CHAPTER IV.

CHRYSOSTOM EVADES FORCIBLE ORDINATION TO A BISHOPRIC; THE TREATISE "ON THE PRIESTHOOD", A.D. 370-371.

 

WE now come to a curious passage in Chrysostom’s life; one in which his conduct, from our moral standpoint, seems hardly justifiable. Yet for one reason it is not to be regretted, since it was the originating cause of his treatise “De Sacerdotio”; one of the ablest, most instructive, and most eloquent works which he ever produced.

Bishop Meletius had been banished in A.D. 370 or 371. The Arian Emperor Valens, who had expelled him, was about to take up his residence in Antioch. It was desirable therefore, without loss of time, to fill up some vacant sees in Syria. The attention of the bishops, clergy, and people was turned to Chrysostom and Basil, as men well qualified for the episcopal office.

According to a custom prevalent at that time, they might any day be seized and compelled, however reluctant, to accept the dignity. So St. Augustine was dragged, weeping, by the people before the bishop, and his immediate ordination demanded by them, regardless of his tears. So St. Martin, Bishop of Tours, was torn from his cell, and conveyed under a guard to his ordination. The two friends were filled with apprehension and alarm. Basil implored Chrysostom that they might act in concert at the present crisis, and together accept or together evade or resist the expected but unwelcome honour.

Chrysostom affected to consent to this proposal, but in reality determined to act otherwise. He regarded himself as totally unworthy and incompetent to fill so sacred and responsible an office; but considering Basil to be far more advanced in learning and piety, he resolved that the Church should not, through his own weakness, lose the services of his friend. Accordingly, when popular report proved correct, and some emissaries from the electing body were sent to carry off the young men (much, it would seem from Chrysostom’s account, as policemen might arrest a prisoner), Chrysostom contrived to hide himself. Basil, less wary, was captured, and imagined that Chrysostom had already submitted; for the emissaries acted with subtlety when he tried to resist them. They affected surprise that he should make so violent a resistance, when his companion, who had the reputation of a hotter temper, had yielded so mildly to the decision of the Fathers. Thus Basil was led to suppose that Chrysostom had already submitted; and when he discovered too late the artifice of his friend and his captors, he bitterly remonstrated with Chrysostom upon his treacherous conduct. “The character of them both”, he complained, “was compromised by this division in their counsels”. “You should have told us where your friend was hidden”, said some, “and then we should have contrived some means of capturing him”; to which poor Basil was ashamed to reply that he had been ignorant of his friend’s concealment, lest such a confession should cast a suspicion of unreality over the whole of their supposed intimacy. “Chrysostom, on his side, was accused of haughtiness and vanity for declining so great a dignity; though others said that the electors deserved a still greater dishonour and defeat for appointing over the heads of wiser, holier, and older men, mere lads, who had been but yesterday immersed in secular pursuits; that they might now for a little while knit their brows, and go arrayed in sombre robes and affect a grave countenance”. Basil begged Chrysostom for an explanation of his motives in this proceeding. “After all their mutual protestations of indivisible friendship, he had been suddenly cast off and turned adrift, like a vessel without ballast, to encounter alone the angry tempests of the world. To whom should he now turn for sympathy and aid in the trials to which he would surely be exposed from slander, ribaldry, and insolence? The one who might have helped him stood coldly aloof, and would be unable even to hear his cries for assistance”.

We may be strongly disposed to sympathise with the disconsolate Basil. But the conscience of Chrysostom appears to have been quite at ease from first to last in this transaction. He regarded it as a “pious fraud”. “When he beheld the mingled distress and displeasure of his friend, he could not refrain from laughing for joy, and thanking God for the successful issue of his plan”. In the ensuing discussion he boldly asserted the principle that deceit claims our admiration when practised in a good cause and from a good motive. The greatest successes in war, he argues, have been achieved through stratagem, as well as by fair fighting in the open field; and, of the two, the first are most to be admired, because they are gained without bloodshed, and are triumphs of mental rather than bodily force. But, retorts poor Basil, I was not an enemy, and ought not to have been dealt with as such. “True, my excellent friend”, replies Chrysostom, “but this kind of fraud may sometimes be exercised towards our dearest acquaintance”. “Physicians were often obliged to employ some artifice to make refractory patients submit to their remedies. Once a man in a raging fever resisted all the febrifugal draughts administered to him, and loudly called for wine. The physician darkened the room, steeped a warm oyster shell in wine, then filled it with water, and put it to the patient’s lips, who eagerly swallowed the draught, believing it, from the smell, to be wine”. In the same category of justifiable stratagem he places, not very discriminatingly, the circumcision of Timothy by St. Paul, in order to conciliate the Jews, and St. Paul’s observance of the ceremonial law at Jerusalem (Acts XXI. 26), for the same purpose. Such contrivances he calls instances, not of treachery, but of “good management”. There is something highly Oriental, and alien to our Western moral sense, in the sophistical tone of this whole discussion. If Basil really submitted to such arguments, he was easily vanquished. He says, however, no more about the injustice of his treatment, but, apparently accepting Chrysostom’s position that for a useful purpose deceit is justifiable, he begs to be informed “what advantage Chrysostom thought he had procured for himself or his friend by this piece of management, or good policy, or whatever he pleased to call it”.

The remaining books on the Priesthood are occupied with the answer to this inquiry. The line which Chrysostom takes is to point out the pre-eminent dignity, difficulty, and danger of the priestly office, and then to enlarge upon the peculiar fitness of his friend to discharge its duties. “What advantage could be greater than to be engaged in that work which Christ had declared with his own lips to be the special sign of love to Himself? For when He put the question three times to the leader of the apostles, ‘Lovest thou me?’ and had been answered by a fervent asseveration of attachment, he added each time. ‘Feed my sheep’ or ‘Feed my lambs’. ‘Lovest thou me more than these?’ had been the question, and the charge which followed it had been always, ‘Feed my sheep’; not, If thou lovest Me, practise fasting, or incessant vigils, and sleep on the bare ground, or protect the injured and be to the orphans as a father, and to their mother as a husband; no, he passes by all these things, and says, ‘Feed my sheep’. Could his friend, therefore, complain that he had done ill in compassing, even by fraud, his dedication to so glorious an office? As for himself, it was obvious that he could not have refused so great an honour out of haughty contempt or disrespect to the electors. On the contrary, it was when he considered the exceeding sanctity and magnitude of the position, and its awful responsibilities the heavenly purity, the burning love towards God and man, the sound wisdom and judgment, and moderation of temper required in those who were dedicated to it that his heart failed him. He felt himself utterly incompetent and unworthy for so arduous a task. If some unskilled person were suddenly to be called upon to take charge of a ship laden with a costly freight, he would immediately refuse; and in like manner he himself dared not risk by his present inexperience the safety of that vessel which was laden with the precious merchandise of souls. Vainglory, indeed, and pride would have induced him not to reject, but to covet, so transcendent a dignity. The office of priest was discharged indeed on earth, yet it held a place among heavenly ranks. And rightly; for neither man, nor angel, nor archangel, nor created power of any kind, but the Paraclete Himself, ordained this ministry. Therefore, it became one who entered the priesthood to be as pure as if he had already taken his stand in heaven itself among the powers above. ‘When thou seest the Lord lying slain, and the priest standing and praying over the sacrifice, when thou seest all sprinkled with that precious blood, dost thou deem thyself still among men, still standing upon this earth? art thou not rather transported immediately to heaven, and, every carnal imagination being cast out, dost thou not, with soul unveiled and pure mind, behold the things which are in heaven ? miracle ! the goodness of God! He who is sitting with the Father is yet at that hour held in the hands of all, and gives Himself to be embraced and grasped by those who desire it. And this all do through the eye of faith. Do these things seem to you to merit contempt? does it seem possible to you that any one should be so elated as to slight them?’

“Human nature possessed in the priesthood a power which had not been committed by God to angels or archangels; for to none of them had it been said, ‘Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth or loose on earth shall be bound or loosed in heaven’. Was it possible to conceive that any one should think lightly of such a gift? Away with such madness! for stark madness it would be to despise so great an authority, without which it was not possible for man to obtain salvation, or the good things promised to him. For if it were impossible for anyone to enter into the kingdom of heaven, except he were born again of water and the Spirit; and if he who did not eat the flesh of the Lord and drink his blood was ejected from life eternal, and if these things were administered by none but the consecrated hands of the priest, how would any one, apart from them, be able to escape the fire of hell, or obtain the crown laid up for him?”

There are, perhaps, no passages elsewhere in Chrysostom expressed in such a lofty sacerdotal tone; but it must be remembered that on any supposition as to the date of this treatise, he was young when it was composed, holding therefore, as on the subject of monasticism, more enthusiastic, highly-wrought opinions than he afterwards entertained; and moreover, that the whole treatise is written in a somewhat vehement and excited style, as by one who was maintaining a position against an antagonist.

Having proved that his evasion of the episcopal office could have arisen from no spirit of pride, but from a consciousness of his infirmity and incapacity, he proceeds to point out the manifold and peculiar dangers which encompassed it. “Vainglory was a rock more fatal than the Sirens. Many a priest was shipwrecked there, and torn to pieces by the fierce monsters which dwelt upon it wrath, despondency, envy, strife, slander, falsehood, hypocrisy, love of praise, and a multitude more. Often he became the slave and flatterer of great people, even of women who had most improperly mixed themselves up with ecclesiastical affairs, and especially exercised great influence in the elections”.

The scenes, indeed, which often took place about this period at the elections to bishoprics occasioned much scandal to the Church. In earlier times, when the Christians were less numerous, more simple in their habits, more unanimous, when liability to persecution deterred the indifferent, or pretenders, from their ranks, the episcopal office could be no object of worldly ambition. The clergy and the people elected their bishop; and the fairness and simplicity with which the election was usually conducted won the admiration of the Emperor Alexander Severus. But when Christianity was recognised by the State, a bishopric in towns of importance became a position of high dignity; and warm debates, often fierce tumults, attended the election of candidates. Up to the time of Justinian at least, the whole Christian population of the city or region over which the bishop was to preside possessed a right to elect. Their choice was subject to the approval of the bishops, and the confirmation of the metropolitan of the province; but, on the other hand, neither the bishops nor the metropolitan could legally obtrude a candidate of their own upon the people. A charge brought against Hilary of Aries was, that he ordained several bishops against the will and consent of the people. A just and legitimate ordination, according to Cyprian, was one which had been examined by the suffrage and judgment of all, both clergy and people. Such, he observes, was the election of Cornelius to the see of Rome in A.D. 251. If the people were unanimous, there were loud cries of ‘dignus’, ‘indignus’, as the case might be; but if they were divided, it was usual for the metropolitan to give the preference to the choice of the majority; or, if they appeared equally divided, the metropolitan and his synod selected a man indifferent, if possible, to both parties. Occasionally also, as in the case of Nectarius, the predecessor of Chrysostom in the see of Constantinople, the Emperor interposed, and appointed one chosen by himself. Sanguinary often were the tumults which attended contested elections. The greater the city, the greater the strife. In the celebrated contest for the see of Rome in A.D. 366, between Damasus and Ursicinus, there was much hard fighting and copious bloodshed. Damasus, with a furious and motley mob, broke into the Julian Basilica, where Ursicinus was being consecrated by Paul, Bishop of Tibur, and violently stopped the proceedings. Frays of this kind lasted for some time. On one occasion, one hundred and thirty dead bodies strewed the pavement of the Basilica of Licinius till Damasus at last won the day. It is especially mentioned that the ladies of Rome favoured his side. It seems scarcely possible to doubt that as these events must have been fresh in Chrysostom’s recollection, he must be specially referring to them when, insisting on freedom from ambition as one grand qualification for the priesthood, he says “that he will pass by, lest they should seem incredible, the tales of murders perpetrated in churches, and havoc wrought in cities by contentions for bishoprics”; and when also he alludes indignantly to the interference of women in the elections. “The elections”, he says, “were generally made on public festivals, and were disgraceful scenes of party feeling and intrigue. The clergy and the people were never unanimous. The really important qualifications for the office were seldom considered. Ambitious men spared no arts of bribery or flattery by which to obtain places for themselves in the Church, and to keep them when obtained. One candidate for a bishopric was recommended to the electors because he belonged to a distinguished family; another because he was wealthy, and would not burden the funds of the Church”.

The provocations to ambition and worldly glory were so great, both in the acquisition and in the exercise of the episcopal office, that Chrysostom says he had “determined partly for these reasons to avoid the snare”. He shrank also from many other trials incident to the office. There were always persons ready to detect and magnify the slightest mistake or transgression in a priest. One little error could not be retrieved by a multitude of successes, but darkened the man’s whole life; for a kind of immaculate purity was exacted by popular opinion of a priest, as if he were not a being of flesh and blood, or subject to human passions. Often his brethren, the clergy, were the most active in spreading mischievous reports about him, hoping to rise themselves upon his ruin; like avaricious sons waiting for their father's death. Too often St. Paul’s description of the sympathy between the several parts of the Christian body was inverted. ‘If one member suffered, all the others rejoiced ; if one member rejoiced, the others suffered pain’.

A bishop had need be as impervious to slander and envy as the three children in the burning fiery furnace. What a rare and difficult combination of qualities was required for the efficient discharge of his duties in the face of such difficulties! “He must be dignified, yet not haughty; formidable, yet affable; commanding, yet sociable; strictly impartial, yet courteous; lowly, but not subservient; strong, yet gentle promoting the worthy in spite of all opposition, and with equal authority rejecting the unworthy, though pushed forward by the favour of all; looking always to one thing only the welfare of the Church; doing nothing out of animosity or partiality”. The behaviour also of a priest in ordinary society was jealously criticised. The flock were not satisfied unless he was constantly paying calls. Not the sick only, but the sound desired to be “looked after”, not so much from any religious feeling, as because the reception of such visits gratified their sense of their own importance. Yet if a bishop often visited the house of a wealthy or distinguished man to interest him in some design for the advantage of the Church, he would soon be stigmatised as a parasitical flatterer. Even the manner of his greetings to acquaintance in the streets was criticised : “He smiled cordially on Mr. Such-an-one, and talked much with him; but to me he only threw a commonplace remark”.

It is amusing and instructive to read these observations. They prove what important personages bishops had become. The interests of the people were violently excited over their elections. They were subjected to the mingled reverence, deference, and court, criticism, scandal, and gossip, which are the inevitable lot of all persons who occupy an exalted position in the world.

In the fourth book Chrysostom speaks of some of the more mental qualifications indispensable for a priest. Foremost among these was a power of speaking : “That was the one grand instrument which enabled him to heal the diseases of the body intrusted to his care. And, in addition to this, he must be armed with a prompt and versatile wit, to encounter the various assaults of heretics. Jews, Greeks, Manicheans, Sabellians, Arians, all were narrowly watching for the smallest loophole by which to force a breach in the walls of the Church. And, unless the defender was very vigilant and skilful, while he was keeping out the one he would let in the other. While he opposed the blind deference of the Jews to their Mosaic Law, he must take care not to encourage the Manicheans, who would eliminate the Law from the Scriptures. While he asserted the Unity of the Godhead against the Arians, there was danger of slipping into the Sabellian error of confounding the Persons; and, while he divided the Persons against the Sabellians, he must be careful to avoid the Arian error of dividing the substance also. The line of orthodoxy was a narrow path hemmed in by steep rocks on either side. Therefore it was of the deepest importance that the priest should be a learned and effective speaker, that he might not fall into error himself or lead others astray. For, if he was seen to be worsted in a controversy with heretics, many became alienated from the truth, mistaking the weakness of the defender for a weakness in the cause itself”.

“But there was yet another task fraught with peril the delivery of sermons. The performances of a preacher were discussed by a curious and critical public like those of actors. Congregations attached themselves to their favourite preachers. Woe to the man who was detected in plagiarisms! He was instantly reprobated like a common thief.

“To become an effective preacher two things were necessary : first, indifference to praise; secondly, power of speech; two qualities, the one moral, the other intellectual, which were rarely found coexisting. If a man possessed the first only, he became distasteful and despicable to his congregation; for if he stood up and at first boldly uttered powerful words which stung the consciences of his hearers, but, as he proceeded, began to blush and hesitate and stumble, all the advantage of his previous remarks would be wasted. The persons, who had secretly felt annoyed by his telling reproofs would revenge themselves by laughing at his embarrassment in speaking. If, on the other hand, he was a weighty speaker, but not indifferent to applause, he would probably trim his sails to catch the popular breeze, and study to be pleasant rather than profitable, to the great detriment of himself and of his flock”.

He makes some remarks eminently wise and true on the necessity of study for the preparation of sermons. “It might seem strange, but in truth study was even more indispensable for an eloquent than for an ordinary preacher. Speaking was an acquired art, and when a man had attained a high standard of excellence he was sure to decline unless he kept himself up by constant study. The man of reputation was always expected to say something new, and even in excess of the fame which he had already acquired. Men sat in judgment on him without mercy, as if he were not a human being subject to occasional despondency, or anxiety, or irritation of temper; but as if he were an angel or some infallible being, who ought always to remain at the same high level of excellence. The mediocre man, on the other hand, from whom much was not expected, would obtain a disproportionate amount of praise if he said a good thing now and then. The number of persons, however, in any congregation, who were capable of appreciating a really learned and powerful preacher, was very small; therefore a man ought not to be much disheartened or annoyed by unfavourable criticisms. He should be his own critic, aiming in all his work to win the favour of God. Then, if the admiration of men followed, he would quietly accept it; or, if withheld, he would not be distressed, but seek his consolation in honest work and in a conscience void of offence. But if a priest was not superior to the love of admiration, all his labour and eloquence would be wasted; either he would sacrifice truth to popularity, or, failing to obtain so much applause as he desired, he would relax his efforts. This last was a common defect in men whose powers of preaching were only second-rate. Perceiving that even the highly gifted could not sustain their reputation without incessant study and practice, while they themselves, by the most strenuous efforts, could gain but a very slender meed of praise, if any, they abandoned themselves to indolence. The trial was especially great when a man was surpassed in preaching by one who occupied an inferior rank in the hierarchy, and who perhaps took every opportunity of parading his superior powers. A kind of passion for listening to preaching possessed, he says, both Pagans and Christians at this time; hence it was very mortifying for a man to see a congregation looking forward to the termination of his discourse, while to his rival they listened with the utmost patience and attention, and were vexed only when his sermon had come to an end”.

In the sixth book, Chrysostom enlarges on the dangers and trials which beset the priest as compared with the tranquillity and security of the monk that life to which he still felt himself powerfully attracted. “Who watch for your souls as they that must give an account. The dread of the responsibility implied in that saying constantly agitated his mind. For if it were better to be drowned in the sea than to offend one of the little ones of Christ's flock, what punishment must they undergo who destroyed not one or two but a whole multitude?” “Much worldly wisdom was required in the priest; he must be conversant with secular affairs, and adapt himself with versatility to all kinds of circumstances and men; and yet he ought to keep his spirit as free, as unfettered by worldly interests and ambitions as the hermit dwelling on the mountains”.

The trials, indeed, which beset the priest so far exceeded those of the monk, that Chrysostom considered the monastery, on the whole, a bad school for active clerical life. “The monk lived in a calm; there was little to oppose or thwart him. The skill of the pilot could not be known till he had taken the helm in the open sea amidst rough weather. Too many of those who had passed from the seclusion of the cloister to the active sphere of the priest or bishop proved utterly incapable of coping with the difficulties of their new situation. They lost their head, and, often, instead of adding to their virtue, were deprived of the good qualities which they already possessed. Monasticism often served as a screen to failings which the circumstances of active life drew out, just as the qualities of metal were tested by the action of fire”.

Chrysostom concludes by saying that he was conscious of his own infirmities; the irritability of his temper, his liability to violent emotions, his susceptibility to praise and blame. All such evil passions could, with the help of God’s grace, be tamed by the severe treatment of the monastic life; like savage beasts who must be kept on low fare. But in the public life of a priest they would rage with incontrollable fury, because all would be pampered to the full vainglory by honour and praise, pride by authority, envy by the reputation of other men, bad temper by perpetual provocations, covetousness by the liberality of donors to the Church, intemperance by luxurious living. He bids Basil picture the most implacable and deadly contest between earthly forces which his imagination could draw, and declares that this would but faintly express the conflict between the soul and evil in the spiritual warfare of the world. “Many accidents might put an end to earthly combat, at least for a time the approach of night, the fatigue of the combatants, the necessity of taking food and sleep. But in the spiritual conflict there were no breathing spaces. A man must always have his harness on his back, or he would be surprised by the Enemy”

It is not surprising that Basil, after the fearful responsibilities and perils of his new dignity had been thus powerfully set before him, should declare that his trouble now was not so much how to answer the accusers of Chrysostom as to defend himself before God. He besought his friend to promise that he would continue to support and advise him in all emergencies. Chrysostom replied that as far as it was possible he would do so; but that he doubted not Christ, who had called Basil to this good work, would enable him to discharge it with boldness. They wept, embraced, and parted. And so Basil went forth to the unwelcome honours and trials of his bishopric, while Chrysostom continued to lead that monastic kind of life which was only a preparatory step to the monastery itself. His friendship with Basil is curious and romantic. Their intercourse was brought to a singular conclusion by the stratagem of Chrysostom. Basil may have, according to his own earnest request, continued to consult his friend in any difficulty or distress; but he is never mentioned again. Although so intimately bound up with this passage in Chrysostom’s life, there is something indistinct and shadowy about his whole existence. He flits across the scene for a few moments, and then disappears totally and for ever.

The books on the Priesthood may be regarded as containing partly a real account of an actual conversation between the two friends. But, as in the dialogues of Plato, far more was probably added by the writer, so that in parts the dialogue is only a form into which the opinions of the author at the time of composition were cast. It is impossible to decide with certainty the exact time at which the treatise may have been written. It is not likely to have been later than his diaconate in 381, but more probably the work may be assigned to the six years of leisure spent in the seclusion of the monastery and mountains that is, to the period between Basil's election to the bishopric, and his own ordination as deacon. The treatise reads like the production of one who had acquired considerable experience of monastic life; who had deliberately calculated its advantages on the one hand, and, on the other, had keenly observed and seriously weighed the temptations and difficulties which attended the more secular career of priest or bishop. It is a more mature work than the Epistles to Theodore, and is free from such rapturous and excessive praise of the ascetic life as they contain.

 

NOTE TO FOREGOING CHAPTER.

 

It may excite surprise that men so young as Chrysostom and Basil, the former at least being not more than twenty-five or twenty-six, and not as yet ordained deacon, should have been designated to the highest office in the Church. The Council of Neocaesarea (about A.D. 320)fixed thirty as the age at which men became eligible for the priesthood. The same age, then, at least, must have been required for a bishop.

The Constitutions called Apostolical fix the age at fifty, but add a clause which really lets in all the exceptions, “unless he be a man of singular merit and worth, which may compensate for the want of years”. And, in fact, there are numerous instances of men, both before and after the time of Chrysostom, who were consecrated as bishops under the age of thirty. The Council of Nice was held not more than twenty years after the persecution of Maximian, which Athanasius says he had only heard of from his father, yet in five months after that Council he was ordained Archbishop of Alexandria. Remigius of Rheims was only twenty-two when he was made bishop, in A.D. 471. In like manner, though it was enacted by the Council of Sardica, A.D. 343-344, that none should rise to the Episcopal throne per saltum, yet there are not a few examples of this rule being transgressed.

Augustine, when he created a See at Fassula, presented Antonius, a reader (the very position Chrysostom now filled) to the Primate, who ordained him without scruple on Augustine’s recommendation. Cyprian, Ambrose, and Nestorius are celebrated instances of the consecration of laymen to bishoprics.

 

 

CHAPTER V.

NARROW ESCAPE FROM PERSECUTION, HIS ENTRANCE INTO A MONASTERY, THE MONASTICISM OF THE EAST. A.D. 372.

 

ABOUT this time, 372-373, while Chrysostom was still residing in Antioch, he narrowly escaped suffering the penalties of an imperial decree issued by Valentinian and Valens against the practisers of magical arts, or possessors even of magical books. A severe search was instituted after suspected persons; soldiers were everywhere on the watch to detect offenders. The persecution was carried on with peculiar cruelty at Antioch, where it had been provoked by the detection of a treasonable act of divination. The twenty-four letters of the alphabet were arranged at intervals round the rim of a kind of charger, which was placed on a tripod, consecrated with incantations and elaborate ceremonies. The diviner, habited as a heathen priest, in linen robes, sandals, and with a fillet wreathed about his head, chanted a hymn to Apollo, the god of prophecy, while a ring in the centre of the charger was slipped rapidly round a slender thread. The letters in front of which the ring successively stopped indicated the character of the oracle. The ring on this occasion was supposed to have pointed to the first four letters in the name of the future Emperor, E O A. Theodorus, and probably many others who had the misfortune to own the fatal syllables, were executed. There were, of course, multitudes of eager informers, and zealous judges, who strove to allay the suspicious fears of the Emperors, and to procure favour for themselves by vigorous and wholesale prosecutions. Neither age, nor sex, nor rank was spared; women and children, senators and philosophers, were dragged to the tribunals, and committed to the prisons of Rome and Antioch from the most distant parts of Italy and Asia.

Many destroyed their libraries in alarm so many innocent books were liable to be represented as mischievous or criminal; and thus much valuable literature perished. It was during this dreadful time, when suspicion was instantly followed by arrest, and arrest by imprisonment, torture, and probably death, that Chrysostom chanced to be walking with a friend to the Church of the Martyr Babylas, outside the city. As they passed through the gardens by the banks of the Orontes, they observed fragments of a book floating down the stream. Curiosity led them to fish it out; but, to their dismay, on examining it, they found that it was inscribed with magical formulae, and, to increase their alarm, a soldier was approaching at no great distance. At first they knew not how to act; they feared the book had been cast into the river by the artifice of an informer to entrap some unwary victim. They determined, however, to throw their dangerous discovery back into the river, and happily the attention or suspicions of the soldier were not roused. Chrysostom always gratefully looked back to this escape as a signal instance of God’s mercy and protection.

It must have been soon after this incident and previous to the edict of persecution against the monks issued by Valens in 373, that Chrysostom exchanged what might be called the amateur kind of monastic life passed in his own home for the monastery itself. Whether his mother was now dead or had become reconciled to the separation, or whether her son’s passionate enthusiasm for monastic retirement became irresistible, it is impossible to determine. His mother is not mentioned by him in his writings after this point, except in allusion to the past, which is a strong presumption that she was no longer living. Bishop Meletius would probably have endeavoured to detain him for some active work in the Church, but he was now in exile; and to Flavian, the successor of Meletius, Chrysostom was possibly not so intimately known.

During the first four centuries of the Christian era, the enthusiasm for monastic life prevailed with ever increasing force. We are, perhaps, naturally inclined to associate monasticism chiefly with the Western Christianity of the Middle Ages. But the original and by far the most prolific parent of monasticism was the East. There were always ascetics in the Christian Church; yet asceticism is the product not so much of Christianity as of the East; of the oriental temperament, which admires and cultivates it; of the oriental climate, which makes it tolerable even when pushed to the most rigorous extremes. Asceticism is the natural practical expression of that deeply-grounded conviction of an essential antagonism between the flesh and spirit which pervades all oriental creeds. Even the monastic form of it was known in the East before Christianity. The Essenes in Judaea, the Therapeutae in Egypt, were prototypes of the active and contemplative communities of monks.

The primitive ascetics of the Christian Church were not monks. They were persons who raised themselves above the common level of religious life by exercises in fasting, prayer, study, alms-giving, celibacy, bodily privations of all kinds. These habits obtained for them great admiration and reverence. Such persons are frequently designated by writers of the first three centuries as “an ascetic”, “a follower of the religious ascetics”. But they did not form a class distinctly marked off by dress and habitation from the rest of the world, like the monks or even the anchorites of later time. They lived in the cities or wherever their home might be, and were not subject to any rules beyond those of their own private making. Eusebius calls them “earnest persons”; and Clemens Alexandrinus “more elect than the elect”. Midway between the primitive ascetic and the fully-developed monk must be placed the anchorite or hermit, who made a step in the direction of monasticism by withdrawing altogether from the city or populous places into the solitudes of mountain or desert.

Persecution assisted the impulse of religious fervour. Paul retired to the Egyptian Thebaid during the persecution of Decius in A.D. 251, and Antony during that of Maximin in A.D. 312. They are justly named the fathers or founders of the anchorites, because, though not actually the first, they were the most distinguished; and the fame of their sanctity, their austerities, their miracles, produced a tribe of followers. The further Antony retired into the depths of the wilderness the more numerous became his disciples. They grouped their cells around the habitation of the saintly father, and out of the clusters grew in process of time the monastery. A number of cells ranged in lines like an encampment, not incorporated in one building, was called a “Laura” or street. This was the earliest and simplest kind of monastic establishment. It was a community, though without much system or cohesion.

The real founder of the Caenobia or monasteries in the East was the Egyptian Pachomius; he was the Benedict of the East. His rule was that most generally adopted, not only in Egypt but throughout the oriental portions of the Empire. He and Antony had now been dead about twenty years, and Hilarius, the pupil and imitator of Antony, had lately introduced monasticism on the Pachomian model into Syria. In about fifty years more, the nomadic Saracens will gaze with veneration and awe at the spectacle of Simeon on his pillar, forty miles from Antioch. Thousands will come to receive baptism at his hands; his image will have been placed over the entrance of the shops in Home. The spirit had been already caught in the West. The feelings of abhorrence with which the Italians first beheld the wild-looking Egyptian monks who accompanied Athanasius to Rome had soon been exchanged for veneration. The example of Marcellina, and the exhortations of her brother Ambrose of Milan, had induced multitudes of women to take vows of celibacy. Most of the little islands on the coasts of the Adriatic could boast of their monasteries or cells. St. Martin built his religious houses near Poitiers and Tours, and was followed to his grave by two thousand brethren. But St. Jerome, perhaps, more than any one else, promoted the advance of monasticism in the West. Born on the borders of East and West, he mingled with the Eastern Church at Antioch and Constantinople, and in the desert of Chalcis had inured himself to the most severe forms of oriental asceticism, and returned to Rome eager to impart to others a kindred spirit of enthusiasm for the ascetic life. A little later, early in the fifth century, John Cassianus, president of a religious establishment in Marseilles, propagated monastic institutions of an oriental type in the south of France, and made men conversant with the system by his work on the rules of the cloister. These were the scattered forces which in the West awaited the master mind and strong hand of Benedict to mould and discipline them into a mighty system. The nearest approach in the West to the Egyptian system of Pachomius was among the Benedictines of Camaldoli.

There is every reason to suppose on general grounds, and the supposition is corroborated by notices in the writings of Chrysostom, that the monasteries near Antioch, like the rest of the Syrian monasteries, were based on the Pachomian model. Pachomius was a native of the Thebaid, born in A.D. 292. He began to practise asceticism as a hermit, but, according to the legend, was visited by an angel who commanded him to promote the salvation of other men’s souls besides his own, and presented him with a brazen tablet, on which were inscribed the rules of the Order which he was to found. He established his first community on Tabernae, an island in the Nile, which became the parent of a numerous offspring. Pachomius had the satisfaction in his lifetime of seeing eight monasteries, containing in all 3000 monks, acknowledging his rule; and after his death, in the first half of the fifth century, their numbers had swelled to 50,000. Chrysostom exulted with Christian joy and pride over the spectacle of “Egypt, that land which had been the mother of pagan literature and art, which had invented and propagated every species of witchcraft, now despising all her ancient customs, and holding up the Cross, in the desert no less if not more than in the cities : ... for the sky was not more beautiful, spangled with its hosts of stars, than the desert of Egypt studded in all directions with the habitations of monks”.

By the Pachomian rule no one was admitted as a full monk till after three years of probation, during which period he was tested by the most severe exercises. If willing, after that period, to continue the same exercises, he was admitted without further ceremony beyond making a solemn declaration that he would adhere to the rules of the monastery. That no irrevocable vow was taken by the members of the monastery near Antioch which Chrysostom joined seems proved by his return to the city after a residence in the monastery of several years' duration. According to Sozomen, the several parts of the dress worn by Pachomian monks had a symbolical meaning. The tunic (a linen garment reaching as far as the knees) had short sleeves, to remind the wearers that they should be prompt to do such honest work only as needed no concealment. The hood was typical of the innocence and purity of infants, who wore the same kind of covering; the girdle and scarf, folded about the back, shoulders, and arms, were to admonish them that they should be perpetually ready to do active service for God. Each cell was inhabited by three monks. They took their chief meal in a refectory, and ate in silence, with a veil so arranged over the face that they could see only what was on the table. No strangers were admitted, except travellers, to whom they were bound, by the rule of their Order, to show hospitality. The common meal or supper took place at three o'clock, up to which time they usually fasted. When it was concluded, a hymn was sung, of which Chrysostom gives us a specimen, though not in metrical form : “Blessed be God, who nourisheth me from my youth up, who giveth food to all flesh : fill our hearts with joy and gladness, that we, having all sufficiency at all times, may abound unto every good work, through Jesus Christ our Lord, with Whom be glory, and honour, and power to Thee, together with the Holy Ghost, for ever and ever, Amen. Glory to Thee, Lord! Glory to Thee, Holy One! Glory to Thee, King, who hast given us food to make us glad! Fill us with the Holy Spirit, that we may be found well pleasing in thy sight, and not ashamed when Thou rewardest every man according to his works”.

The whole community in a Pachomian monastery was divided into twenty-four classes, distinguished by the letters of the Greek alphabet; the most ignorant, for instance, under class Iota, the more learned under Xi or Zeta, such letters being in shape respectively the simplest and the most complicated in the alphabet. Those hours which were not devoted to services or study were occupied by manual labour, partly to supply themselves with the necessaries of life, partly to guard against the incursion of evil thoughts. There was a proverbial saying attributed to some of the old Egyptian fathers, that “a labouring monk was assaulted by one devil only, but an idle one by an innumerable legion”. They wove baskets and mats, agriculture was not neglected, nor even, among the Egyptian monks, ship-building. Palladius, who visited the Egyptian monasteries about the close of the fourth century, found, in the monastery of Panopolis, which contained 300 members, 15 tailors, 7 smiths, 4 carpenters, 12 camel-drivers, 15 tanners. Each monastery in Egypt had its steward, and a chief steward stationed at the principal settlement had the supervision of all the rest. All the products of monkish labour were shipped under his inspection on the Nile for Alexandria. With the proceeds of their sale, stores were purchased for the monasteries, and the surplus was distributed amongst the sick and poor.

A monastery founded on this model might be fairly described as a kind of village containing an industrial and religious population; and had the Eastern monks adhered to this simple and innocent way of life, such communities might have become more and more schools of learning, centres of civilisation, and homes of piety. But they were increasingly forgetful of the wholesome saying of Antony, that a monk in the city was like “a fish out of water”.

Instead of attending exclusively to their pious and industrial exercises, they mixed themselves up with the theological and political contests which too often convulsed the cities of the Eastern Empire. Their influence or interference was frequently the reverse of peace-making, judicious, or Christian. They would rush with fanatical fury into the city, to rescue the orthodox, or to attack those whom they considered heretical. The evil had grown to such a height by the reign of Arcadius, that a law was passed by which monks were strictly forbidden to commit such outrages on civil order, and bishops were commanded to prosecute the authors of such attempts. Eastern monasticism, in fact, partook of the character which distinguished the Eastern Church as a whole, and which we may regard as one principal cause of its corruption and decay. A certain stability, sobriety, self-control, a law-making and law-respecting spirit, as it is the peculiar merit of the Western, so the want of it is the peculiar defect of the Oriental temperament. Hence a curious co-existence of extremes; the passions, unnaturally repressed at one outlet by intense asceticism, burst forth with increased fury at another. He who had subdued his body in the wilderness or on the mountains by fastings and macerations entertained the most implacable animosity towards pagans and heretics, and fought them like a ruffian (the word is not too strong for truth), when some tumult in an adjacent city afforded him an opportunity for this robust mode of displaying and defending his orthodoxy. Western monasticism, on the other hand, is distinguished by more gravity, more of the old Roman quality, a love of stern discipline. It did not run to such lengths of fanatical asceticism, and consequently was exempt from such disastrous reactions. It never produced such a caricature of the anchorite as Simeon Stylites, or such savage zealots as the monkish bands who dealt their sturdy blows in the religious riots of Constantinople and Alexandria. From the notices scattered up and down Chrysostom's writings of the monasteries in the neighbourhood of Antioch, it appears that they conformed in all essential respects to the Pachomian model. We might anticipate, indeed, that, where such a man as Diodorus was president or visitor, they would be conducted on a simple and rational system.

South of Antioch were the mountainous heights of Silpius and Casius, whence rose the springs which in a variety of channels found their way into the city, provided it with a constant and abundant supply of the purest water, and irrigated the gardens for which it was celebrated. In this mountain region dwelt the communities of monks, in separate huts or cells, but subject to an abbot, and a common rule. Chrysostom has in more passages than one furnished us with a description of their ordinary costume, fare, and way of life. He is fond of depicting their simple, frugal, and pious habits, in contrast to the artificial and luxurious manners of the gay and worldly people of the city. They were clad in coarse garments of goat’s hair or camel’s hair, sometimes of skins, over their linen tunics, which were worn both by night and day. Before the first rays of sunlight, the abbot went round, and struck those monks who were still sleeping with his foot, to wake them. When all had risen, fresh, healthy, fasting, they sang together, under the precentorship of their abbot, a hymn of praise to God. The hymn being ended, a common prayer was offered up (again under the leadership of their abbot), and then each at sunrise went to his allotted task, some to read, others to write, others to manual labour, by which they made a good deal to supply the necessities of the poor. Four hours in the day, the third, the sixth, the ninth, and some time in the evening, were appointed for prayers and psalms. When the daily work was concluded, they sat down, or rather reclined, on strewn grass, to their common meal, which was sometimes eaten out of doors by moonlight, and consisted of bread and water only, with occasionally, for invalids, a little vegetable food and oil. This frugal repast was followed by hymns, after which they betook themselves to their straw couches, and slept, as Chrysostom observes, free from those anxieties and apprehensions winch beset the worldly man. There was no need of bolts and bars, for there was no fear of robbers. The monk had no possession but his body and soul, and if his life was taken he would regard it as an advantage, for he could say that to live was Christ, and to die was gain. Those words “mine and thine”, those fertile causes of innumerable strifes, were unknown. No lamentations were to be heard when any of the brethren died. They did not say, “such a one is dead”, but, “he has been perfected”, and he was carried forth to burial amidst hymns of praise, thanksgiving for his release, and the prayers of his companions that they too might soon see the end of their labours and struggles, and be permitted to behold Jesus Christ. Such was the simple and industrial kind of monastic body to which Chrysostom for a time attached himself; and to the end of his life he regarded such communities with the greatest admiration and sympathy. But he never failed to maintain also the duty of work against those who represented the perfection of the Christian life as consisting in mere contemplation and prayer. Such a doctrine of otiose Christianity he proved to be based on a too exclusive attention to certain passages in the New Testament. If, for instance, our blessed Lord said to Martha, “Thou art careful and troubled about many things, but one thing is needful”; or again, “Take no thought for the morrow”; or, “Labour not for the meat that perisheth” all such passages were to be balanced and harmonised by others, as, for example, St. Paul’s exhortation to the Thessalonians to be “quiet and to do their own business”, and “let him that stole steal no more, but rather let him labour, working with his hands that which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth”. He points out that the words of our Lord do not inculcate total abstinence from work, but only censure an undue anxiety about earthly things, to the exclusion or neglect of spiritual concerns. The contemplative form of monasticism, based on misconception of Holy Scripture, had, he observes, seriously injured the cause of Christianity, for it occasioned practical men of the world to deride it as a source of indolence.

 

 

CHAPTER VI.

 

WORKS PRODUCED DURING HIS MONASTIC LIFE; THE LETTERS TO

DEMETRIUS AND STELECHIUS; TREATISES ADDRESSED TO THE

OPPONENTS OF MONASTICISM; LETTER TO STAGIRIUS.

 

SEVERAL treatises were composed by Chrysostom during his monastic life. Among the first must be placed two books addressed to Demetrius and Stelechius. Of these the former was evidently written soon after the commencement of his retreat, for he speaks of having recently determined to take the step, and of the petty anxieties about food and other personal comforts which had at first unsettled his purpose a little. But he had soon conquered these hankerings after the more luxurious life which he had abandoned. It seemed to him a disgrace that one to whom heaven and celestial joys were offered, such as eye had not seen nor ear heard, should be so hesitating and timorous, when those who undertook the management of public affairs did not shrink from dangers and toil, and long journeys, and separation from wife and children, and perhaps unfavourable criticism, but only inquired whether the office were honourable and lucrative.

The aim of the books is to animate torpid characters to a warmer piety, first by drawing a lively picture of the depravity of the times, secondly by a glowing description of the fervent energy of apostles and apostolic saints, and insisting that those lofty heights of Christian holiness were not unattainable by the Christian of his own day, if he bent the whole energy of his will, aided by Divine grace, to the attempt.

“So great”, he observes, “was the depravity of the times that if a stranger were to compare the precepts of the Gospel with the actual practice of society, he would infer that men were not the disciples, but the enemies of Christ. And the most fatal symptom was their total unconsciousness of this deep corruption. Society was like a body which was outwardly vigorous, but concealed a wasting fever within; or like an insane person who says and does all manner of shocking things, but, instead of being ashamed, glories in the fancied possession of superior wisdom”. Chrysostom applies the test of the principal precepts of morality in the Sermon on the Mount to the existing state of Christian morals. Every one of them was shamelessly violated. A kind of regard, superstitious or hypocritical, was paid to the command in the letter, which was broken in the spirit. Persons, for instance, who scrupled to use the actual expressions “fool” or “raca”, heaped all lands of opprobrious epithets on their neighbours. So the command to be reconciled with a brother before approaching the altar was really broken though formally kept. Men gave the kiss of peace at the celebration of Holy Communion when admonished by the deacon so to do, but continued to nourish resentful feelings in the heart all the same. Vainglory and ostentation robbed prayer, fasting and almsgiving of their merit; and as for the precept “Judge not”, a most uncharitable spirit of censoriousness pervaded every class of society, including monks and ecclesiastics. Contrast with this false and hollow religion of the world the condition of one in whom a deep compunction for sin, and a genuine love of Jesus Christ, was awakened. The whole multitude of vain frivolous passions was dispersed like dust before the wind. So it was with St. Paul. Having once turned the eye of his soul towards heaven, and being entranced by the beauty of that other world, he could not stoop to earth again. As a beggar, in some gloomy hovel, if he saw a monarch glittering with gold and radiant with jewels, might altogether for a time forget the squalor of his dwelling-place in his eagerness to get inside the palace of the king, so St. Paul forgot and despised the poverty and hardship of this present world because the whole energy of his being was directed to the attainment of that heavenly city. But men objected to the citation of apostolic examples. Paul and Peter, they said, were superhuman characters; models beyond our limited powers. “Nay”, Chrysostom replies, “these are feeble excuses. The Apostles were in all essential points like ourselves. Did they not breathe the same kind of air? eat the same kind of food? were not some of them married men? did they not follow mechanical trades? nay more, had not some of them deeply sinned? Men at the present day did not indeed receive grace at baptism to work miracles, but they received enough to enable them to lead a good and holy Christian life. And the highest blessing of Christ his invitation to those who were called ‘blessed children’ to inherit the kingdom prepared for them was addressed, not to those who had wrought miracles, but to those who had ministered to himself through feeding the hungry, entertaining the stranger, visiting the sick and the prisoners, who were his brethren. But grace, though undoubtedly given by God, required man’s own cooperation to become effectual. Otherwise, since God is no respecter of persons, it would have resided in equal measure in all men; whereas we see that with one man it remains, from another it departs ; a third is never affected by it at all”. The second book on the same subject, addressed to another friend, named Stelechius, is an expression of more rapturous and highly-wrought feeling, and is more rhetorical in style. His description in the beginning of the blessed freedom of the monk’s life from secular vanities and cares, his remarks on David and St. Paul, two of his most favourite characters, and still more his masterly enumeration of the manifold ways in which God manifests his providential care for man, well deserve to be read. They are too long to be translated here in full, and a paraphrase would very inadequately represent such passages, of which the peculiar beauty consists in the language more even than in the ideas. One special interest of these books, written immediately after his retirement from the world, is that they put clearly before us what it was which drove him and many another to the monastic life. It was a sense of the glaring and hideous contrast between the Christianity of the Gospel and the Christianity of ordinary society. A kind of implacable warfare, as he expresses it, seemed to be waged in the world against the commands of Christ; and he had therefore determined, by seclusion from the world, to seek that kind of life which he saw exhibited in the Gospels, but nowhere else.

But the largest and most powerful work which Chrysostom produced during this period was occasioned by the decree of the Emperor Valens in A.D. 373 a decree which struck at the roots of monasticism. It directed that monks should be dragged from their retreats, and compelled to discharge their obligations as citizens, either by serving in the army, or performing the functions of any civil office to which they might be appointed. The edict is said to have been enforced with considerable rigour, and in Egypt this seems to have been the case. But it was evidently far from complete or universal in its operation. None of Chrysostom’s brethren appear to have been compelled to return to the city; certainly he himself was not. But they were liable, of course, to the persecution which, under the shelter of the decree, all the enemies of their order directed against them. These enemies of monasticism were of several kinds. There were the zealous adherents of the old paganism; men like Libanius, who were opposed to Christianity on principle, and especially to the monastic form of it, as encouraging idleness, and the dereliction of the duties of good citizens. There were also the more worldly-minded Christians who had adopted Christianity more from impulse or conformity than from conviction, and who disliked the standing protest of monastic life against their own frivolity. They were irritated also by the influence which the monks often acquired over their wives and children, sometimes alluring the latter from that lucrative line of worldly life which their fathers had marked out for them. And lastly, there were those who regretted that some men should have taken up a position of direct antagonism to the world, instead of mingling with it, and infusing good leaven into the mass of evil. The treatise of Chrysostom addressed “to the assailants of monastic life” was intended to meet most of these objections.

A friend had brought the terrible tidings to his retreat of the authorised persecution which had just broken out. He heard it with indescribable horror. It was a sacrilege far worse than the destruction of the Jewish Temple. That an Emperor (an Arian, indeed, yet professing himself Christian) should organise the persecution, and that some actually baptized persons should take, as his friend informed him, a part in it, was an intolerable aggravation of the infliction. He would rather die than witness such a calamity, and was ready to exclaim with Elijah, “Now, Lord, take away my life!” His friend roused him from this state of despondency by suggesting that, instead of giving way to useless lamentations, he should write an admonitory treatise to the originators and abettors of this horrible persecution. At first Chrysostom refused, partly from a feeling of incompetency, partly from a dread of exposing to the pagans by his writings some of the internal corruptions, dissensions, and weaknesses of the Church. His friend replies that these were already but too notorious; and as for the sufferings of the monks, they formed the topic of public conversation, too often of public jest. In the market-place and in the doctors’ shops the subject was freely canvassed, and many boasted of the part which they had taken against the victims. “I was the first to lay hands on such a monk”, one would cry, “and to give him a blow”; or, “I was the first to discover his cell”; or, “I stimulated the judge against him more than any one”. Such was the spirit of cruelty and profanity by which even Christians were animated; and, as for the pagans, they derided both parties. Roused by these dreadful communications, the indignation of Chrysostom no longer hesitated to set about the task.

His pity, he says, was excited chiefly for the persecutors; they were purchasing eternal misery for themselves, while the future reward of their victims would be in proportion to the magnitude of their present sufferings, since “Blessed were those whom men should hate, persecute, and revile for Christ’s sake, and great was to be their reward in heaven”.

To persecute monks was to hinder that purity of life to which Christ attached so deep an importance. It might be objected, Cannot men lead lives uncontaminated at home? to which Chrysostom replies that he heartily wishes they could, and that such good order and morality might be established in cities as to make monasteries unnecessary. But at present such gross iniquity prevailed in large towns, that men of pious aspirations were compelled to fly to the mountain or the desert. The blame should fall, not on those who escaped from the city, but on those who made life there intolerable to virtuous men. He trusted the time might come when these refugees would be able to return with safety to the world.

If it was objected that on this principle of reasoning the mass of mankind was condemned, he could only reply, in the words of Christ himself, “Narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it”. We must not honour a multitude before truth. If all flesh was once destroyed except eight persons, we cannot be surprised if the number of men eventually saved shall be few. “I see”, he says, “a constant perpetration of crimes which are all condemned by Christ as meriting the punishment of hell adultery, fornication, envy, anger, evil speaking, and many more. The multitude which is engaged in this wickedness is unmolested, but the monks who fly from it themselves, and persuade others to take flight also, are persecuted without mercy”. So much for the Christianity of the world.

In Book II he expresses his astonishment that fathers should so little understand what was best for their sons as to deter them from studying “the true philosophy”. But in combating this error he will put forward all that can be urged on their side. He imagines the case of a pagan father, possessed of great worldly distinction and wealth. He has an only son, in whom all his pride and hopes are centred; one whom he expects to surpass himself in riches and honour. Suddenly this son becomes converted to monasticism; this rich heir flies to the mountains, puts on a dress coarser than that of the meanest servant, toils at the menial occupations of gardening and drawing water, becomes lean and pale. All the schemes of his father for the future are frustrated, all past efforts for his education seem to have been squandered. The little vessel which was his pride and pleasure is wrecked at the very mouth of the harbour from which it was setting out on the voyage of life. The parent has no longer any pleasure in life; he mourns for his son as for one already dead.

Having thus stated the case on his adversary’s side as strongly as possible, Chrysostom begins his own defence by asking which would be best: that a man should be subject to thirst all his life, or wholly exempt from it? Surely to be exempt from it. Apply this to the moral appetites love, avarice, and the rest. The monk is exempt from them; the man of the world is distracted by them, if not overwhelmed. Again, if the monk has no wealth of his own, he exercises a powerful influence in directing the wealth of others. Religious men will part with much of their riches according to his suggestions; if one refuses, another will give. The resources, in fact, of the monk are quite inexhaustible; many will subscribe to supply his wants or to execute his wishes, as Crito said that he and his friends would subscribe for Socrates. It is impossible to deprive the monk of his wealth or of his home; if you strip him of everything he has, he rejoices, and thanks you for helping him to live the life which he desires; and as for his home, the world is his home; one place is the same as another to him; he needs nothing but the pure air of heaven, wholesome streams, and herbs. As for high place and rank, history suffices to teach us that the desert does not destroy, and the palace does not give, true nobility. Plato planting, watering, and. eating olives was a far nobler personage than Dionysius the Tyrant of Sicily, amidst all the wealth and splendour of a monarch. Socrates clad in a single garment, with his bare feet and his meagre fare of bread, and dependent upon others for the mere necessaries of life was a far more illustrious character than Archelaus, who often invited him, but in vain, to court. Real splendour and distinction consisted not in fine raiment, or in positions of dignity and power, but only in excellence of the soul and in philosophy.

He then proceeds to maintain that the influence of the monk was more powerful than that of the man of the world, however distinguished he might be. If he descended from his mountain solitude, and entered the city, the people flocked round him, and pointed him out with reverence and admiration, as if he were a messenger from heaven. His mean dress commanded more respect than the purple robe and diadem of the monarch. If he was required to interfere in matters of public interest, his influence was greater than that of the powerful or wealthy; for he could speak before an emperor with boldness and freedom, and without incurring the suspicion of self-interested or ambitious motives. He was a more effectual comforter of the mourners than any one in a prosperous worldly condition was likely to be. If a father had lost his only son, the sight of other men’s domestic happiness only revived his grief; but the society of the monk, who disdained the ties of home and family, and who talked to him of death as only a sleep, soothed his grief. Thus the man who wished his son to possess real honour and power would permit him to become a monk; for monks who were once mere peasants had been visited in their cells and consulted by kings and ministers of state.

Chrysostom concludes this book by relating the history of one of his own brethren in the monastery, who, when first he desired to become a monk, had been disowned by his father, a wealthy and distinguished pagan, who threatened him with imprisonment, turned him out of doors, and allowed him almost to perish with hunger. But, finding him inflexible in his purpose, the father at last relented, and, at the time when Chrysostom wrote, honoured, he might say venerated, that son, considering the others, who occupied distinguished positions in the world, scarcely worthy to be his servant.

As the second book was intended to meet the objections of a pagan father, so the third contains admonitions to one who was professedly Christian, but worldly-minded, on the duty of parents in regard to the moral and religious education of their children.

It appeared to him that the fathers of that day gave their sons none but worldly counsel, inculcated none but worldly industry and prudence, and encouraged to the emulation of none but worldly examples. The force of habit was intensely strong, especially when pleasure cooperated with it, and parents, instead of counteracting habits of worldliness, promoted them by their own example. God led the Israelites through the wilderness as a kind of monastic training, to wean them from the luxurious and sensual habits of an Egyptian life; yet even then they hankered after the land of their bondage. How, then, could the children of parents who left them in the midst of the Egypt of vice, escape damnation? If they achieved anything good of themselves, it was speedily crushed by the flood of worldly conversation which issued from the parent. All those things which were condemned by Christ as wealth, popularity, strife, an evil eye, divorce were approved by parents of that day, and they threw a veil over the ugliness of these vices, by giving them specious names. Devotion to the hippodrome and theatre was called fashionable refinement; wealth was called freedom; love of glory, high spirit; folly, boldness; prodigality, benevolence; injustice, manliness. Virtues, on the contrary, were depreciated by opprobrious names: temperance was called rusticity; equity, cowardice; justice, unmanliness; modesty, meanness ; endurance of injury, feebleness. He truly remarks, that nothing contributes so much to deter men from vice as calling vices plainly by their proper names.

“How can children escape moral ruin, when all the labour of their fathers is bestowed on the provision of superfluous things fine houses, dress, horses, beautiful statues, gilded ceilings while they take no pains about the soul, which is far more precious than any ornament of gold?”

And there were worse evils behind : vice too monstrous and unnatural to be named, but to which he was constrained to allude, because he felt that it was poisoning with deadly venom the very vitals of the social body. “Well”, but worldly men reply, “Would you have us all turn philosophers, and let our worldly affairs go to ruin? Nay”, says Chrysostom, “it is the want of the philosophic spirit and rule which ruins everything now; it is your rich men with troops of slaves and swarms of parasites, eager for wealth and ambitious of distinction, building fine houses, adding field to field, lending money at a usurious rate of interest who propagate the strife and litigation, and envy, and murder, and general confusion, by which life is distracted. These are they who bring down the vengeance of Heaven, in the shape of droughts, and famines, and inundations, and earthquakes, and submersion of cities, and pestilences. It is not the simple monk, or the philosophic Christian, who is contented with a humble dwelling, a mean dress, a little plot of ground. These last, shining like bright beacons in a dark place, hold up the lamp of philosophy on high, and endeavour to guide those who are tossing on the open sea in a dark night into the haven of safety and repose”.

“In spite of law, disorder prevailed to such an extent, that the very idea of God’s providence was lost. Men assigned the course of events to fate, or to the stars, or to chance, or to spontaneous force. God did, indeed, still rule; but He was like a pilot in a storm, whose skill in managing and conducting the vessel in safety was not perceived or appreciated by the passengers, owing to the confusion and fright caused by the raging of the elements. In the monastery, on the other hand, all was tranquillity and peace as in a community of angels. He strenuously combated the error of supposing that sin was more pardonable in a man of the world than in a monk. Anger, uncleanness, swearing, and the like, were equally sinful in all. Christ made no distinctions, but propounded one standard of morality for all alike. Nothing had inflicted more injury on the moral tone of society than the supposition that strictness of life was demanded of the monk only”. He strongly urges the advantage of sending youths for education to monasteries, even for so long a period as ten or twenty years. Men consented, he says, to part with their children, for the purpose of learning some art or trade, or even so low an accomplishment as rope-dancing; but when the object was train their souls for heaven, all kinds of impediments were raised. To object that few attained through residence in a monastery that perfection of spiritual life which some expected of them, was a mere excuse. In the case of worldly things, on which men’s hearts were set, they thought of getting as much as they could, not of reaching absolute perfection. A man did not prevent his son from entering military service because the chances of his becoming a prefect were small; why, then, hesitate to send your son to a monastery because all monks do not become angels?

These treatises are remarkable productions, and deserve to be read, not only because they exhibit Chrysostom’s best powers of argument and style, but also because they throw light upon the character of the man and the times in which he lived. He pleads his cause with the ingenuity, as well as eloquence, of a man who had been trained for the law courts. We find, indeed, that his opinions on the advantages of the monastic life were modified as he grew older; but his bold condemnation of worldliness, his denunciation of a cold secularised Christianity, as contrasted with the purity of the Gospel standard, the deep aspirations after personal holiness, the desire to be filled with a fervent and overflowing love of Christ, the firm hold on the idea of a superintending Providence, amidst social confusion and corruption; these we find, as here, so always, conspicuous characteristics of the man, and principal sources of his influence.

From the frightful picture here drawn of social depravity, we perceive the value we might say, t the necessity of monasteries, as havens of refuge for those who recoiled in horror from the surrounding pollution. It is clear also that the influence of the monks was considerable. Monasteries were recognised places of education, where pious parents could depend on their children being virtuously brought up. The Christian wife of a pagan or worldly husband could here find a safe home for her boy, where he could escape the contamination of his father’s influence or example. Chrysostom relates, in chapter 12, how a Christian lady in Antioch, being afraid of the wrath of a harsh and worldly-minded husband if she sent away her son to school at the monastery, induced one of the monks, a friend of Chrysostom’s, to reside for a time in the city, in the character of pedagogue. The boy, thus subjected to his training, afterwards joined the society of the monks; but Chrysostom, fearing the consequences both to the youth and to the monastic body, should his father detect his secession, persuaded him to return to the city, where he led an ascetic life, though not habited in monkish dress. Out of these monastic schools, after years of discipline and prayer, and study of the Word, there issued many a pastor and preacher, well-armed champions of the truth, strong in the Lord, and in the power of His might; like Chrysostom himself, instant in season and out of season; stern denouncers of evil, even in kings’ courts; holding out the light of the Gospel in the midst of a dark and crooked generation.

The foregoing extracts and paraphrases from these treatises prove also that as philosophy was considered the highest flight in the intellectual culture of the pagan, so was asceticism regarded as the highest standard of Christian life; it was to the education of the soul what philosophy was to the education of the mind, and hence it was called by the same name. Possessed by this idea, Chrysostom threw himself at this period of his life into the system with all the ardour of his nature. If asceticism was good, it was right to carry it as far as nature could bear it. He adopted the habits of an old member of the brotherhood named Syrus, notorious for the severity of his self-inflicted discipline. The day and greater part of the night were spent in study, fastings and vigils. Bread and water were his only habitual food. At the end of four years he proceeded a step further. He withdrew from the community to one of those solitary caves with which the mountains overhanging Antioch on its southern side abounded. In fact, he exchanged the life of a monk for that of an anchorite. His frame endured this additional strain for nearly two years, and then gave way. His health was so much shattered that he was obliged to abandon monastic life, and to return to the greater comfort of his home in Antioch.

Meanwhile a friend of his, Stagirius by name a person of noble birth, who, in spite of his father’s opposition, had embraced monasticism was reduced to a more deplorable condition. While Chrysostom was confined to his house by illness, a friend common to him and Stagirius brought him the sad intelligence that Stagirius was affected with all the symptoms of demoniacal possession wringing of the hands, squinting of the eyes, foaming at the mouth, strange inarticulate cries, shiverings, and frightful visions at night. We shall perhaps find little difficulty in accounting for these distressing affections, as the consequence of excessive austerities. The young man, who formerly lived a gay life in the world, and in the midst of affluence, had in the monastery fared on bread and water only, often kept vigil all night long, spent his days in prayer and tears of penitence, preserved an absolute silence, and read so many hours continuously, that his friends and brother monks feared that his brain would become disordered. Very probably it was, and hence his visions and convulsions; but those were not days in which men readily attributed any strange phenomena, mental or bodily, to physical causes. We may believe in the action of a spirit-world on the inhabitants of this earth; but we require good evidence that any violent or strange affection of mind or body is due to a directly spiritual agency, rather than to the operation of God according to natural law. The cases of demoniacs in the Gospel stand apart. Our Lord uses language which amounts to a distinct affirmation that those men were actually possessed by evil spirits. To use such expressions as “come out of him”, “enter no more into him”, and the like, if there was no spirit concerned in the case at all, would have been, to say the least, a mere unmeaning piece of acting, of which it would be shocking to suppose our Lord capable. But to admit the direct agency of spirit, when confirmed by such authoritative testimony, is widely different from the hasty ascription to spiritual agency, by an uncritical and unscientific age, of everything which cannot be accounted for by the most superficial knowledge and observation. Chrysostom, of course, not being beyond his age in such matters, did not for a moment dispute the supposition that Stagirius was actually possessed by a demon, but he displays a great deal of good sense in dealing with the case. As the state of his own health did not permit him to pay Stagirius a visit in person, he wrote his advice instead. He perceived the fatal temptation to despair in a man who imagined that the devil had got a firm hold upon him, and that every evil inclination proceeded directly from this demoniacal invader. He will not allow that the suggestion to suicide, of which Stagirius complained, came direct from the demon, but rather from his own despondency, with which the devil had endeavoured to oppress him, that he might, under cover of that, work his own purposes more effectually, just as robbers attack houses in the dark. But this was to be shaken off by trust in God; for the devil did not exercise a compulsory power over the hearts of men; there must be a cooperation of the man’s own will. Eve fell partly through her own inclination to sin : “When she saw that the tree was good for food, and pleasant to the eyes, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat”; and if Adam was so easily persuaded to participate in her sin, he would have fallen even had no devil existed.

Chrysostom endeavours also to console his friend by going through the histories of saints in all times who have been afflicted. His sufferings were not to be compared to those of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and St. Paul. “These afflictions were sent for remedial, purgatorial purposes that the soul might be saved in the day of the Lord. It was not easy to say why such a person was tried by this or that form of suffering, but if we knew exactly God’s motives, there would be no test of faith. The indispensable thing was to be firmly convinced that whatever God sent was right. Some men were disturbed because the good were often troubled, and the wicked prosperous; but such inequality in the distribution of reward and punishment in this life suggested a future state where they would be finally adjusted. The wicked who had here received his good things would there receive his evil. Stagirius had not been attacked by any demon when he was living in carelessness and worldly pleasure, but when he had buckled on his armour and appeared as an antagonist, then the devil descended to the assault. Hence he had no need to be ashamed of his affliction; the only thing to be ashamed of was sin, and it was owing to his renunciation of sin that the devil assailed him. The real demoniacs were those who were carried away by the impulses of unregulated passions”. His summaries of the lives of the Old Testament saints, which fill the rest of the second book and most of the third, are very masterly, and display most intimate acquaintance with Holy Scripture in all its parts. A powerful mind and retentive memory had profited by six years of retirement largely devoted to study.