SAINT JOHN CHRYSOSTOM

HIS LIFE AND TIMES

A SKETCH OF THE CHURCH AND THE EMPIRE IN

THE FOURTH CENTURY.

BY

W. K.W. STEPHENS

I. 

FROM HIS BIRTH TO HIS APPOINTMENT TO THE OFFICE OF READER,  

A.D. 345 OR A.D. 347 TO A.D. 370.

IT has been well remarked by Sir Henry Savile, in the preface to his noble edition of Chrysostom’s works, published in 1612, that, as with great rivers, so often with great men, the middle and the close of their career are dignified and distinguished, but the primary source and early progress of the stream are difficult to ascertain and trace. No one, he says, has been able to fix the exact date, the year, and the consulship of Chrysostom’s birth. This is true; but at the same time his birth, parentage, and education are not involved in such obscurity as surrounds the earliest years of some other great luminaries of the Eastern Church; his own friend, for instance, Theodore, Bishop of Mopsuestia, and yet more notably, the great Athanasius.

There is little doubt that his birth occurred not later than the year A.D. 347, and not earlier than the year A.D. 345; and there is no doubt that Antioch in Syria was the place of his birth, that his mother’s name was Anthusa, his father's Secundus, and that both were well born. His mother was, if not actually baptized, very favourably inclined to Christianity, and, indeed, a woman of no ordinary piety. The father had attained the rank of magister militum in the Imperial army of Syria, and therefore enjoyed the title of illustris. He died when his son John was an infant, leaving a young widow, about twenty years of age, in comfortable circumstances, but harassed by the difficulties and anxieties of her unprotected condition as mistress of a household in days when servants were slaves, and life in large cities altogether unguarded by such securities as are familiar to us. Greatly did she dread the responsibility of bringing up a son in one of the most turbulent and dissolute capitals of the Empire. Nothing, she afterwards declared to him, could have enabled her to pass through such a furnace of trial but a consoling sense of divine support, and the delight of contemplating the image of her husband as reproduced in his son. How long a sister older than himself may have lived we do not know; but the conversation between him and his mother, when he was meditating a retreat into a monastery, seems to imply that he was the only surviving child. All her love, all her care, all her means and energies, were concentrated on the boy destined to become so great a man, and exhibiting even in childhood no common ability and aptitude for learning. But her chief anxiety was to train him in pious habits, and to preserve him uncontaminated from the pollutions of the vicious city in which they resided. She was to him what Monica was to Augustine, and Nonna to Gregory Nazianzen.

The great influence, indeed, of women upon the Christianity of domestic life in that age is not a little remarkable. The Christians were not such a pure and single-minded community as they had been. The refining fires of persecution which burnt up the chaff of hypocrisy or indifference were now extinguished; Christianity had a recognised position; her bishops were in kings’ courts. The natural consequences inevitably followed this attainment of security; there were more Christians, but not more who were zealous; there were many who hung very loosely to the Church, many who fluctuated between the Church and Paganism. In the great Eastern cities of the Empire, especially Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, the mass of the so-called Christian population was largely infected by the dominant vices, inordinate luxury, sensuality, selfish avarice, and display. Christianity was in part paganised long before it had made any appreciable progress towards the destruction of Paganism. But the sincere and ardent piety of many amongst the women kept alive in many a home the flame of Christian faith which would otherwise have been smothered. The Emperor Julian imagined that his efforts to resuscitate Paganism would have been successful in Antioch but for the strenuous opposition of the Christian women. He complains “that they were permitted by their husbands to take anything out of the house to bestow it upon the Galileans, or to give away to the poor, while they would not expend the smallest trifle upon the worship of the gods”. The efforts also of the Governor Alexander, who was left in Antioch by the Emperor to carry forward his designs of Pagan reformation, were principally baffled through this male influence. He found that the men would often consent to attend the temples and sacrifices, but afterwards generally repented and retracted their adherence. This relapse Libanius the sophist, in a letter to the Governor, ascribes to the home influence of the women. “When the men are out of doors”, he says, “they obey you who give them the best advice, and they approach the altars; but when they get home, their minds undergo a change; they are wrought upon by the tears and entreaties of their wives, and they again withdraw from the altars of the gods”.

Anthusa did not marry again; very possibly she was deterred from contracting a second marriage by religious scruples which Chrysostom himself would certainly have approved. The Pagans themselves admired those women who dedicated themselves to a single life, or abstained from marrying again. Chrysostom himself informs us that when he began to attend the lectures of Libanius, his master inquired who and what his parents were; and on being told that he was the son of a widow who at the age of forty had lost her husband twenty years, he exclaimed in a tone of mingled jealousy and admiration : “Heavens! what women these Christians have!”

What instruction he received in early boyhood, beside his mother’s careful moral and religious training; whether he was sent, a common custom among Christian parents in that age,to be taught by the monks in one of the neighbouring monasteries, where he may have imbibed an early taste for monastic retirement, we know not. He was designed, however, not for the clerical but for the legal profession, and at the age of twenty he began to attend the lectures of one of the first sophists of the day, capable of giving him that secular training and learning which would best enable him to cope with men of the world. Libanius had achieved a reputation as a teacher of general literature, rhetoric, and philosophy, and as an able and eloquent defender of Paganism, not only in his native city Antioch, but in the Empire at large. He was the friend and correspondent of Julian, and on amicable terms with the Emperors Valens and Theodosius. He had now returned to Antioch after lengthened residence in Athens (where the chair of rhetoric had been offered to him, but declined), in Nicomedia, and in Constantinople. In attending daily lectures at his school, the young Chrysostom became conversant with the best classical Greek authors, both poets and philosophers. Of their teaching he in later life retained little admiration, and to the perusal of their writings he probably seldom or never recurred for profit or recreation, but his retentive memory enabled him to the last to point and adorn his arguments with quotations from Homer, Plato, and the Tragedians. In the school of Libanius also he began to practise those nascent powers of eloquence which were destined to win for him so mighty a fame, as well as the appellation of Chrysostomos, or the Golden Mouth, by which, rather than by his proper name of John, he will be known to the end of time. Libanius, in a letter to Chrysostom, praises highly a speech composed by him in honour of the Emperors, and says they were happy in having so excellent a panegyrist. The Pagan sophist helped to forge the weapons which were afterwards to be skilfully employed against the cause to which he was devoted. When he was on his deathbed, he was asked by his friends who was in his opinion capable of succeeding him. “It would have been John”, he replied, “had not the Christians stolen him from us”.  But it did not immediately appear that the learned advocate of Paganism was nourishing a traitor; for Chrysostom had not yet been baptized, and began to seek an opening for his powers in secular fields of activity. He commenced practice as a lawyer  some of his speeches gained great admiration, and were highly commended by his old master Libanius. A brilliant career of worldly ambition was open to him. The profession of the law was at that time the great avenue to civil distinction. The amount of litigation was enormous. One hundred and fifty advocates were required for the court of the Praetorian Prefect of the East alone. The display of talent in the law-courts frequently obtained for a man the government of a province, whence the road was open to those higher dignities of vice-prefect, prefect, patrician, consul, which were honoured by the title of illustrious.

But the pure and upright disposition of the youthful advocate recoiled from the licentiousness which corrupted society; from the avarice, fraud, and artifice which marked the transactions of men of business; from the chicanery and rapacity that sullied the profession which he had entered.  He was accustomed to say later in life that “the Bible was the fountain for watering the soul”. If he had drunk of the classical fountains in the school of Libanius, he had imbibed draughts yet deeper of the spiritual well-spring in quiet study of Holy Scripture at home. And like many another in that degraded age, his whole soul revolted from the glaring contrast presented by the ordinary life of the world around him to that standard of holiness which was held up in the Gospels.

He had formed also an intimate friendship with a young man, his equal in station and age, by whose influence he was diverted more and more from secular life, and eventually induced altogether to abandon it. This was Basil, who will come before us in the celebrated work on the priesthood. He must not be confounded with the great Basil, Bishop of Caesarea, in Cappadocia, who was some fifteen years older than Chrysostom, having been born in A.D. 329, nor with Basil, Bishop of Seleucia, who was present at the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451, and must therefore have been considerably younger. Perhaps he may be identified with a Basil, Bishop of Eaphanea in Syria, not far from Antioch, who attended the Council of Constantinople in A.D. 381.

Chrysostom has described his friendship with Basil in affecting language :  “I had many genuine and true friends, men who understood and strictly observed the laws of friendship; but one there was out of the many who exceeded them all in attachment to me, and strove to leave them all behind in the race, even as much as they themselves surpassed ordinary acquaintances. He was one of those who accompanied me at all times; we engaged in the same studies, and were instructed by the same teachers; in our zeal and interest for the subjects on which we worked, we were one. As we went to our lectures or returned from them, we were accustomed to take counsel together on the line of life it would be best to adopt; and here, too, we appeared to be unanimous”.

Basil early determined this question for himself in favour of monasticism; he decided, as Chrysostom expresses it, to follow the “true philosophy”. This occasioned the first interruption to their intercourse. Chrysostom, soon after the age of twenty, had embarked on a secular career, and could not immediately make up his mind to tread in the footsteps of his friend. “The balance”, he says, “was no longer even”; the scale of Basil mounted, while that of Chrysostom was depressed by the weight of earthly interests and desires. But the decisive act of Basil made a deep impression on his mind; separation from his friend only increased his attachment to him, and his aversion from life in the world. He began to withdraw more from ordinary occupations and pleasures, and to spend more of his time in the study of Holy Scripture. He formed acquaintance with Meletius, the deeply respected Catholic Bishop of Antioch, and after three years, the usual period of probation for catechumens, was baptized by him.

A natural question arises : Why was he not baptized before, since his mother was a Christian, and there is abundant evidence that infant baptism was and had been the ordinary practice of the Church? In attempting a solution of the difficulty, it will be proper to mention first certain reasons for delaying baptism which were prevalent in that age, and which may partially have influenced the mind of Chrysostom’s mother or himself. It may sound paradoxical to say that an exaggerated estimation of the import and effect of baptism contributed in two ways to its delay. But such appears to have been the case. It was regarded by many as the most complete and final purgation of past sin, and the most solemn pledge of a new and purified life for the future. To sin, therefore, before baptism was comparatively harmless, if in the waters of baptism the guilty stains could be washed away; but sin after the reception of that holy sacrament was almost, if not altogether, unpardonable, at least fraught with the most tremendous peril. Hence some would delay baptism, as many now delay repentance, from a secret or conscious reluctance to take a decisive step, and renounce the pleasures of sin; and under the comfortable persuasion that some day, by submitting to baptism, they would free themselves from the responsibilities of their past life. Others, again, were deterred from binding themselves under so solemn a covenant by a distrust of their ability to fulfil their vows, and a timorous dread of the eternal consequences if they failed. Against these misconceptions of the true nature and proper use of the sacrament, the great Basil, the two Gregories, and Chrysostom himself contend l with a vehemence and indignation which proves them to have been common. Many parents thought they would allow the fitful and unstable season of youth to pass before they irrevocably bound their children under the most solemn engagements of their Christian calling. The children, when they grew up, inherited their scruples, and so the sacrament was indefinitely deferred.

It is not impossible that such feelings may have influenced Chrysostom’s mother and himself; but considering the natural and healthy character of his piety, which seems to have grown by a gentle and unintermitting progress from his childhood, they do not seem very probable in his case. A more cogent cause for the delay may perhaps be found in the distracted state of the Church in Antioch, which lasted, with increasing complications, from A.D. 330, or fifteen years prior to Chrysostom’s birth, up to the time of his baptism by Meletius, when a brighter day was beginning to dawn.

The vicissitudes of the Church in Antioch during that period form a curious, though far from pleasing, picture of the inextricable difficulties, the deplorable schisms, into which the Church at large was plunged by the Arian controversy. Two years after the Council of Nice, A.D. 327, the Arians, through the assistance of Constantia, the Emperor’s sister, won the favour of Constantine. He lost no time during this season of prosperity in procuring the deposition of Catholic bishops. Eminent among these was Eustathius, Bishop of Antioch. He was ejected by a synod held in his own city on false charges of Sabellianism and adultery. An Arian Bishop, Euphronius, was appointed, but the Catholic congregation indignantly withdrew to hold their services in another quarter of the town, on the opposite side of the Orontes. The see remained for some time entirely in the hands of the Arians. When the Council of Sardica met in A.D. 342, and the Arian faction seceded from it to hold a Council of their own in Philippopolis, Stephen, Bishop of Antioch, was their president. He was deposed in A.D. 349 by the Emperor Constantius, having been detected as an accomplice in an infamous plot against some envoys from the Western Church. But “uno avulso nou deficit alter”; he was succeeded by another Arian, the eunuch Leontius. He tried to conciliate the Catholics by an artful and equivocating policy, of which his manner of chanting the doxology was an instance. The Arian form of it was “Glory be to the Father BY the Son in the Holy Ghost”; this the bishop was accustomed to slur in such an indistinct voice that the prepositions could not be clearly if at all heard, while he joined loudly in the second part of the hymn where all were agreed. He died towards the close of A.D. 357, when the see was fraudulently seized by Eudoxius, Bishop of Germanicia. He favoured the extreme Arians so openly that the Semi-Arians appealed to the Emperor Constantius to summon a General Council. Their request was granted; but the Arians, fearing that the Catholics and Semi-Arians would coalesce to overwhelm them, artfully suggested that Rimini, the place proposed for the Council, was too distant for the Eastern prelates, and that the Assembly should be divided, part meeting at Rimini, and part at Nice. Their suggestion was accepted, and the result is well known. Partly by arguments, partly by artifices and delays which wore out the strength and patience of the members, the Arians completely carried the day; the creed of Rimini was ordered by the Emperor to be everywhere signed, and in the words of Jerome, “the world groaned and found itself Arian”. An Arian synod sat at Constantinople. Macedonius, the archbishop, being considered too moderate, was deposed, and Eudoxius, the usurper of Antioch, was elevated to the see in his stead; and Meletius, Bishop of Sebaste, in Armenia, was translated to the vacant see of Antioch, A.D. 361. But in him the Arians had mistaken their man. He was one of those who attended more to the practical moral teaching than to the abstract theology of Christianity; and, being not perhaps very precise in his language on doctrinal points, he had been reckoned an Arian. After his elevation to the see of Antioch, he confined himself in his discourses to those practical topics on which all could agree. But this was not allowed to last long. The Emperor Constantius paid a visit to Antioch soon after the appointment of Meletius, and he was instigated by the Arians to put the bishop to a crucial test. He was commanded to preach on Proverbs VIII. 22 : “The Lord possessed me” (that was the fatal word) “in the beginning”, etc. The interpretation put on the word “formed” would reveal the mail. Two other bishops discoursed first upon the same text: George of Laodicea, Acacius of Caesarea. The first construed the passage in a purely Arian sense : the Word was a “a created being”, though the first in time and rank; the second preacher took a more moderate line. Then came the turn of Meletius; short-hand writers took down every word as it fell. Meletius was a mild and temperate man, but he had his convictions, and he was no coward. To the horror of the Arians (the secret joy, perhaps, of those who disliked him) he entirely dissented from the Arian interpretation. The people loudly applauded his sermon, and called aloud for some brief and compendious statement of his doctrine. Meletius replied by a symbolical action : he held up three fingers, and then closing two of them, he said : “Our minds conceive of three, but we speak as to one”. This was conclusive; the objectionable prelate was banished to Melitene, his native place in Armenia, thirty days after he had entered Antioch. Euzoius, who had been an intimate friend and constant associate of Arius himself, was put into the see. The Church of Antioch now split into three parties : the old and rigid orthodox set, who, ever since the deposition of Eustathius in A.D. 327, had adhered to his doctrine, and were called after his name; the moderate Catholics, who regarded Meletius as their bishop: and the Arians under Euzoius. The synod which had deposed him published a thoroughly Arian creed, which declared the Son to have been created out of nothing, and to be unlike the Father both in substance and will.

This first banishment of Meletius, which occurred in A.D. 361, did not last long. Julian, who became Emperor the same year, recalled all the prelates who had been exiled in the two preceding reigns; partly, perhaps, from a really liberal feeling, partly from a willingness to foment the internal dissensions of the Church by placing the rival bishops in close antagonism. Athanasius returned to Alexandria amidst great ovations. One of the questions which occupied the attention of a synod convened by him was the schism of Antioch. Eusebius, Bishop of Vercelli, a staunch Italian friend of Athanasius, was despatched to Antioch in order to heal the division; but he had been unhappily anticipated by another Western prelate, Lucifer of Cagliari, in Sardinia, a brave defender of orthodoxy, for which with Eusebius he had suffered exile, but a most unskilful peacemaker. He only complicated the existing confusion by consecrating as bishop a priest of the old Eustathian party, named Paulinus, instead of strengthening the hands of Meletius. The unhappy Church at Antioch, where the whole Christian community amounted to not more, than 100,000 souls, was thus torn to tatters. There were now three bishops : the Arian Euzoius, Meletius, generally acknowledged by the Eastern Church, and Paulinus by the Western. And, as if three rival heads were not sufficient, the Apollinarians soon afterwards added a fourth. But the mild, prudent, and charitable disposition of Meletius procured for him the affection and esteem of the largest and most respectable part of the population, as well as of the common people. Even when he was banished for the first time after he had been only a month in Antioch, the populace endeavoured to stone the prefect as he was conducting the bishop out of the city. He was saved by Meletius himself, who threw a part of his own mantle round him, to protect him from their fury. And after he returned from exile the popularity of Meletius increased. In paintings on the walls of houses and engravings on signet rings, his face was often represented, and parents gave his name to their children both to perpetuate his memory and to remind them of an example which was worthy of their imitation. Once more in A.D. 367, and yet again in A.D. 370 or A.D. 371, when the Arians recovered the favour of the Court under the Emperor Valens, he was sent into exile, but he returned after the death of Valens in A.D. 378; and it was as Bishop of Antioch that he presided over the Council of Constantinople in A.D. 381, and died during its session. His funeral oration, pronounced by Gregory Nyssen, is extant. The final reparation of that schism which he nobly and constantly endeavoured to heal was not effected for nearly twenty years, when Chrysostom, then Archbishop of Constantinople, accomplished that good service for his native city.

It is interesting to dwell at some length upon the history of the Church in Antioch at this period, because it represents the painful feuds in which the Church at large became entangled through the baneful influence of the Arian controversy, that first great blow to the unity of Christendom; when bishop was set up against bishop, and rival councils manufactured rival creeds, when violence, and intrigue, and diplomatic arts were employed too often by both sides to gain their ends. But the distracted state of the Church at Antioch also supplies a possible answer to the question why the baptism of Chrysostom was delayed so long. One of the reasons frequently alleged for deferring the reception of that sacrament was the desire of the candidate to receive it at the hands of some particular bishop. Now who were the bishops of Antioch during the infancy and boyhood of Chrysostom? The Arians were in possession of the see at the time of his birth, and retained it till A.D. 361, when Meletius was appointed, but banished almost immediately. The pious sensible mother and the well-disposed youth would not unnaturally hold aloof from a Church over which presided such prelates as Stephen, Leontius, Eudoxius, Euzoius. Their minds may well have been so sorely perplexed and suspended between the claims of opposing factions as to delay the reception of baptism from the hands of any.

But the prudent, conciliatory policy, the mild and amiable disposition of Meletius, would engage the sympathy and respect of an affectionate, pious, and sensible youth, such as Chrysostom was. He was about twenty when Meletius was banished in 367 by the Emperor Valens; but the bishop returned in a short time, when Chrysostom’s friend Basil had withdrawn into religious seclusion, and he himself was feeling an increasing repugnance to the world. He presented himself as a candidate for baptism to the bishop, and after the usual three years of preparation as a catechumen, was admitted into the Christian Church.

There can be no doubt that baptism, from whatever cause delayed, must on that very account have come home to the recipient with a peculiar solemnity of meaning. It was an important epoch, often a decisive turning-point in the life, a deliberate renunciation of the world, and dedication of the whole man to God. So Chrysostom evidently felt it; from this point we enter on a new phase in his life. He becomes for a time an enthusiastic ascetic, and then settles down into that more tranquil and steady, but intense glow of piety and love to God which burned with undiminished force till the close of his career.

The wise Bishop Meletius, however, desired to employ his powers in some sphere of active labour in the Church. As a preliminary step to this end, he ordained him soon after his baptism to the office of reader. This order appears not to have been instituted in the Church before the third century; at least there is no allusion to it in writers of the first two centuries, and frequent references in writers of the third and fourth. The duty of readers was to read those portions of Scripture which were introduced into the first service or “Missa Catechumenorum”, which preceded the Communion, or “Missa Fidelium”, so called because only the baptized were admitted to it. They read from the Pulpitum or Tribunal Ecclesiae, or Ambo, the reading-desk of the Church, which must not be confounded with the Bema, or Tribunal of the Sanctuary. This last was identical with the altar, or rather the steps of the altar, and no rank lower than that of deacon was permitted to read from this position. By the Novells of Justinian, eighteen was fixed as the youngest age at which any one could be ordained to this office. But previous to this limitation, it was not uncommon to appoint mere children. Caesarius of Aries is said to have been made a reader at the tender age of seven, and Victor Uticensis, describing the cruelties of the Vandalic persecution in Africa, affirms that among 500 clergy or more who perished by sword or famine, were many “infant readers”.

The ceremony of ordination appears to have been very simple. The Fourth Council of Carthage ordains that the bishop should testify before the congregation to the purity, the faith, and conversation of the candidate. Then in their presence he is to place a Bible in his hands with these words : “Take thou this book, and be thou a reader of the word of God, which office if thou discharge faithfully and profitably thou shalt have part with those who have ministered the word of God”.

II.

COMMENCEMENT OF ASCETIC LIFE. STUDY UNDER DIODORUS. FORMATION OF AN ASCETIC BROTHERHOOD. THE LETTERS TO THEODORE.

A.D. 370.

THE enthusiasm of minds newly awakened to a full perception of Christian holiness, and a deep sense of Christian obligations, was in early times seldom contented with anything short of complete separation from the world. The Oriental temperament especially has been at all times inclined to passionate extremes. It oscillates between the most abandoned licentiousness and intense asceticism. The second is the corrective of the first; where the disease is desperate, the remedies must be violent. Chrysostom, as will be perceived throughout his life, was never carried to fanatical extremes; a certain sober-mindedness and calm practical good sense eminently distinguished him, though mingled with burning zeal. But in his youth especially he was not exempt from the spirit of the age and country in which he lived. He irresistibly gravitated towards that kind of life which his friend Basil had already adopted a life of retirement, contemplation, and pious study : the philosophy of Christianity, as it was called at that time.

It does not appear that Basil had actually joined any monastic community, but merely that he was leading a life of seclusion, and practising some of the usual monastic austerities. Chrysostom, indeed, distinctly asserts that, previous to his own baptism, their intercourse had not been entirely broken off; only that it was impossible for him, who had his business in the law-courts and found his recreation in the theatre, to be so acceptable as formerly to one who now never entered public places, and who was wholly devoted to meditation, study, and prayer. Their intercourse was necessarily more rare, though their friendship was substantially unshaken. “When, however, I had myself also lifted my head a little above this worldly flood, he received me with open arms” (probably referring here to his baptism or preparation for it); “but even then I was not able to maintain my former equality, for he had the advantage of me in point of time, and having manifested the greatest diligence, he had attained a very lofty standard, and was ever soaring beyond me”. 

This disparity, however, could not diminish their natural affection for one another; and Basil at length obtained Chrysostom’s consent to a plan which he had frequently urged, that they should abandon their present homes and live together in some quiet abode, there to strengthen each other in undisturbed study, meditation, and prayer. But this project of the young enthusiasts was for a time frustrated by the irresistible entreaties of Chrysostom’s mother, that he would not deprive her of his protection, companionship, and help. The scene is described by Chrysostom himself, with a dramatic power worthy of Greek tragedy. It reminds the reader of some of those long and stately, yet elegant and affecting, narratives of the messenger who, at the close of the play, describes the final scene which is not represented. Certainly it bespeaks the scholar of a man who had made his pupils familiar with the best classical writers in Greek. “When she knew that we were meditating this course, my mother took me by the right hand and led me into her own chamber, and there, seating herself near the bed on which she had given birth to me, wept fountains of tears; to which she added words of lamentation more pitiable even than the tears themselves. ‘I was not long permitted to enjoy the virtue of thy father, my child : so it seemed good to God. My travail-pangs at your birth were quickly succeeded by his death; bringing orphanhood upon thee, and upon me an untimely widowhood, with all those miseries of widowhood which those only who have experienced them can fairly understand. For no description can approach the reality of that storm and tempest which is undergone by her who having but lately issued from her father’s home, and being unskilled in the ways of the world, is suddenly plunged into grief insupportable, and compelled to endure anxieties too great for her sex and age. For she has to correct the negligence, to watch against the ill-doings, of her slaves, to baffle the insidious schemes of kinsfolk, to meet with a brave front the impudent threats and harshness of tax-collectors’.”

She then describes minutely the expense, and labour, and constant anxiety which attended the education of a son; how she had refrained from all thoughts of second marriage, that she might bestow her undivided energies, time, and means upon him; how amply it had all been rewarded by the delight of his presence, recalling the image of her husband; and now that he had grown up, would he leave her absolutely forlorn? “In return for all these my services to you”, she cried, “I implore you this one favour only not to make me a second time a widow, or to revive the grief which time has lulled. Wait for my death perhaps I shall soon be gone; when you have committed my body to the ground, and mingled my bones with your father’s bones, then you will be free to embark on any sea you please”. Such an appeal to his sense of filial gratitude and duty could not be disregarded. Chrysostom yielded to his mother’s entreaties, although Basil did not desist from urging his favourite scheme.

At the same time he assimilated his life at home as much as possible to the condition of a monk. He entirely withdrew from all worldly occupations and amusements. He seldom went out of the house; he strengthened his mind by study, his spirit by prayer, and subdued his body by vigils and fasting, and sleeping upon the bare ground. He maintained an almost constant silence, that his thoughts might be kept abstracted from mundane things, and that no irritable or slanderous speech might escape his lips. Some of his companions naturally lamented what they regarded as a morose and melancholy change.

But the intercourse between, him and Basil was more frequent than before; and two other young men, who had been their fellow-students at the school of Libanius, were persuaded to adopt the same kind of secluded life. These two were Maximus, afterwards Bishop of Seleucia, in Isauria; and Theodore, who became Bishop of Mopsuestia, in Cilicia. This little fraternity formed, with some others not named, a voluntary association of youthful ascetics. They did not dwell in a separate building, nor were they in any way established as a monastic community, but (like Wesley and his young friends at Oxford) they lived by rule, and practised monastic austerities. The superintendence of their studies and general conduct they submitted to Diodorus and Carterius, who were presidents of monasteries in the vicinity of Antioch. In addition to his own intrinsic merits and eminence, Diodorus claims our attention, because there can be no doubt that he exercised a great influence upon the minds of his two most distinguished scholars, Chrysostom and Theodore. Indeed, judging from the fragments of his works, and the notices of him by historians, it is not too much to say that he was the founder of a method of Biblical interpretation of which Chrysostom and Theodore became the most able representatives.

He was of noble family, and the friend of Meletius, who confided to him and the priest Evagrius the chief care of his diocese during his second exile under Valens about A.D. 370. And one of the first acts of Meletius, on his return in A.D. 378, was to make Diodorus Bishop of Tarsus. His writings in defence of Christianity were sufficiently powerful and notorious to provoke the notice of Julian, who, in a letter to Photinus, attacks him with no small asperity. The Emperor finds occasion for ridicule in the pale and wrinkled face and the attenuated frame of Diodorus, wasted by his severe labours and ascetic practices; and represents these disfigurements as punishments from the offended gods against whom he had directed his pen. Being well known as a warm, friend of Meletius, Diodorus was exposed to some risk from the Arian party during the exile of the bishop from A.D. 370-378. But he was not deterred from frequenting the old town on the south side of the Orontes, where the congregation of Meletius held their assemblies, and diligently ministering to their spiritual needs. He accepted no fixed stipend, but his necessities were supplied by the hospitality of those among whom he laboured. Of his voluminous writings, a commentary on the Old and New Testament is that most frequently quoted by ecclesiastical writers. They expressly and repeatedly affirm that he adhered very closely to the literal and historical meaning of the text, and that he was opposed to those mystical and allegorical interpretations of Origen and the Alexandrian school, which often disguised rather than elucidated the true significance of the passage. One evil of the allegorical method was, that it destroyed a clear and critical perception of the differences between the Older Revelation and the New. The Old Testament was regarded as a kind of vast enigma, containing implicitly the facts and doctrines of the New. To detect subtle allusions to the coming of our Saviour, to the events of his life, to his death and resurrection, in the acts, speeches, and gestures of persons mentioned in the Old Testament, was regarded as a kind of interpretation no less satisfactory than it was ingenious. To believe indeed that the grand intention running through Scripture from the beginning to the end is to bring men to Jesus Christ; that the history of the fall of man is given to enable us to appreciate the need of a Restorer, and to estimate his work at its proper value; that the history of a dispensation based on law enables us to accept with more thankfulness a dispensation of spirit; that the history of the Jewish system of sacrifices is intended to conduct us to the one great Sacrifice as the substance of previous shadows, the fulfilment of previous types; that, alike in the law and the prophets, intimations and hints and significant parallels of the subsequent history to which they lead on are to be discerned; this may be reasonable, profitable, and true : but it can be neither profitable nor true to see allusions, prophecies, and parallels in every minute and trivial detail of that earlier history.

From this vital error Diodorus appears to have emancipated himself and his disciples. He perceived, as we shall see Chrysostom perceived, a gradual development in Revelation : that the knowledge, and morality, and faith of men under the Old Dispensation were less advanced than those of men who lived under the New. One instance must suffice. He remarks that the Mosaic precept, directing the brother of a man who had died childless to raise up posterity to his brother by marrying his wife, was given for the consolation of men who had as yet received no clear promise respecting a resurrection from the dead. There is an approach to what some might deem rationalistic criticism, when he affirms that the speech of God to men in the Old Testament was not an external voice, but an inward spiritual intimation. When, for instance, it is said that God gave a command to Adam, it is evident, he says, that it was not made by a sound audible to the bodily ear, but that God impressed the knowledge of the command upon him according to his own proper energy, and that when Adam had received it his condition was the same as if it had come to him through the actual hearing of the ear. And this, he observes, is what God effected also in the case of the prophets. A similar rationalistic tendency is observable in his explanation of the relation between the Divine and human elements in the person of our blessed Lord. His language, in fact, on this subject is Nestorian : a distinction was to be made between Him who, according to his essence, was Son of God --the Logos-- and Him who through Divine decree and adoption became Son of God. He who was born as Man from Mary was Son according to grace, but God the Logos was Son according to nature. The Son of Mary became Son of God because He was selected to be the receptacle or temple of God the Word. It was only in an improper sense that God the Word was called Son of David; the appellation was given to Him merely because the human temple in which He dwelt belonged to the lineage of David.  It is clear that Diodorus would have objected equally with Nestorius to apply the title of “God-bearer” (Theotokos) to the blessed Virgin. Sixty years later, in A.D. 429, the streets of Constantinople and Alexandria resounded with tumults excited by controversy about the subject of which this was the watchword. But Diodorus happily lived too early for these dreadful conflicts, and his scholar Theodore was not personally disturbed; though long after his death, in A.D. 553, his writings were condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Council, because the Nestorians appealed to them in confirmation of their tenets, and revered his memory. The practical element in Diodorus, his method of literal and common-sense interpretation of Holy Scripture, was inherited chiefly by Chrysostom; the intellectual vein, his conceptions of the relation between the Godhead and Manhood in Christ, his opinions respecting the final restoration of mankind, which were almost equivalent to a denial of eternal punishment, were reproduced mainly by Theodore.

It was inevitable that those who, in an access of religious fervour, had renounced the world and subjected themselves to the sternest asceticism, should sometimes find that they had miscalculated their powers. The passionate enthusiasm which for a time carried them along the thorny path would begin to subside; a hankering after a more natural, if not more worldly, life ensued; and occasionally the reaction was so violent, the passions kept down in unnatural constraint reasserted themselves with such force, that the ascetic flew back to the pleasures and sometimes to the sins of the world, with an appetite which was in painful contrast to his previous abstinence. The youthful Theodore was for a time an instance, though far from an extreme instance, of such reaction : the strain was too great for him; he relapsed for a season into his former habits of life; he retired from the little ascetic brotherhood to which Chrysostom and Basil belonged. There is no evidence that he fell into any kind of sin; he simply returned to the occupations and amusements of ordinary life. He was in love with and desirous of marrying a young lady named Hermione. But Chrysostom was at this period such an ardent ascetic; he was so deeply impressed with the evil of the world; and regarded an austere and absolute separation from it as so indispensable to the highest standard of Christian life, that to him any divergence from that path, when once adopted, seemed a positive sin. The relapse of Theodore called forth two letters of lamentation, remonstrance, and exhortation from his friend. They are the earliest of his extant works, and exhibit a command of language which does credit to the training of Libanius as well as to his own ability, and an intimate acquaintance with Holy Scripture, which proves how much time he had already spent in diligent and patient study. Since these epistles have been justly considered among the finest of his productions, and represent his opinions at an early stage of his life respecting repentance, a future life, the advantages of asceticism and celibacy, some paraphrases from them will be presented to the reader.

He begins his first letter by quoting the words of Jeremiah : “Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears !”

“If the prophet uttered that lamentation over a ruined city, surely I may express a like passionate sorrow over the fallen soul of a brother. That soul which was once the temple of the Holy Spirit now lies open and defenceless to become the prey of any hostile invader. The spirit of avarice, of arrogance, of lust, may now find a free passage into a heart which was once as pure and inaccessible to evil as heaven itself. Wherefore I mourn and weep, nor will I cease from my mourning until I see thee again in thy former brilliancy. For though this may seem impossible to men, yet with God it is possible, for He it is who lifteth the beggar from the earth and taketh the poor out of the dunghill, that He may set him with the princes, even with the princes of his people”. An eminent characteristic of Chrysostom is that he is always hopeful of human nature; he never doubts the capacity of man to rise, or the willingness of God to raise him. Theodore himself appears to have been stricken with remorse, and to have drooped into despondency, to rouse him from which and lead him to repose more trustfully on the goodness of God, was one main purpose of Chrysostom’s letters. “Despair was the devil’s Work”; “it is he who tries to cut off that hope whereby men are saved, which is the support and anchor of the soul, which, like a long chain, let down from heaven, little by little draws those who hold tightly to it up to heavenly heights, and lifts them above the storm and tempest of these worldly ills. The devil tries to extinguish that trust which is the source and strength of prayer, which enables men to cry, ‘as the eyes of a maiden look unto the hand of her mistress, even so our eyes wait upon the Lord our God until He have mercy upon us’. Yet if man will only believe it, there is never a time at which any one, even the most abandoned sinner, may not turn and repent and be accepted by God. For God being impassible, his wrath is not a passion or an emotion; He punishes not in anger, since He is unsusceptible by nature of injury from any insult or wrong done by us, but in mercy, that He may bring men back to Himself. The many instances of God’s mercy; his relenting towards the Jews, and even to Ahab, when he humbled himself; the repentance of Manasseh, of the Ninevites, of the penitent thief, all accepted, although preceded by a long course of sin, prove that the words ‘today if ye will hear his voice’ are applicable to any time : it is always ‘today’ as long as a man lives; repentance is estimated not by length of time, but by the disposition of the heart”. He acutely observes that “despondency often conceals moral weakness; a secret though perhaps unconscious sympathy with the sin which the man professes to deplore and hate”. “To fall is natural, but to remain fallen argues a kind of acquiescence in evil, a feebleness of moral purpose which is more displeasing to God than the fall itself”.

But although he speaks in the most hopeful, encouraging language of the efficacy of repentance, however late, if sincere, in this life, no one can assert more strongly the impossibility of restoration when the limits of this present existence have once been passed. In this respect he differs alike from Origen, Diodorus, and his fellow-student Theodore, and from believers in the later developed doctrine of purgatory. “As long as we are here, it is possible, even if we sin ten thousand times, to wash all away by repentance; but when once we have been taken to that other world, even if we manifest the greatest penitence, it will avail us naught, but however much we may gnash with our teeth, and beat our breasts, and pour forth entreaties, no one will be able even with the tip of his finger to cool us in the flame; we shall only hear the same words as the rich man : ‘between us and you there is a great gulf fixed’.”

Nothing is more remarkably characteristic of Chrysostom’s productions, especially the earlier, than a frequent recurrence to this truth : the existence of a great impassable chasm between the two abodes of misery and bliss. Heaven and hell were no distant dreamlands to him, but realities so nearly and vividly present to his mind that they acted as powerful motives, encouraging to holiness, deterring from vice. He paints the two pictures in glowing colours, and submits them to the contemplation of his friend. “When you hear of fire, think not that the fire in that other world is like it; for this earthly fire burns up and consumes whatever it lays hold of, but that burns continually those who are seized by it and never ceases, wherefore it is called unquenchable. For sinners must be clothed with immortality, not for honour, but merely to supply a constant material for this punishment to feed upon; and how terrible this is, a description would indeed never be able to present, but from our experience of small sufferings it is possible to form some little conception of those greater miseries. If you should ever be in a bath which has been overheated, then I pray you consider the fire of hell; or if ever you have been parched by a severe fever, transfer your thoughts to that flame, and you will be able clearly to distinguish the difference. For if a bath or a fever so distress and agitate us, what will be our condition when we fall into that river of fire which flows past the terrible Judge’s throne”.

“Heaven is, indeed, a subject which transcends the powers of human language, yet we can form a dim image of what it is like. It is the place ‘whence sorrow and sighing shall flee away’ (Is. xxxv. 10); where poverty and sickness are not to be dreaded; where no one injures or is injured, no one provokes or is provoked; no one is harassed by anxiety about the necessary wants, or frets over the loftier ambitions, of life; it is the place where the tempest of human passions is lulled; where there is neither night nor cold nor heat, nor changes of season, nor old age; but everything belonging to decay is taken away, and incorruptible glory reigns alone. But far above all these things, it is the place where men will continually enjoy the society of Jesus Christ, together with angels and archangels and all the powers above”.

“Open your eyes”, he cries in a transport of feeling, “and contemplate in imagination that heavenly theatre crowded not with men such as we see, but with those who are nobler than gold or precious stones or sunbeams, or any brilliant thing that can be seen; and not with men only, but angels, thrones, dominions, powers ranged about the King whom we dare not describe for his transcendent beauty, majesty, and splendour. If we had to suffer ten thousand deaths every day; nay, if we had to undergo hell itself, for the sake of beholding Christ coming in his glory, and being numbered among the band of saints, would it not be well to submit to all these things? ‘Master, it is a good thing for us to be here’: if such an exclamation burst from St. Peter on witnessing a partial and veiled manifestation of Christ’s glory, what are we to say when the reality shall be displayed, when the royal palace shall be thrown open and we shall see the King Himself; no longer by means of a mirror, or as it were in a riddle, but face to face; no longer through faith, but actual sight”.

He passes on to some remarks upon the soul, which are Platonic in character: “Man cannot alter the shape of his body, but God has conceded to him a power, with the assistance of Divine grace, of increasing the beauty of the soul. Even that soul which has become deformed by the ugliness of sin may be restored to its pristine beauty. No lover was ever so much captivated by the beauty of the body as God loves and longs for the beauty of the human soul. You who are now transported with admiration of Hermione’s beauty” (the girl whom Theodore wished to marry) “may, if you will, cultivate a beauty in your own soul as far exceeding hers as heaven surpasses earth. Beauty of the soul is the only true and permanent kind, and if you could see it with the eye, you would admire it far more than the loveliness of the rainbow and of roses, and other flowers which are evanescent and feeble representations of the soul’s beauty”.

He tells some curious stories of men who had relapsed from monastic life and subsequently been reclaimed to it. One, a young man of noble family and heir to great wealth, had thrown up all the splendour which he might have commanded, and exchanged his riches and his gay clothing for the poverty and mean garb of a recluse upon the mountains, and had attained an astonishing degree of holiness. But some of his relations seduced him from his retreat, and once more he might be seen riding on horseback through the forum followed by a crowd of attendants. But the holy brethren whom he had deserted ceased not to endeavour to recover him; at first he treated them with haughty indifference, when they met and saluted him, as he proudly rode through the streets. But at last, as they desisted not day by day, he would leap from his horse when they appeared, and listen with downcast eyes to their warnings; till, as time went on, he was rescued from his worldly entanglements, and restored to his desert and the study of the true philosophy, and now, when Chrysostom wrote, he bestowed his wealth upon the poor, and had attained the very pinnacle of virtue. Earnestly, therefore, does he implore Theodore to recover his trust in God, to repent and return to the brotherhood which was buried in grief at his defection.

“Now the unbelieving and the worldly rejoice; but return to us, and our sorrow and shame will be transferred to the adversary’s side. It was the beginning of penitence which was arduous; the devil met the penitent at the door of the city of refuge, but, if defeated there, the fury of his assaults would diminish”.

He warned him against an idle confession of sinfulness not accompanied by any honest effort to amend. “Such was no true confession, because not joined with the tears of contrition or followed by alteration of life”. But of Theodore he hoped better things; as there were different degrees of glory reserved for men, implied in our Lord’s mention of “many mansions” and his declaring that every one should be rewarded according to his works, he trusted that Theodore might still obtain a high place; that he might be a vessel of silver, if not of gold or precious stone, in the heavenly house.  

In the second epistle Chrysostom expresses more distinctly his view respecting the solemn obligations of those who joined a religious fraternity. “If tears and groanings could be transmitted through a letter, this of mine would be filled with them; I weep that you have blotted yourself out of the catalogue of the brethren, and trampled on your covenant with Christ”. “The devil assaulted him with peculiar fury, because he was anxious to conquer so worthy an antagonist; one who had despised delicate fare and costly dress, who had spent whole days in the study of Holy Scripture, and whole nights in prayer, who had regarded the society of the brethren as a greater honour than any worldly dignity. What, I pray you, is there that appears blessed and enviable in the world? The prince is exposed to the wrath of the people and the irrational outbursts of popular feeling to the fear of princes greater than himself to anxieties about his subjects; and the ruler of today is tomorrow a private man : for this present life no way differs from a stage; as on that, one man plays the part of a king, another of a general, a third of a common soldier; but when evening has come the king is no king, the ruler no ruler, the general no general; so will it be in that day; each will receive his due reward, not according to the character which he has enacted, but according to the works which he has done”.

Theodore had clearly expressed his intention of honourably marrying Hermione; but though Chrysostom allows that marriage is an honourable estate, yet he boldly declares that for one who like Theodore had made such a solemn renunciation of the world, it was equally criminal with fornication. He had wholly dedicated himself to the service of God, and he had no right to bind himself by any other tie : to marry would be as culpable as desertion in a soldier. He points out the miseries, the anxieties, the toils, often fruitless, which accompanied secular life, especially in the married state. From all such ills the life of the brotherhood was exempt : he alone was truly free who lived for Christ; he was like one who, securely planted on an eminence, beholds other men below him buffeting with the waves of a tumultuous sea. For such a high vantage-ground Chrysostom implores Theodore to make. He begs him to pardon the length of his letter : “nothing but his ardent love for his friend could have constrained him to write this second epistle. Many indeed had discouraged what they regarded as a vain task and sowing upon a rock ; but he was not so to be diverted from his efforts : he trusted that by the grace of God his letters would accomplish something ; and if not, he should at least have delivered himself from the reproach of silence”.

These letters are the productions of a youthful enthusiast, and as such, allowances must be made for them. They abound not only in eloquent passages, but in very fine and true observations upon human nature on penitence on God’s mercy and pardon. It is only the application of them to the case of Theodore which seems harsh and overstrained. At a later period Chrysostom’s views on ascetic and monastic life were modified; but in early life, though never fanatical, they were what we should call extreme. His earnest efforts for the restoration of his friend were crowned with success. Theodore abandoned the world once more and his matrimonial intentions, and retired into the seclusion of the brotherhood. Some twenty years later, in A.D. 394, he was made Bishop of Mopsuestia, which is pretty nearly all we know about him, but the extant fragments of his voluminous writings prove him to have been a man of no ordinary ability, and a powerful commentator of the same sensible and rational school as Chrysostom himself. We may be disposed to say, What of Hermione? Had she no claims to be considered? But the ascetic line of life was regarded by the earnest-minded as so indisputably the noblest which a Christian could adopt, that her disappointment would not have been allowed to weigh in the balance for a moment against what was considered the higher call.

TO BE CONTINUED.