2 . Saint John Chrysostom
INTRODUCTION
ter, as a source not only of religious inspiration but of diagnostic insight for the performance of his tasks.
Such a period is the century following the conversion of Constantine.
Into that century fall the major parts of the careers of those Greek and Latin fathers who shaped the subsequent development of the church and of dogma more decisively than any group of men since the apostles: Eusebius,
Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzus, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and John Chrysostom, to name only some of them. What official Christian doctrine became in the 125 years from the Council of Nicaea in 325 to the Council of Chalcedon in 451, it has remained to the present day. Underlying the codification of the dogma was the establishment of the church as Christendom, dominating the culture and allied with the state. Preaching had been a witness to the truth of the gospel, directed to the faithful on the inside for their edification and to the unbelievers on the outside for their conversion. Now that Christianity was socially respectable and eventually even fashionable, the unbelievers began to appear inside the church also; and preaching was obliged to undertake the responsibility of instructing in the rudiments of Christian doctrine those who had been baptized without any such instruction, of training them in at least the minimum requirements of the Christian ethic, and of maintaining the ecclesiastical establishment, whether with the help of the secular arm or against interference from it.
2. Saint John Chrysostom By common consent, there was no preacher in that saeculum mirabile more admirable than John Chrysostom, whom Pope
Pius X in 1908, speaking in this instance for most Christians, designated as "patron" of Christian preachers.' This is not the place for a full-length biography of Chrysostom.* The date
1 Acta Sanctae Sedis, XLI (1908), 594-95.
* The standard modern biography is that of the Benedictine scholar, Chrysostomus Baur, John Chrysostom and His Time, trans.
Gonzaga (2 vols.; Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1959-60), from which I have drawn much of the biographical information summarized here.
THE PREACHING OF CHRYSOSTOM
of his birth is rather uncertain, but there is some reason to place it at 354, which also happens to have been the year of Augustine's birth." In his best-known treatise, On the Priesthood, John quotes his mother's words to him when he was contemplating the religious life: "My child, it was not the will of Heaven that I should long enjoy the benefit of thy father's virtue. For his death soon followed the pangs which I endured at thy birth, leaving thee an orphan and me a widow before my time." Nevertheless, he eventually did become a monk, and one of such rigorously ascetic devotion that he broke under the regimen and returned to Antioch. There he was ordained into the priesthood in 386, and for the next eleven years preached his way through most of the New Testament and parts of the Old.
(It is to this period of his career that we owe the homilies presented here.) In 397 the preacher became patriarch of Constantinople. and from that time on his life, which even in Antioch had been anything but sheltered, was a turbulent and even a tragic one. He was driven into exile by the combined opposition of the patriarch of Alexandria, Theophilus, and the empress
Eudoxia; the former had been alienated by many of John': activities, but especially by his acceptance of monks who had been excommunicated by the Alexandrian patriarch, while the latter believed the reports that Chrysostom had denounced he: as a Jezebel. Although this exile was cut short by the protest: of loyalists in Constantinople, the patriarch was exiled again in the following year, 404. To this final exile in Armenia, we owe a large collection of his letters, many of them now avail. able in a fine modern edition;* they are sources of valuable information both about him and about the internal condition: of the church. When he was forced to transfer his place of * Chrysostomus Baur, "Wann ist der heilige Johannes Chrysosto: mus ped So Zeitschrift fiir katholische Theologie, LIL (1928)
401-6.
* Chrysostom On the Priesthood i. 5.
*Jean Chrysostome, Lettres a Olympias, ed. Anne-Marie Malin. grey ("Sources chrétiennes," XIII [Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1947]) with an informative introduction on the historical situation (6-32) on the relation between Chrysostom and Olympias (32-66), and on the Stoic and Christian ideas of suffering (66-85).
INTRODUCTION
exile from Armenia to the remote frontier at the foot of the Caucasus in Pityus, the fearsome journey proved to be too much for John. And on September 14, 407, he died, near a village which today bears the name Bizeri, in the valley of the Iris, His dying words are said to have been: "Glory to God for all things. Amen."
For our purposes in the present volume, it is Chrysostom as a churchman and preacher who is the most important. There are several suggestions in the text of these homilies that give us a hint about changes that had come in the life of the church within the empire, and about Chrysostom's attitude toward these changes. In the final homily, for example, he contrasts the authentic security of the life of faith with the illusory security of wealth and power. "For there is not," he says, "nay there is not another life we may find free from all evils, but this alone. And ye are witnesses, who know the plots in king's courts and the troubles in the houses of the rich. But there was not among the apostles any such thing."* The emperor at the time was Theodosius the Great, whose achievements in establishing Christianity consolidated the work of Constantine and prepared for that of Justinian. Although Chrysostom, like other clerics, was in many ways the beneficiary of those achievements, this did not blind him to the contrast between the imperial church and the apostolic church. Before his life and ministry were over, he would have ample occasion for further reflection on that contrast and on the effect of "plots in king's [and queen's! } courts" upon the security of the Christian church and the freedom of its proclamation.
Another by-product of ecclesiastical establishment to which Chrysostom the churchman often called attention, also in these homilies, was the incursion of hordes of uncommitted new members into the church and the catastrophic breakdown in church discipline that this presaged. Warning that he would
"have no rich man, no potentate, puffing at me here, and drawing up his eyebrows," Chrysostom denounced those who came to his church because its liturgy was a dramatic spectacle or ®* Chrysostom Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew xxiv. 3.
Henceforth, in referring to those homilies, they shall be cited merely as Matt., referring to the number of the homily in lower-case Roman numerals and to the number of the section in Arabic numerals. v
THE PREACHING OF CHRYSOSTOM
because his preaching was an exciting form of rhetorical display. He was not a man of infinite patience, and he did not suffer fools gladly; now he had "fairly given up in despair," for the members of the church were "still clinging to the former rude beginnings." If they persisted, he threatened, he would "forbid you for the future to set foot on this sacred threshold, and partake of the immortal mysteries" of the divine liturgy. "For it is better to offer our accustomed prayers, with two or three, who keep the laws of God, than to sweep together a multitude of transgressors and corrupters of others."
Despite such attacks and threats, neither liturgical decorum nor moral uprightness seems to have improved.
Therefore even so formal and stylized a series of homilies as this contains repeated admonitions to observe both liturgical decorum and moral uprightness.
There were evidently some Christians who "shamelessly associated with all, and make the awful things [of the liturgy and the sacraments} contemptible." Addressing himself to such Christians, Chrysostom warned that the church still celebrated the mysteries behind closed doors and still forbade attendance at them by the uninitiated.* This was "not for any weakness of which we have convicted our rites, but because the many are as yet imperfectly prepared for them." Both the origins and the extent of the disciplina arcani have long been debated by patristic scholars, but such comments as these substantiate the liturgical evidence of the church's continued effort to hold the line against the growing pressure of those who had become Christians the easy way." But these homilies also show that the effort was not altogether successful. There was, the preacher warned, great "disrespectfulness" among Christian worshipers;
"when prophets are chanting, and apostles singing hymns, and * Chrysostom Matt. xvii.
8 Cf. Ibid. xvi. 12 and xix. 9.
® Ibid. xxiii. 3.
See the summary of the evidence by O. Perler, '"Arkandisziplin,"
Reallexikon fiir Antike und Christentum, 1 (Stuttgart: Hiersemann Verlags-G.M.B.H., 1950), 667-76, including several references to Chrysostom; see also the evidence on the redditio symboli assembled in St. John Chrysostom: Baptismal Instructions, ed. Paul W. Harkins
("Ancient Christian Writers,'
XX XI [Westminster, Md.:
Newman Press, 1963}), 222-23, n. 39.
INTRODUCTION
God is discoursing, we wander without, and bring in upon us a turmoil of worldly business." This he contrasted with the great reverence shown at the worldly theaters when the customary letters of the emperor were being read. The audience was silent, and if anyone presumed to interrupt this silence, he was severely punished. Here in church it was the very letters of heaven that were read, and yet the audience was indifferent. Nor was its decorum any better during the liturgy.
"As though in the midst of a forum,' he complained, "we make an uproar and disturbance, and spend the whole time of our solemn assembly in discoursing of things which are nothing to us."
So far had such disrespect gone that the solemn regulations of the church regarding fasting were also being flouted. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus condemned those who fasted ostentatiously, but the new breed of Christians had gone these hypocrites one better, "not merely fasting and making a display of it, but neglecting to fast, and yet wearing the masks of them that fast, and cloaking themselves with an excuse worse than their sin." When they were called to account for their hypocrisy, they claimed that they were doing this to avoid giving offense. Thus they were afraid of offense, but unafraid of blasphemy!" As Stighmayer has suggested, such references and allusions in Chrysostom's homilies—particularly those that were composed later than the present series—can be used as a source for the social history of the metropolitan centers of the classical world." They are, of course, especially important for the social history of the church, but they also reveal a great deal about general conditions.
The most distinguished of present-day historians of Antioch has noted that "Chrysostom's works complete our knowledge of Antioch at this time as much by the background they supply indirectly as by the specific facts they mention."™
* Chrysostom Matt. xix. 12.
2 Ibid. xx. 1.
* YJ. Stighmayer, "Antike Grossstadte im Spiegel der ChrysostomusHomilien," Stimmen der Zeit, LVI (1927), 170-85.
" Glanville Downey, A History of Antioch in Syria from Seleucus to the Arab Conquest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 42.
THE PREACHING OF CHRYSOSTOM
One aspect of church life at the end of the fourth century is of particular importance for an understanding of the Tendenz in these homilies. Although the various Arian positions were still the most virulent heresies of the time, Chrysostom is especially concerned in his exposition of the Sermon on the Mount to refute another heretical tradition, that of Gnosticism and its descendant, Manichaeism. At the very beginning of the first homily on the Sermon on the Mount, the preacher describes Jesus as stopping "the shameless mouths of heretics, signifying by this his care of both parts of our being, that he himself is the Maker of the whole creation."
Against the Gnostic and Manichaean disparagement of the body as the prison of the soul, he thus defended the biblical insistence that both the body and the soul were God's creations and, as such, essentially good. Later he rejected the dualistic notion that the body is the source of temptation and sin which corrupts the purity of the mind by its appetites. For in the Sermon on the Mount Christ is "not discoursing about our limbs;—far from it——for nowhere doth he say that our flesh is to be blamed for things, but everywhere it is the evil mind that is accused. For it is not the eye that sees, but the mind and the thought." At a time when the teachers of the church, including Chrysostom, were cultivating the ascetic ideal and exalting virginity, they also continued to fight off the heretical doctrine that the body and its drives were creatures of the devil.
It was not only the human body, however, that called forth the aversion of the Gnostics and Manichaeans; it was the entire natural realm. They asserted that "the God who made the world, who 'makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, who sends the rain on the just and on the unjust, is in some sense an evil being.""" The dichotomy between soul and body had its counterpart and its basis in a dualism within the divine reality itself. The Creator of the natural world, and thus of the human body, was a different being from the heavenly
Father; "some other one, who is not, nor made any of the things that are, they assign for a Father to Christ." This Father
* Chrysostom Matt. xv. 1.
* Ibid. xvii. 3.
™ Ibid. xvi. 8.
INTRODUCTION
so completely transcended the natural world of existence and of becoming that he could not even be said to "be," but could be properly described only in negative terms. When the doctrine of the Trinity identified God the Father with the Creator and asserted the unity of the Son and the Holy Spirit with him in one Godhead, it was defending monotheism simultaneously against Gnostic dualism and against Arian subordinationism.
So far had the disparagement of the natural gone that even the use of illustrations drawn from the world of animals seemed improper:
"It was not meet for one strengthening moral principle, to use natural advantages as enticements to that end."* And as Chrysostom defended the essential goodness of the body, so he affirmed the essential goodness of the entire creation. Even the wickedness of the devil was not "from nature," but had come by the devil's own choice; the devil, too, was part of creation."
The heretical antipathy for creation and the body was part of a theological system that also rejected the Old Testament, and since the middle of the second century the church had been engaged in a defense of the Old Testament as Christian
Scripture. Therefore the words of the Sermon on the Mount about the commandments given "by them of old time" did not mean an attack on the Old Testament and its law. On the contrary, by these words Christ "commends the old law, by making a comparison between it and the other...
. He doth not, you see, find fault with the old law, but will have it made stricter."" The commandments of the Mosaic law and the commandments of the Sermon on the Mount differed in degree, not in kind, and belonged together in the history of God's revelation of his will to men. It was blasphemy to "say that the old covenant is of the devil.""" Christ himself used the occasion of his announcement of the new and stricter law to make it clear that he had not come to destroy the law and the prophets of the Old Testament, but to fulfill them. Especially in St. Matthew's account of his teachings and actions was the theme of fulfillment dominant; from birth to death Christ
8 Thid. xxi. 4.
9 Ibid. xix. 10.
" Ibid. xvi. 6.
" Thid. xvi. 3.