Justified True Belief

(●) The preacher they nicknamed Golden Mouth, who told his congregations that the silver in their churches belonged to the poor, and died on a forced march for saying things like that. + John of Antioch was not called Chrysostom in his lifetime. The name is Greek for "golden mouth," and it attached itself to him long after his death; the earliest surviving document to use it dates from 553, nearly a century and a half on. It stuck because of the one thing nobody on any side of his quarrels ever disputed: when he stood up to preach, people came, and stayed, and remembered. He belongs on a Christian apologetics site for a reason that has little to do with argument in the technical sense. Most of the great fourth-century names are here because of what they hammered out about the nature of God: Athanasius on the Son, the Cappadocians on the Spirit, Augustine on grace. John did almost none of that. What he did instead was stand in front of ordinary people, week after week, and work through the actual sentences of Scripture in order, explaining what the words meant and what they demanded, on the assumption that a shopkeeper with a family could follow Paul if somebody would take the trouble to explain him. That assumption, and the habit of preaching that grew out of it, is one of the things Christianity has that the philosophies around it did not. Here is the fact about him that is easiest to remember and hardest to take in. More of his writing survives than of any other Greek-speaking Christian of the ancient world: roughly seven hundred genuine sermons, a shelf of treatises, and about two hundred and forty letters. Not one of them is a systematic theology. Almost all of them were spoken out loud to a congregation, taken down by stenographers as he went, and kept because people did not want to lose them.

(●) c. 347 AD: Born at Antioch to a mother widowed at twenty, and schooled by the finest pagan orator alive. + The year is a scholarly estimate, and you will see anything from about 344 to 354 in careful books; c. 347 is the conventional figure and the one the title uses. Antioch, though, is certain, and Antioch matters. It was the third city of the empire after Rome and Alexandria, a Greek-speaking city on the Orontes with a Syriac-speaking countryside behind it, and it was where the disciples were first called Christians (Acts 11:26). His father Secundus was a senior officer in the Syrian military command and died soon after John was born. His mother Anthusa was twenty. She did not remarry, which in that world was less an act of piety than an act of nerve: a young widow without a husband to defend her property was fair game for relatives and creditors alike. She raised her son on the estate that was left and paid for the best education money could buy in the East. That education was Libanius, the most admired teacher of rhetoric in the Greek world and a convinced pagan who spent his life defending the old gods. John sat in his classroom learning how a sentence is built and how a crowd is moved, and he never unlearned it. Years afterward, writing to console a young widow, he told a story from those days. His old teacher, told that this promising student was the son of a widow of forty who had lost her husband twenty years before and never remarried, turned to the men around him and exclaimed at what women there were among the Christians. John does not name the teacher in that letter; his editors identify him as Libanius. A separate tradition, reported by the historian Sozomen some fifty years afterwards, has Libanius on his deathbed naming John as the man who should have succeeded him, had the Christians not taken him first. That one is a good story, and it is only a story.

(●) c. 368 AD: Baptized at about twenty-one, he left the law courts for a cave and very nearly killed himself there. + He was heading for a career as an advocate, which for a young man of his class and training was the obvious road. Then he fell under the influence of Meletius, the bishop of Antioch, was baptized around 368, and was made a lector, the man who reads the Scripture lesson aloud in the service. He also joined the study circle of Diodore, later bishop of Tarsus, who taught him to read the Bible the way the teachers of Antioch read it: for the plain historical sense of the words, and not for hidden meanings floating above them. Everything he would later do in a pulpit starts there. Then he did what a great many serious young Christians of that generation did, and went to the mountains to live among the ascetics. An ascetic is someone who gives up property, marriage and comfort on purpose, on the view that a life stripped back to prayer and Scripture is the life Christ actually asked for, and in fourth-century Syria that meant a hut on a hillside and very little to eat. He spent about four years in a community of them under an old Syrian monk and then two more entirely alone in a cave, where, as his friend Palladius tells it, he gave himself to the Scriptures and for two years did not lie down, by night or by day. What it got him was a ruined stomach and kidneys that troubled him for the rest of his life, and eventually he had to come back down to the city because his health had broken. He never romanticized it afterwards. The man who came out of that cave spent the next twenty years telling people who lived in houses that they did not need to leave them, which is a striking thing for an ex-hermit to say and probably not a coincidence.

(●) 386 AD: Ordained a priest, he began working straight through whole books of the Bible from the pulpit. + Meletius had ordained him deacon around 381. In 386, five years on, Bishop Flavian ordained him priest and gave him the preaching, and for the next twelve years the pulpit of Antioch was his. What he did with it sounds unremarkable now and was not then. Instead of choosing a topic and gathering texts around it, he took a book of the Bible and went through it in order, passage after passage, week after week, until it was finished, and then started another. A sermon of that kind, one that walks through the text and explains it as it goes rather than starting from a theme, has a name his editors still use: a homily. Ninety sermons got him through Matthew. Eighty-eight through John. Thirty-two through Romans, forty-four through First Corinthians, and on through nearly the whole of Paul. Each sermon typically explains the passage first and then turns, sometimes abruptly, to what the congregation is to do about it on Monday. They were taken down as he spoke. Antioch had stenographers who worked in shorthand, and the sermons that survive are largely their transcripts, which is why the text still carries the sound of a room: he stops to scold people for talking, complains that they applaud instead of obeying, notices that the church empties after the sermon and before the prayers. You can hear a man handling a live audience rather than a writer polishing a paragraph.

(●) 387 AD: Antioch pulled down the emperor’s statues and waited to be destroyed, and he preached to the city for the whole of Lent. + Early in 387 the emperor Theodosius announced a new tax. Antioch rioted, and the rioting went somewhere no riot could safely go: crowds dragged down the bronze statues of the emperor, his late wife and his sons, and hauled them through the streets. In Roman law that was treason against the imperial person, and everyone in the city knew it. Troops arrived, the theatres and baths were shut, arrests began, and Antioch sat waiting to hear whether it would lose its status, its property, or its population. Bishop Flavian, old and unwell, set off overland for Constantinople in winter to beg for the city. He left John in the pulpit, and John preached the twenty-one sermons that came to be called On the Statues: through Lent, to a terrified congregation, in a city under military occupation. He talks about the fear plainly, tells them that the one thing nobody can take from them is their own soul, and works the crisis into a sustained argument about swearing, wealth, and the fear of death. It is the first time we can watch him do the thing he would do for the rest of his life, which is preach to people whose situation is genuinely dangerous without either flattering them or pretending the danger is not there. Flavian got the pardon. The city kept its rank, and Antioch never forgot who had stood in front of it that spring.

(●) 398 AD: Imperial officers took him quietly out of Antioch and made him bishop of Constantinople. + The bishopric of the capital fell vacant in 397, and the court wanted John. The problem was Antioch, which would not have given him up, so the thing was done by a trick: he was invited outside the city walls on some pretext, met there by an imperial escort, and taken to Constantinople. He was consecrated on 26 February 398 by Theophilus of Alexandria, who had come with a candidate of his own and was made to perform the ceremony instead. Theophilus did not forget it. Once installed, John behaved exactly as anyone who had listened to his sermons should have expected. He cut the bishop’s household budget to almost nothing, sold off the luxuries of the residence and marble intended for church decoration, and put the money into hospitals and the feeding of the poor. He disciplined clergy who lived with unmarried women under the name of spiritual friendship. He preached against the extravagance of the court and the aristocracy in terms nobody at that level was used to hearing. In the summer of 399 the point of all this became visible. Eutropius, the eunuch chief minister who had engineered John’s own appointment, fell from power and fled into the cathedral, clinging to the altar for sanctuary. Sanctuary was a real protection rather than a gesture: by long custom a fugitive who reached the altar of a church was not to be dragged off it, and the bishop would speak for him while he stayed there. It was Eutropius who had recently tried to curtail the right of sanctuary. John preached over him where he lay, on "vanity of vanities" from Ecclesiastes, took the whole church through what had just become of the second most powerful man in the empire, and then defended his right to the altar he had attacked. Eutropius did not survive the year, but he did not die in the church, and the two surviving sermons are among the most astonishing things anyone preached in the fourth century.

(●) 403 AD: Thirty-six bishops meeting in a suburban villa deposed him, and the city rose until he was brought back. + The enemies accumulated. He had deposed bishops in Asia Minor for buying their offices. He had sheltered a group of Egyptian monks, the Tall Brothers, whom Theophilus of Alexandria had driven out for their sympathy with the theology of Origen, the third-century Alexandrian teacher whose bolder speculations about the soul and the world were still dividing Egyptian monasteries a century and a half after his death. John gave them lodging and food but withheld communion while their case was open, and wrote to Theophilus about it. And he had gone on preaching about wealth and luxury in a capital where the empress Eudoxia took such preaching personally. Theophilus arrived in the summer of 403 to answer for his own conduct and instead convened a synod against John, a council of bishops, this one sitting as a court, in a villa across the water near Chalcedon called The Oak. Thirty-six bishops attended, twenty-nine of them Egyptians who had come with Theophilus. They compiled a long list of charges, most of them petty and some of them absurd. John refused to appear before judges who were his accusers, and the synod deposed him for that refusal, having proved nothing else. He was taken out of the city and the city would not have it. The historian Socrates reports crowds in the streets and around the palace; some sudden alarm in the imperial household frightened the empress, and within days John was fetched back and escorted in by a jubilant population. It lasted a few months.

(●) 404 to 407 AD: Exiled to the Armenian frontier and then marched toward the Black Sea, he died on the road. + The break came over a silver statue of Eudoxia set up near the cathedral, with public games and noise around it that carried into the services. John objected from the pulpit, and the objection was reported to the empress in the worst possible terms. Socrates records that he opened a sermon with a line about Herodias raving again and wanting John’s head on a platter, though the homily that has come down under that title is generally judged not to be his. At Easter 404 troops broke up the baptismal vigil, and in June he was sent away for good, to Cucusus, a bleak mountain village on the Armenian frontier. He was in his late fifties, with the stomach he had ruined as a young man, and he spent three years there writing. About two hundred and forty of his letters survive from the exile, seventeen of them to Olympias, a wealthy deaconess in Constantinople. A deaconess held a recognized office of service in the church rather than a courtesy title, and Olympias had given her fortune away and was being persecuted for her loyalty to him. He also wrote the treatise arguing that nobody is really harmed except by himself (T4), which is an easier thing to say from a study than from Cucusus. In the summer of 407 the order came to move him further, to Pityus at the eastern edge of the Black Sea. He was marched in the heat under guard, collapsed, and was brought back as far as Comana in Pontus, where he died on 14 September 407. His friend and biographer Palladius reports that he made his last prayer in the words he had always used, "Glory to God for all things." Thirty-one years later Bishop Proclus, with the emperor’s leave, brought the body back to Constantinople and laid it in the Church of the Apostles, and Theodoret reports that Theodosius the Second put his head against the coffin and prayed that his parents might be forgiven the wrong they had done in ignorance.

What He Taught

(T1) The Bible was written for people with a wife, children and a business to run, not for monks only. + Picture the excuse, because he quotes it himself, in the voice of the man making it: I am not a monk. I have a wife and children and a household to manage. Reading the Scriptures is for the men who have time for it. Every congregation John preached to was full of people who thought that, and he thought it was the single most damaging idea in the room. His answer runs the argument backwards. The men in the mountains are out of the traffic. It is the people in the city who take a wound every day, in the shop, in the courts, at the dinner table, and a wounded man needs the medicine more than a healthy one, not less. So the Bible in the house, read by the householder, is not an optional refinement for the devout. It is the ordinary equipment of a Christian life. Behind that lay the way his teachers at Antioch read the text. The Alexandrian school, following Origen, was famous for allegory: reading a story for a hidden spiritual meaning underneath the plain one, so that the wells Abraham digs become the depths of Scripture. Antioch was suspicious of that. Its teachers worked for the literal and historical sense, what the words meant to the man who wrote them and the people he wrote them for, and treated the moral application as growing out of that sense rather than replacing it. This is why John can hand the Bible to a shopkeeper with a straight face. If the meaning is in the plain words, then a plain reader with an explanation of the hard parts can get at it. If the meaning is hidden behind the words, only a trained decoder can.

(Q) "Why, this is what hath ruined all, your supposing that the reading of the divine Scriptures appertains to those only, when ye need it much more than they. For they that dwell in the world, and each day receive wounds, these have most need of medicines." + Source: Homilies on Matthew 2.10 (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, volume 10). He has just put the excuse in his congregation’s mouth: "I am not," you will say, "one of the monks, but I have both a wife and children, and the care of a household." The "those" and "they" of the reply are the monks. This is the second sermon of the ninety it took him to preach through Matthew (T1).

(T2) Silver on the altar is not honour paid to Christ while he is freezing outside the door. + A congregation in Antioch had been buying vessels for the communion table, and it was a genuinely pious thing to do. John took the opportunity to ask a question that has been uncomfortable ever since. The same Lord who said over the bread, "Take, eat; this is my body" (Matthew 26:26), also said that when he was hungry they fed him, and that what was done for the least of his brothers was done for him (Matthew 25:35, 25:40). If you believe the first sentence enough to buy him a gold cup, what do you do with the second? He is not against beautiful churches, and he says so; his complaint is about the order of the two obligations, not about the existence of one of them. What he refuses is the arrangement where a man honours Christ in the building on terms he himself has chosen and then walks past Christ in the street on terms Christ has chosen. Give the honour that the one being honoured has actually asked for, he says, and the poor are where he has asked for it. This is the theme that made him famous and eventually got him removed. Across hundreds of sermons he hammered at wealth with an insistence that still startles. Surplus held while a neighbour starves is a kind of theft. Almsgiving, the plain word in his world for money handed to the poor, is not generosity but restitution, which is what you call giving back something that was never yours to begin with. And the rich are stewards of what passes through their hands, handling it the way a manager handles the owner’s money, rather than owners of it. He preached it in Antioch to merchants and in Constantinople to a court, and the court had less patience with it.

(Q) "Wouldest thou do honor to Christ’s body? Neglect Him not when naked; do not while here thou honorest Him with silken garments, neglect Him perishing without of cold and nakedness." + Source: Homilies on Matthew 50.4 (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, volume 10). "Without" here means outside, in the street. He goes on to point out that the one who said "This is my body" is the same one who said "Ye saw me an hungered, and fed me not," and that the honour most pleasing to the one honoured is the honour he has asked for (T2).

(T3) The priesthood is carried out on earth but belongs to heaven, which is why a sane man runs from it. + As a young man John and his friend Basil were both, it seems, in line for ordination as bishops, and John avoided it. His treatise On the Priesthood, six books cast as a conversation with the friend he had left holding the consequences, is his defence of that flight, and it became the standard book on ministry in the Greek church and, once the Latin West had it in translation, was read there beside Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Rule. The argument is not that the office is beneath a serious man. It is the reverse, and that is the point. A soldier answers for a wall, a judge for a verdict, a doctor for a body; a pastor answers for souls he cannot see into, using tools that are nothing but words, against a resistance he cannot compel. He cannot operate on an unwilling patient. Persuasion is the whole of his equipment. And the man who takes that on will be judged for the people he loses. So the fear is the correct response, and a man who is not afraid of the office has not understood it. What John will not allow is that the fear settles anything: the treatise ends with him consoling the friend, not with either of them released. Scripture calls the work a noble task and calls wanting it a good thing to want (1 Timothy 3:1). John’s point is about the weight of the task rather than its worth, and about how little a gifted man’s gifts are a qualification for it.

(Q) "The priestly office is indeed discharged on earth, but it ranks among heavenly ordinances; and very naturally so: for neither man, nor angel, nor archangel, nor any other created power, but the Paraclete Himself, instituted this vocation." + Source: On the Priesthood 3.4 (W. R. W. Stephens, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, volume 9). The Paraclete is the Holy Spirit, from the Greek word John’s Gospel uses for him, meaning one called alongside to help. The sentence comes early in the third of the six books, where the treatise turns from why he ran to what it is he was running from (T3).

(T4) Nobody is really harmed by another; a man is only ever harmed by himself. + He wrote this from Cucusus, deposed by a synod, banished by an emperor, cut off from a congregation that wanted him back, with his health going. That is the setting, and it is most of the reason the treatise is worth reading rather than merely arguing with. The case is that the things people call injuries, poverty, sickness, slander, exile, losing your position, being killed, are not injuries to the person at all, because none of them can touch the only thing that finally belongs to him, which is what he is. A man can be robbed of everything he owns and remain exactly the man he was. He cannot tell a lie and remain exactly the man he was. Therefore the only agent who can genuinely damage him is himself, and the only weapon that reaches him is his own sin. You can hear the Stoic in this, and John had read the philosophers; the Stoics of the Greek and Roman world taught much the same about what is and is not in our power. But he means it in a different key. The Stoic sage is invulnerable because he has trained himself not to want what can be taken. John is writing to Olympias and to his own church about a God who is running the whole business and has not lost track of it, so his invulnerability is not detachment but confidence in someone else. He is not saying that exile does not hurt. He is saying it is not the thing to be afraid of.

(Q) "No one of those who are wronged is wronged by another, but experiences this injury at his own hands." + Source: No One Can Harm the Man Who Does Not Injure Himself, 1 (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, volume 9). The thesis in a line, from the treatise written in exile at Cucusus. He restates it near the close: "in no case will any one be able to injure a man who does not choose to injure himself" (section 12). (T4)

(Q) "Glory to God for all things." + Source: Palladius, Dialogue on the Life of St John Chrysostom 11 (Herbert Moore, 1921). Palladius, a bishop who knew him and wrote his defence within a few years of his death, reports these as his last words at Comana in Pontus, on 14 September 407, after the march toward Pityus had finished him. He adds that John was using the formula he used habitually, so the words were not saved up for a deathbed. The Greek, doxa to Theo panton heneken, has stayed in Eastern Christian use ever since.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The church kept his sermons because nobody had explained Paul so plainly, and East and West both claimed him. + Vindication came quickly by the standards of these things. His name was restored to the diptychs, the lists of bishops read aloud at the liturgy, within a generation, and in 438 Bishop Proclus brought his body back to Constantinople, where the reigning emperor asked pardon for what his parents had done. After that the copying never stopped, and that is the real measure of his reception. Manuscripts of Chrysostom survive in numbers no other Greek father comes near, because his sermons were the working library of Greek preachers for a thousand years: you wanted to preach on Romans, so you read what he had said about Romans. The Eastern churches rank him with Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus as the Three Holy Hierarchs. The West numbers him among the Doctors of the Church, the title it keeps for the small number of writers whose teaching it commends to everybody. And the standard eucharistic service of the Orthodox churches, meaning their order for the Lord’s Supper, is called the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, though the text as it now stands took its shape well after him. The Latin West read him in translation from early on. Thomas Aquinas quoted him constantly in his Catena Aurea, the chain of patristic comments he assembled on the four Gospels; his earliest biographer, William of Tocco, reports him saying that he would rather have Chrysostom on Matthew than the city of Paris. The remark reaches us at second hand, gathered for the canonization inquiry rather than written down by Thomas, and it has lasted because it sounds like what a working commentator would say.

(†) The Reformers went back to him for the same reason Antioch had listened: he let the text say what it says. + When sixteenth-century scholars went looking in the fathers for support for reading the Bible in its plain sense, and for putting it into the hands of laypeople, John was the obvious witness, because he had done both loudly and at length. Erasmus edited and translated him. Protestant and Catholic printers alike put out editions of him through the century. Calvin went furthest. He planned a French edition of the homilies for ordinary readers and drafted a Latin preface for it; a substantial fragment of the preface survives in his own hand, and the edition never appeared. His reason for choosing Chrysostom over every other father is exactly the Antiochene point: that he stays with the plain sense of the words and does not take liberties with what they say. He is also candid, in the same preface and in the Institutes, about where he thinks Chrysostom goes wrong: in the chapter on the bondage of the will he has him conceding too much to human choice and too little to grace. Both halves of that assessment are worth keeping. The Reformers did not treat him as a proto-Protestant; they treated him as the ancient preacher who had shown them how to preach. That is roughly how he has been read since. He is not where Christians go to settle a doctrinal question, and there is little in him that a systematic theologian needs. He is where preachers go, and where the church has repeatedly gone when it wanted to remember that the poor have a claim on it.

(†) Where his own record goes wrong: eight sermons against Christians keeping the Jewish feasts, preached in language the gospel does not license. + In 386 and 387, in his first two years of preaching at Antioch, he delivered eight sermons that are usually printed under the title Against the Jews. The situation behind them was real and local. Antioch had a large and long-established Jewish community whose autumn festivals, and whose reputation for oaths and for healing, drew Christians from John’s own congregation into the synagogue. He was preaching at those Christians, and the sermons are arguments aimed at keeping them in church. None of that covers what he actually said. He called the synagogue a brothel and a den of robbers and a dwelling of demons, said that demons live not only in the building but in the souls of the Jews, and said that they had made themselves fit for slaughter. The style has a name in ancient rhetoric: invective, the set-piece verbal demolition of an opponent, in which a trained speaker was expected to find the worst thing that could be said and then say it as hard as he could. It was standard equipment in the schools where he trained, and he used the same weapons on heretics, on actors, on the rich. Knowing that explains where the language came from. It does not make it something a Christian preacher should have said, and the reasons are in the New Testament he was expounding. Paul, writing about the same people, says he has great sorrow and unceasing anguish in his heart for them (Romans 9:2), that to them belong the covenants and the promises (Romans 9:4), and that "as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable" (Romans 11:28-29). The man who would go on to preach straight through Romans in thirty-two sermons had those verses in the Bible he was holding. So the honest account is that the greatest preacher of the ancient church preached this, in his own voice, with his own reasons, and that his own Scriptures were against him when he did. It is the one place where the plain sense of the text he loved would have corrected him and he did not let it.