are close, literal, sequential expositions with constant application to contemporary life. He belongs to the Antiochene exegetical school, which read scripture for its historical and literal sense rather than allegorically, and the result is commentary that remains usable.

The most dramatic episode of these years came in 387, when the population of Antioch, angry at a new tax, rioted and pulled down the imperial statues — a capital offence for the whole city. While the city waited for Theodosius I’s response, John preached the twenty-one sermons On the Statues, a remarkable series that combines pastoral consolation, moral exhortation and political calculation. The bishop Flavian went to plead in person; the city was pardoned.

Constantinople

In 397 he was made archbishop of Constantinople — effectively kidnapped for the purpose, since the imperial official sent to fetch him removed him from Antioch quietly to avoid a riot.

It was a disastrous appointment for everyone’s peace of mind and an excellent one for the historical record. John attacked clerical luxury, sold off the episcopal palace’s silver to fund hospitals, forbade clergy to keep female housekeepers, disciplined widows on the church’s payroll for dressing extravagantly, and preached against the wealth of the court in terms nobody at the time could have missed.

His sermons on wealth and poverty are the sharpest social criticism in patristic literature. He argued that surplus wealth is theft from the poor; that the rich man who gives alms is returning property rather than exercising generosity; and that the distinction between what is mine and what is yours is a consequence of the fall rather than a natural fact. On slavery he was less radical, accepting the institution while insisting on the humanity of the enslaved and urging masters to free them and teach them a trade.

The Fall

He was deposed twice.

The first time, in 403, came through the manoeuvring of Theophilus of Alexandria, who had his own reasons for wanting Constantinople humbled, in alliance with the empress Eudoxia, who had taken John’s sermons on female extravagance personally. A gathering of bishops at a suburban villa — the Synod of the Oak — deposed him on a list of charges. He was exiled, an earthquake struck the city that night, and the terrified empress had him recalled within days.

The second time was permanent. In 404, after John compared Eudoxia to Herodias in a sermon — or was reported to have done — he was condemned and sent to Cucusus in the Armenian mountains. His supporters in Constantinople, the “Johnites,” refused communion with his successors for decades.

In 407 he was ordered moved further, to Pityus on the eastern Black Sea. He died on the road at Comana in Pontus on 14 September, worn out by the journey. His reported last words — “Glory be to God for all things” — became a standard Orthodox formula.

His relics were returned to Constantinople in 438 with an imperial apology; Theodosius II, Eudoxia’s son, is said to have asked pardon for his parents. Some of the relics were taken to Rome in 1204 and returned by Pope John Paul II in 2004.

The Liturgy of St John Chrysostom

The eucharistic liturgy used in Orthodox churches on most days of the year bears his name. He almost certainly did not write it in the form it now has: it developed over centuries, and the attribution reflects his authority rather than his authorship, though some of the prayers may derive from Antiochene usage he knew. The service and its history are described in Byzantine liturgy.

The attribution is, in a sense, fair. No one shaped the devotional habits of Greek Christianity more than Chrysostom, and the liturgy that carries his name is where most Orthodox Christians encounter him.

The Homilies Against the Jews

Eight sermons preached at Antioch in 386–387 attack Judaising practices among his own congregation — Christians attending synagogue, observing Jewish fasts, seeking out Jewish healers — in language of extreme violence.

They are the most difficult texts in the patristic corpus. They were written in the rhetorical mode of the psogos, the formal invective, in which exaggeration was expected; their target was ostensibly Christians rather than Jews; and the church of Antioch was in a genuinely competitive religious environment. None of that mitigates what the texts say, and they were used with enthusiasm by later antisemites, including in the twentieth century.

Modern Orthodox and Catholic scholarship has addressed them directly rather than explaining them away, and any honest account of Chrysostom has to include them.

Reputation

Byzantine readers ranked him with Basil the Great and Gregory of Nazianzus as one of the “Three Holy Hierarchs,” commemorated together on 30 January — a feast instituted in the eleventh century precisely to stop partisans of the three from quarrelling about which was greatest.

His practical, applicable, endlessly quotable prose made him the Byzantine preacher’s standard resource, and excerpts from him fill the florilegia, the moral anthologies and the catenae. For a thousand years, a Byzantine bishop with a sermon to write reached for Chrysostom.

The Preaching Itself

What Chrysostom actually sounded like is recoverable to an unusual degree, because the homilies were taken down by shorthand writers as he spoke and circulated substantially unedited.

The evidence is in the texts. He interrupts himself. He responds to the congregation — telling them to stop applauding, complaining that they are talking, noting that the church empties after the sermon and before the eucharist, observing that the theatre is fuller than the church. He returns to a point because he suspects it has not landed. In one homily he breaks off to deal with a disturbance.

The applause is worth pausing on. Byzantine congregations applauded sermons as a theatre audience applauded a performance, and Chrysostom repeatedly told them to stop — not from modesty but because he wanted them to change their behaviour rather than admire his delivery. He says so explicitly: he would rather they wept than clapped.

He preached sequentially through biblical books, several times a week, for years. The homilies on Matthew run to ninety; on John, eighty-eight; on Acts, fifty-five; on Romans, thirty-two. The scale means that anyone reading them gets not a selection of set pieces but an unbroken record of one preacher’s working thought over a decade.

The Social Teaching in His Own Words

Chrysostom’s position on wealth is the most radical in patristic literature and is frequently softened in summary, so it is worth quoting.

On property, from the homilies on 1 Timothy:

Is this not an evil, that you alone should have the Lord’s property, that you alone should enjoy what is common? Is not the earth God’s, and the fullness thereof? If then our possessions belong to one common Lord, they belong also to our fellow-servants.

On almsgiving, from the homilies on Lazarus: not to share one’s goods with the poor is to rob them and deprive them of life; the goods we hold are not ours but theirs.

He is not proposing a programme of expropriation, and he does not call for the abolition of private property as an institution. He is telling wealthy congregations that their surplus is not morally theirs, week after week, in the capital of the empire, from a pulpit.

That he was deposed twice, by an alliance of the empress and the bishop of Alexandria, is not surprising. That he was preaching this in the imperial capital for six years first is the more remarkable fact.

The Homilies Against the Jews in Context

The eight sermons of 386–387 require a fuller account than a disclaimer, because how they are read has consequences.

The occasion was specific. Chrysostom’s congregation included Christians who attended synagogue on Jewish festivals, took oaths in synagogues because they were thought more binding, observed Jewish fasts, and consulted Jewish healers. Antioch had a large, long-established and socially confident Jewish community, and the boundary between the communities was porous in a way the clergy found intolerable.

The genre was the psogos, formal invective, in which extremity of language was expected and understood as rhetorical performance. Chrysostom used the same register against Christian heretics, against wealthy Christians and against the theatre.

None of that blunts what the texts say. They call the synagogue a brothel and a den of thieves, describe Jews in terms designed to make social contact unthinkable, and assert a collective guilt for the crucifixion.

They were quoted approvingly in Christian antisemitic literature for centuries, and in the twentieth century by the perpetrators of worse. Modern Orthodox and Catholic scholarship has addressed them directly rather than contextualising them away, and several Orthodox theologians have called for the passages to be acknowledged as wrong rather than explained.

Any account of Chrysostom that omits them is incomplete, and any account that reduces him to them misses a preacher whose other surviving work runs to some ten thousand pages.

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