John Chrysostom

John was born at Antioch about 347. His father Secundus, an army officer, died while he was an infant; his mother Anthusa was widowed at twenty and refused to remarry so she could raise him. The pagan orator Libanius, the finest teacher of Greek rhetoric alive, took him as a student and is said to have named John as the man who should have succeeded him, if the Christians had not stolen him.

They had. John was baptized about 368, studied under Diodorus of Tarsus, who taught him to read the Bible for what the text actually says rather than for hidden allegories, and then went up into the mountains outside Antioch to live with the monks. He spent four years under an old Syrian ascetic and two more alone in a cave, standing most of the time and barely sleeping, memorizing the Bible. It wrecked his stomach and his kidneys permanently, and he came back down to the city ill for life.

He was ordained deacon in 381 and priest in 386, and for twelve years he preached in Antioch. That is where the work was done. He went through Genesis, the Psalms, Matthew, John, Acts and every letter of Paul, verse by verse, in front of ordinary people, sermons that his hearers applauded in the middle of, which he told them to stop doing. He is the only ancient preacher whose complete run of homilies on Paul survives, and no one before or since has explained Paul to a congregation with that combination of plainness and heat.

Antioch found out what he was made of in 387. The city rioted over a new tax and smashed the imperial statues, a capital offense against the emperor Theodosius, and the whole population expected to be destroyed. The old bishop Flavian rode to Constantinople to beg. John preached through Lent to a terrified city, the twenty-one sermons called On the Statues, holding them steady until the pardon came.

In 397 the emperor's minister had him seized outside Antioch, effectively kidnapped, and carried to Constantinople to be made archbishop of the capital. He did not want it and could not refuse it.

He governed the way he preached. He cut the archbishop's household budget to nothing and spent it on hospitals. He sold the marble and furnishings meant for his residence. He disciplined idle clergy, sent missionaries to the Goths and preached to them in their own quarter, and told the rich of the richest city on earth, from the pulpit, exactly what their luxury looked like next to the beggars freezing outside their doors. He said that the poor at the church door are the altar you can find on any street. The people loved him. Nobody in power did.

His enemies gathered: Theophilus, the patriarch of Alexandria, who resented the capital's rising see, and the Empress Eudoxia, who took his sermons on vain and grasping women personally, and, by all accounts, correctly. In 403 Theophilus convened the Synod of the Oak across the water at Chalcedon, on charges John was never allowed to answer, and deposed him. He was exiled. An earthquake shook the city that night, the crowds filled the streets, and the empress had him brought back within days.

It held for a few months. In 404 a silver statue of Eudoxia was set up near the great church with public games in front of it; John denounced the noise, and the second exile came for good. Soldiers cleared his congregation out of the church at Easter, wading into the baptismal candidates. He was marched east into Armenia and kept there three years, writing letters, hundreds of them survive, many to the deaconess Olympias, that never once turn bitter.

In 407 the order came to move him further, to Pitiunt on the far edge of the Black Sea. His guards drove him on foot through the summer heat. He collapsed at Comana in Pontus on 14 September, asked to be dressed in white, took communion, and said his last words: Glory to God for all things. He was about sixty.

Thirty-one years later the emperor Theodosius II brought his body back to Constantinople and asked his forgiveness in public for what his parents had done.

The name Chrysostom, golden-mouth, was given him a century after he died. It stuck because the preaching survives: hundreds of sermons taken down by shorthand writers as he spoke, still the plainest verse-by-verse exposition the early church produced, and still the first place a preacher goes when he wants to know what a father actually said about a text.

Sources: Palladius, Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom; Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History; Philip Schaff, ed., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, vols. 9–14.