Ecumenical Commemoration
Bishop of Constantinople & Teacher of the Faith
September 13 · d. 407
also known as John Chrysostom, John of Constantinople, The Golden-Mouthed
"Golden-Mouthed," the greatest preacher of the early Church. John was an Antioch-born ascetic whose sermons packed the churches and whose plain rebukes of imperial luxury got him made archbishop of Constantinople against his will, then twice deposed and driven into exile. He died on a forced march in the mountains of Pontus with a doxology on his lips: "Glory be to God for all things." His homilies, copied for sixteen centuries, are still the school of Christian preaching.
John was born about 349 in Antioch, one of the great cities of the Roman East (today Antakya in southern Turkey). His father died while he was an infant, and his mother Anthusa, widowed at twenty, refused to remarry and poured herself into her son. Even John's pagan teacher noticed: the famous orator Libanius, hearing of her, is said to have exclaimed, by John's own report, "Heavens, what women these Christians have!" Libanius trained the boy in rhetoric and reckoned him his finest pupil; asked on his deathbed who should follow him, the old pagan answered that it would have been John, had the Christians not stolen him.
For the church had him. John gave up the courts for the gospel, went off to live as a hermit in the mountains above Antioch, and kept such brutal fasts and vigils that he wrecked his health for life. Brought back to the city, he was ordained deacon and then priest, and in the pulpit he found his calling. For a dozen years the people of Antioch packed the churches to hear him preach through book after book of Scripture, plainly, fiercely, tenderly, until they gave him the name the centuries kept: Chrysostom, the golden mouth.
In 398 the imperial court reached out and seized him for a harder post, the bishopric of Constantinople. John would not soften. He sold off the palace silver to feed the poor, disciplined idle and luxurious clergy, and preached against the vanity of the court so directly that the Empress Eudoxia took it as a personal attack. His enemies, led by the bishop of Alexandria, convened a packed synod and deposed him. An earthquake frightened the court into recalling him; within months they deposed him again and sent him into exile.
They marched the old man through heat and cold toward a remote outpost on the Black Sea. His guards drove him without mercy, and at last his ruined body gave out at Comana, in the mountains of Pontus. His final words were the summary of his whole life: "Glory be to God for all things." Thirty years later the city that had exiled him carried his bones home in honor, and the dead emperor's son knelt to ask forgiveness for his parents.
John could have kept his pulpit by softening what he said in it; he never did. He sold the palace silver to feed the poor, rebuked the court to its face, and was twice deposed for plain speech. At the end of the forced march that killed him, his words were not a protest but a doxology: "Glory be to God for all things." Speaking truly cost him everything except his thanksgiving. Where in your own life would honesty cost you something, and could you say those words there?
John Chrysostom is among the best attested figures of the ancient church. Some seven hundred of his sermons and many letters survive, far more than from any other Greek father, including his great homiletic series on Genesis, the Psalms, Matthew, John, the Acts, and the letters of Paul. His friend and deacon Palladius wrote a Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom soon after his death, the source for his last words; the church historians Socrates and Sozomen narrate the politics of his fall; and his own treatise On the Priesthood remains a classic.
The contemporary record even preserves the petty machinery of his condemnation, the so-called Synod of the Oak of 403. Little in his story rests on legend. The man speaks for himself in volume after volume, which is why he became, more than almost any other father, the working preacher's father.
In the East, Chrysostom is one of the Three Holy Hierarchs, ranked with Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian, and the Divine Liturgy that bears his name is the ordinary eucharist of the Orthodox Church. The soaring Paschal homily read in every Orthodox church on Easter night, with its cry that hell is embittered and the grave robbed of its victory, is traditionally ascribed to him.
The Western calendars keep him on September 13, the eve of his death; the East on November 13 and on January 27, the day his relics were brought home. His deposition and exile were early understood as a bloodless martyrdom, a death suffered for righteousness without the sword. He is honored as a patron of preachers and, fittingly for the golden mouth, of orators.
On the Priesthood (De Sacerdotio)(Greek, c. 390)
Chrysostom's classic on the awe and burden of the pastoral office, still read in seminaries.
Public domain: CCEL, NPNF ser. 1 vol. 9
Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew(Greek, c. 390)
The fullest surviving ancient commentary on Matthew, and the model of his expository preaching.
Public domain: CCEL, NPNF ser. 1 vol. 10
Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom(Greek, c. 408)
The earliest life, written by a friend within a year of his death; the source for his last words.
Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom(English, 1995)
The standard modern biography, balancing the preacher and the politics.
Further reading. Begin with Chrysostom himself: the Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, the treatise On the Priesthood, and the Homilies on the Statues are all in the nineteenth-century Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation. Palladius's Dialogue is the earliest life. For a modern study, J. N. D. Kelly's Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom (Cornell University Press, 1995) is the standard biography.
Online resources. The full Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers volumes of Chrysostom are free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
British (Received Pronunciation): Eudoxia /juːˈdɒksiə/
Almighty God, you gave your servant John Chrysostom special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52