St. John Chrysostom

1. The Preacher

"Chrysostom" is a nickname meaning "Golden-Mouthed," given to him for his preaching. He was the most eloquent preacher of his age. His homilies were so popular that people would shove and push to get closer to hear him.

The nickname is not contemporary. Nobody who heard him called him Chrysostom in his lifetime, and the name appears in the sources only generations after his death, from roughly the sixth century onward. What his own congregation called him is not recorded. What survives instead is the preaching itself, in a quantity that has no parallel among the Greek Fathers: hundreds of homilies taken down by stenographers as he spoke, including complete verse-by-verse series on Genesis, Matthew, John, Acts, Romans and the whole body of the Pauline letters.

Two things about that preaching are worth knowing before reading any of it. First, he worked through a biblical book in order, sitting on the raised step and speaking without a written text, and the stenographers preserved the interruptions: applause, which he complained about, and the noise of a crowd he sometimes had to quiet down. Second, he read Scripture for its plain sense. Antioch trained its clergy to ask what the text says about the events it narrates, in contrast to the allegorical habits of Alexandria. That is why his commentaries are still usable. He asks what Paul meant by a sentence and then asks what a person in the congregation is supposed to do about it.

He had been trained for a different job. As a young man in Antioch he studied rhetoric under Libanius, the most famous pagan teacher of oratory of the century, whose surviving letters and speeches make him one of the best documented men of the age. The story that Libanius on his deathbed named John as the successor he would have chosen "if the Christians had not stolen him" comes from the fifth-century church historian Sozomen, writing decades later, and it should be read as a compliment paid by a later admirer rather than a transcript.

2. Truth to Power

As Patriarch of Constantinople, he railed against the excesses of the rich and the vanity of the Empress Eudoxia. He refused to host lavish banquets, giving the money to the poor instead. This made him powerful enemies.

The detail matters here, because the conflict was administrative before it was rhetorical. Arriving in Constantinople in 398, John cut the archbishop's household budget to something close to a monk's, sold off furnishings and plate that his predecessor Nectarius had accumulated, and put the proceeds into hospitals and the relief of the poor. He stopped hosting the dinners by which a bishop of the capital maintained his standing with the court and the senatorial families, which was read, correctly, as a refusal to play the part.

He then turned the same standard on his own clergy. He removed priests he judged corrupt, ended the practice by which clergy kept consecrated women in their households, and pressed the deacons and presbyters of a wealthy see to live plainly. He also deposed bishops in Asia Minor whom he found had bought their sees, an intervention that made him enemies well outside his own city.

Only after that did the preaching against luxury become dangerous, because by then a great many people in Constantinople had a specific reason to want him gone. The empress Eudoxia, wife of the emperor Arcadius, was the most powerful of them. The immediate trigger for the second and final breach, according to the church historians Socrates and Sozomen, was a silver statue of the empress set up near the church of Hagia Sophia and the public celebrations held around it, which John denounced from the pulpit.

3. Exile and Death

Eudoxia had him exiled. He was forced to march in harsh weather until he died of exhaustion. His last words were, "Glory be to God for all things." He is a model of courage for all bishops.

The sequence ran over four years. In 403 Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, came to Constantinople with a body of Egyptian bishops and convened a synod at an estate called the Oak, across the water near Chalcedon. The synod was irregular by any standard: it sat outside John's own city, it was made up largely of men under Theophilus, and John refused to appear before it on the ground that his accusers were also his judges. It deposed him on a list of charges, and the court enforced the sentence. He was recalled within days after a public uproar in the capital and an incident in the palace that the sources describe as an earthquake or a misfortune to the imperial household, which frightened the court into reversing itself.

The peace did not last. The dispute over the empress's statue reopened the quarrel, the sentence of the Oak was revived, and in June 404 he was removed for good. He was sent to Cucusus, a remote place in the Armenian highlands, where he stayed about three years and wrote the letters that survive, including the long series to the deaconess Olympias. He remained influential from there, which is why the order came to move him further, to Pitiunt on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. He died on the journey at Comana in Pontus on 14 September 407. The words reported as his last, "Glory be to God for all things," are recorded in the early accounts of his death and became a fixed part of Byzantine devotion.

The rehabilitation was complete and public. In 438, under the emperor Theodosius II, his relics were brought back to Constantinople and his name restored to the diptychs, the list of bishops named in the liturgy. The sentence against him was not defended by anyone afterwards.

4. The Life: Antioch, the Mountains, the Pulpit

John was born at Antioch in Syria, a city of several hundred thousand people that was one of the three or four great centres of the Roman East. His father, an officer named Secundus, died while John was an infant, and his mother Anthusa, widowed at about twenty, did not remarry and raised him herself. He was given the standard elite education of the city, which meant rhetoric, and he was on course for a career in law or public administration.

He was baptised in his late teens or early twenties, at a period when adult baptism after a long catechumenate was still normal, and then abandoned the career. Around 372 he went into the mountains outside Antioch to live as an ascetic, spending roughly six years there, two of them alone in a cave, memorising Scripture and sleeping little. It ruined his health. He returned to the city with damage to his stomach and kidneys that stayed with him for the rest of his life and that made the forced marches of his exile lethal.

He was ordained deacon in 381 by Meletius of Antioch and priest in 386 by Bishop Flavian, and he preached in Antioch until 397. That eleven-year stretch produced most of his surviving work. He wrote On the Priesthood in this period as well, a dialogue on why he had avoided ordination, which remains one of the frankest things ever written about the fear of pastoral responsibility.

He did not seek Constantinople and did not want it. When Nectarius died in 397 the imperial minister Eutropius arranged for John to be brought to the capital quietly, effectively removing him from Antioch before the city could object. He was consecrated in February 398. The see he inherited was the second in the Christian world after Rome by the ranking that the Council of Constantinople had given it in 381, and it sat inside the emperor's own city, which is the whole difficulty of the next six years.

5. The Riot of the Statues

The single best documented episode of his Antioch years is the crisis of 387. A new tax provoked a riot, and the crowd pulled down and dragged through the streets the bronze statues of the emperor Theodosius I and members of the imperial family. Under Roman law that was treason against the emperor's person, and Antioch had reason to expect the punishment given to rebellious cities: executions, loss of civic status, in the worst case destruction.

Bishop Flavian travelled to the emperor to plead for the city. John, newly ordained a priest, stayed and preached. The twenty-one sermons known as the Homilies on the Statues were delivered during Lent that year to a terrified population, and they are the reason a great many people in the East first heard of him. He used the weeks of waiting to argue that the fear the city was feeling was the fear it should always have had about its own conduct, and he pressed his hearers about swearing, about their treatment of the poor, and about the difference between the punishment of a magistrate and the judgment of God. Theodosius pardoned the city, and the pardon was announced in time for Easter.

The episode is worth knowing because it shows the pattern of his whole career in miniature. He is handed a political emergency and he preaches about repentance, and he treats the crisis as something his hearers have to answer for.

6. What the Sources Actually Say

Chrysostom is unusually well documented for a fourth-century figure, and it is worth separating the kinds of evidence, because they do not all carry the same weight.

His own writing

The homilies and letters are first-hand and enormous in bulk. They tell us what he taught, how he argued, what he thought his congregation was doing wrong, and, in the exile letters, what his last years were like in his own words. This is the most reliable material about him by a wide margin.

Palladius

The Dialogue on the Life of John Chrysostom was written soon after his death, around 408, by Palladius, a bishop who was his supporter and who suffered for it. It is close to the events and full of detail, and it is a defence brief. It presents the case for John against Theophilus and the court, and it should be read as the argument of a partisan who was there.

The church historians

Socrates Scholasticus and Sozomen wrote their histories in the fifth century, a generation or two later, and both cover the deposition and exile at length. Theodoret covers it more briefly. They preserve material that would otherwise be lost, including the anecdotes about Libanius and about the empress's statue, and they also preserve rumour. Where they disagree with each other, as they do on the details of the recall from the first exile, the honest position is that the sequence is uncertain.

What later devotion added

Much of what circulates about Chrysostom in popular retellings has no source in any of the above. The claim that he was starved, or executed, or that he denounced Eudoxia to her face in a particular sentence, comes from later embellishment. The record says he was moved on foot in bad conditions by soldiers to a place he was not fit to reach, and that he died of it. That is severe enough without improvement.

7. What He Taught About Wealth and the Poor

The subject that recurs most often in his preaching is money, and his position on it is harder than most modern readers expect. He argued that surplus wealth is held in trust for the poor, that failing to give from it is a form of robbery, and that a Christian who leaves a beggar outside the church and then receives Communion inside has misunderstood what he is doing at the altar.

He returned constantly to the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19 to 31), preaching a full series on it, and to the judgment scene in which Christ identifies himself with the hungry and the stranger: "as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me" (Matthew 25:40). He also read Paul's rebuke of the Corinthians for humiliating the poor at the common meal (1 Corinthians 11:20 to 22) as a rule that still applied to his own congregation.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes him on exactly this point in its treatment of the Eucharist and the poor, at paragraph 1397, where his complaint is that a Christian who has received the Blood of the Lord will not recognise his brother, and honours the altar with silver while ignoring Christ dying of hunger at the door. The Church's teaching on the universal destination of goods, that the earth's goods are meant for everyone and that private ownership serves that end rather than replacing it, is set out in the same Catechism at paragraphs 2402 to 2406, and Chrysostom is one of the Fathers standing behind it.

None of this made him popular in the richest city in the Christian East. It is the reason his opponents had allies.

8. The Sermons Against the Judaizers

A page about Chrysostom that leaves out the eight sermons commonly titled Adversus Judaeos is not telling the truth about him. He preached them at Antioch in 386 and 387, and their language about Jews and about the synagogue is violent, contemptuous and, read straight, indefensible.

The context is established and does not excuse the content. The sermons were aimed at members of his own congregation, Christians who were attending synagogue services and Jewish festivals, keeping the fasts, and going to Jewish courts to swear oaths because they regarded them as more binding. His target was that practice and the Christians engaged in it. He wrote in the ancient rhetorical genre of invective, in which the speaker is expected to abuse the opponent without restraint, and his Antiochene audience would have recognised the register. Historians of the period, including Robert Wilken, have laid out that setting in detail.

What the setting explains is why the sermons were written. It does not change what they contain, and it does not touch the fact that later writers, including in the twentieth century, quoted them to justify hatred and worse. Any honest use of Chrysostom has to say so.

The Church's own position on the underlying question is not in doubt and is not his. The Second Vatican Council, in the declaration Nostra Aetate of 1965, taught that what was done in Christ's passion cannot be charged against all Jews then living or against Jews today, that the Jewish people are not rejected or accursed, and that the Church deplores hatred and persecution directed against Jews at any time and from any source. Popes since have repeated it. Catholic teaching on this subject is set by the Council's declaration.

The right way to read him, then, is the way the Church reads any Father: as a witness whose authority is real and limited. He is a Doctor of the Church for his exposition of Scripture and his teaching on the priesthood, on prayer and on wealth. He is not an authority on this, and on this he was wrong.

9. The Divine Liturgy That Carries His Name

The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom is the eucharistic liturgy celebrated on most days of the year in the Byzantine rite, which includes the Eastern Orthodox churches and the Byzantine Catholic churches in communion with Rome. It is the most frequently celebrated eucharistic liturgy in the Christian East, with the longer Liturgy of St. Basil used about ten times a year.

The attribution requires care. Liturgical scholars hold that the text as celebrated today reached its present form over several centuries after his death, through the ordinary process by which liturgies grow, and that it cannot be treated as a service he composed and wrote out. What is defensible is that a core of the anaphora, the great eucharistic prayer at its centre, belongs to the Antiochene tradition he came from, and that his name became attached to the rite as the tradition's most famous representative. Saying that plainly takes nothing away from the liturgy, which is a serious and beautiful thing on its own account.

One prayer from it has travelled well beyond the East. The petition beginning "O Lord, who hast given us grace at this time with one accord to make our common supplications unto thee" was translated into English at the Reformation and printed in the Book of Common Prayer as the Prayer of St. Chrysostom, where generations of English-speaking Christians who never heard of the Byzantine rite have prayed it. Our page on the Book of Common Prayer sets out how that book was compiled, and our page on the Eucharist explains what the Church holds is happening in the liturgy itself.

10. Feast Day, Patronage and Relics

Feast day

In the Roman calendar his memorial is 13 September. It was moved there in the reform of the calendar in 1969, from 27 January, so that it would fall next to the day of his death; 14 September itself is occupied by the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. The Byzantine churches keep 13 November as his principal feast, 27 January for the return of his relics to Constantinople, and 30 January for the Three Holy Hierarchs, the joint feast of Chrysostom with Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian.

Patronage

He is invoked as the patron of preachers and orators, for the obvious reason, and by extension of those who have to speak publicly about the faith. Because of the ruin his early asceticism made of his digestion, he is also invoked against epilepsy and by those with stomach complaints, a patronage that comes from the circumstances of his own body rather than from any legend.

Relics

His relics were returned from Comana to Constantinople in 438 and kept there. A portion was taken west during the Fourth Crusade in 1204 and eventually held in Rome. In November 2004 Pope John Paul II returned relics of John Chrysostom, together with relics of Gregory of Nazianzus, to the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in Constantinople, a gesture made explicitly in the context of the long division between the churches. Our page on the Great Schism covers that division, and our page on the Eastern Orthodox Church describes the communion that received them.

11. What a Reader Can Take From John Chrysostom

Read a whole book of the Bible in order. His method was to start at the first verse and keep going, week after week, until the book was finished. It is still the best way to read Scripture and it needs no training to begin.

Check what your money is doing. He preached that surplus wealth is held on behalf of the poor and that this is a matter of justice rather than generosity. That claim is uncomfortable in exactly the way he intended.

Expect institutional cost for saying the true thing. He was deposed by a synod of bishops, and the sentence was enforced by a Christian court. Being right did not protect him, and it did not protect him for four years while it was happening.

Take the honour due to a Father without treating him as inerrant. The same man wrote the homilies on Matthew and the sermons against the Judaizers. Reading him well means knowing both and not pretending either away.

Learn his last sentence. "Glory be to God for all things" was said by a man who had lost everything and was dying on a road far from home. It is available for use on much smaller occasions.

12. Frequently Asked Questions

Who was St. John Chrysostom?

St. John Chrysostom was a preacher and bishop of the fourth century who lived from about 349 to 407. He was born at Antioch in Syria, trained in rhetoric, spent about six years as an ascetic in the mountains, and was ordained priest in 386. He preached at Antioch for eleven years, was made Archbishop of Constantinople in 398, and was deposed and exiled twice by an alliance of the imperial court and Theophilus of Alexandria. He died on the road at Comana in Pontus in 407 and is honoured as a Doctor of the Church.

Why is he called Chrysostom?

Chrysostom is a Greek nickname meaning golden-mouthed, given for his preaching. It is not a family name and it was not used in his lifetime. The name appears in the sources only generations after his death, from roughly the sixth century onward, and there is no record of what his own congregation at Antioch or Constantinople called him.

Did St. John Chrysostom write the Divine Liturgy that bears his name?

Not in the form now celebrated. The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom is the ordinary eucharistic liturgy of the Byzantine rite, and liturgical scholars hold that its present text developed over several centuries after his death. What can be defended is that its central eucharistic prayer belongs to the Antiochene tradition he came from, and that his name became attached to the rite as that tradition's most famous representative.

Why was St. John Chrysostom exiled?

He was deposed in 403 by the Synod of the Oak, an irregular gathering convened near Chalcedon under Theophilus of Alexandria and made up largely of bishops under Theophilus, and the sentence was enforced by the imperial court. The underlying causes were his cutting of the archbishop's household spending, his removal of clergy and of bishops he found had bought their sees, and his preaching against the luxury of the court. He was recalled within days after a public uproar, then removed for good in June 404 after a fresh quarrel over a silver statue of the empress Eudoxia set up near Hagia Sophia.

What did St. John Chrysostom say about the Jews?

He preached eight sermons at Antioch in 386 and 387, commonly titled Adversus Judaeos, whose language about Jews and the synagogue is violent and contemptuous. They were aimed at Christians in his own congregation who were attending synagogue services and Jewish festivals, and they were written in the ancient rhetorical genre of invective, but that context explains why they were written without excusing what they contain. Later writers quoted them to justify hatred. Catholic teaching on the subject is set by the Second Vatican Council's declaration Nostra Aetate of 1965, which taught that the passion of Christ cannot be charged against all Jews then living or against Jews today, and which deplores hatred and persecution directed against Jews at any time and from any source.

When is the feast day of St. John Chrysostom?

In the Roman calendar his memorial is 13 September, moved there in 1969 from 27 January so that it would fall next to the day of his death on 14 September, which is occupied by the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. The Byzantine churches keep 13 November as his principal feast, 27 January for the return of his relics, and 30 January for the Three Holy Hierarchs, the joint feast with Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian.

What were the Homilies on the Statues?

They are twenty-one sermons preached at Antioch during Lent in 387, after a riot over a new tax in which the crowd pulled down statues of the emperor Theodosius I. The city expected severe punishment for what Roman law treated as treason. Bishop Flavian went to plead with the emperor while John, newly ordained a priest, preached to the frightened population about repentance, swearing and the treatment of the poor. Theodosius pardoned the city in time for Easter.