Saint John Chrysostom, his Life and Times

Saint John Chrysostom, his Life and Times

A sketch of the church and the empire in the fourth century

By

W. R. W. Stephens

COPIED FROM A FRONTISPIECE TO THE EDITION BY FRONTO DUCÆUS, A.D. 1636, OF ST. CHRYSOSTOM’S WORKS (IN THE CATHEDRAL LIBRARY, CHICHESTER). THE ORIGINAL IS STATED TO HAVE BEEN ENGRAVED FROM AN EIKON OF GREAT ANTIQUITY, AT CONSTANTINOPLE, AND AGREES WITH THE NOTICES OF CHRYSOSTOM’S APPEARANCE BY GREEK WRITERS, WHO DESCRIBE HIM AS SHORT, WITH A LARGE HEAD, AMPLE, WRINKLED FOREHEAD, EYES DEEP-SET BUT PLEASING, HOLLOW CHEEKS, AND A SCANTY GREY BEARD.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

The present edition of this Essay is substantially a reproduction of the first. It is possible, indeed, and I hope probable, that the fruits of nine years’ more experience and study would have manifested themselves in some marked improvements upon the former work had I rewritten or recast the whole of it. But after mature consideration it did not seem to me that the defects of my original attempt were sufficient to warrant such an expenditure of time and toil.

I have therefore contented myself with carefully revising the text and references, and making here and there a few slight alterations in the way either of addition or omission.

Woolbeding Rectory,

Feby. 20, 1880.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

The considerations which induced me to undertake this monograph are mentioned in the introductory chapter. How far the design there indicated has been satisfactorily fulfilled, it is for others to decide. I am of course conscious of defects, for every workman’s ideal aim should be higher than what he can actually accomplish. The work has incurred a certain risk from having been once or twice suspended for a considerable period; but I have always returned to it with increased interest and pleasure, nor can I charge myself with having wittingly bestowed less pains on one part than another. I have endeavoured to make it a trustworthy narrative by drawing from the most original sources to which I could gain access; and where, as in those portions which touch on secular history, the lead of general historians, such as Gibbon or De Broglie has been followed, I have, as far as possible, consulted the authorities to which they refer. To modern authors from whom I have derived valuable assistance for special parts of the work, such as M. Amédée Thierry and Dr. Foerster, my obligations are acknowledged in their proper place.

Neander’s Life of St. Chrysostom has, of course, throughout been frequently consulted. It is marked by the customary merits and defects of that historian. It is full of research, information, thought, and refined religious sentiment; but he fails to bring out strongly the personality of his subject. We have abundance of Chrysostom’s sayings and opinions, but somehow too little of Chrysostom himself. The fact is that Neander seems always to be thinking more of those views and theories about the growth of Christian doctrine and the Church, which he wishes to impress upon men’s minds, than of the person about whom he is writing. Thus, the subject of his biography becomes too much a mere vehicle for conveying Neander’s own opinions, and the personality of the character fades away in proportion. Some passages in the life of his subject are related at inordinate length; others, because less illustrative of Neander’s views, are imperfectly sketched, if not omitted.

In extracts from the works of Chrysostom, the somewhat difficult question of the comparative advantages of translation and paraphrase has been decided, on the whole, in favour of the latter. The condensation of matter gained by a paraphrase is an important, indeed necessary, object, if many specimens are to be given from such a very voluminous author as Chrysostom. A careful endeavour, at the same time, has been made to render faithfully the general sense of the original; and wherever the peculiar beauty of the language or the importance of the subject seemed to demand it, a translation has been given.

From an early date in the sixteenth century down to the present time the works of Chrysostom have occupied the attention of learned editors. The first attempts, after the invention of printing, were mainly confined to Latin translations of different portions. Afterwards appeared—

(1.) In 1529 the Greek text of the Homilies on St. Paul, published at Vienna, typis Stephani et fratrum, with a preface by Maximus Donatus. This was followed by the Commentaries on the New Testament, published by Commelin, a printer at Heidelberg, four vols. folio, A.D. 1591-1602.

(2.) In 1612 appeared a magnificent edition of the whole works, in eight thick folio volumes, printed at Eton, and prepared by Sir Henry Savile. Savile, born in 1549, was equally distinguished for his knowledge of mathematics and Greek, in which he acted for a time as tutor to Queen Elizabeth. He became Warden of Merton in 1585, and Provost of Eton in 1596. Promotion in Church and State was offered to him by James I., but declined, though he accepted a knighthood in 1604. His only son died about that time, and he devoted his fortune henceforth entirely to the promotion of learning. The Savilian Professorships of Geometry and Astronomy in Oxford were founded by him, and a library furnished with mathematical books for the use of his Professors. He spared no labour or expense to make his edition of St. Chrysostom handsome and complete. He personally examined most of the great libraries in Europe for mss., and, through the kindness of English ambassadors and eminent men of learning abroad, his copyists were admitted to the libraries of Paris, Basle, Augsburg, Munich, Vienna, and other cities. He used the Commelinian edition as his printer’s copy, carefully compared with five mss., the various readings of which are marked (by a not very distinct plan) in the margin. The chief value of the work consists in the prefaces and notes, contributed some of them by Casaubon and other learned men, though by far the best are Savile’s own. The whole cost of bringing out this grand edition is said to have been £8000. Savile’s wife was so jealous of her husband’s attachment to the work that she threatened to burn it.

(3.) Meanwhile, Fronton le Duc, a French Jesuit, had been labouring independently, but in most amicable intercourse with Savile, not only to edit the works of Chrysostom complete, but accompanied by a Latin translation, which he supplied himself for those pieces of which he failed to find any good one already existing. His death arrested the work, which was taken up, after a time, by the two brothers, Frederick and Claude Morel, and completed by the latter in 1633. It was published in Paris in 1636, in twelve large folio volumes. The Commelinian was again used as the printer’s copy, with fewer alterations than in the edition of Savile.

(4.) We now come to the great Benedictine edition, prepared under the care of Bernard de Montfaucon, who deserted the profession of arms at the age of twenty to become, as a member of the brotherhood of St Maur, one of the most marvellously industrious workers in literature that the world has ever seen. In 1698, when the Benedictines had completed their editions of SS. Augustine and Athanasius, they began to prepare for an edition of Chrysostom, which they had intended to do for more than thirty years. Montfaucon was sent to Italy, where he spent three years in examining libraries; and, on his return, obtained leave from the presidents of the congregation to employ four or five of the brethren in collating mss. in the Royal Library at Paris, and in those of Colbert and Coislin. Their labours extended over thirteen years; more than 300 MSS., containing different portions of Chrysostom’s works, having been discovered in those libraries. Montfaucon, meanwhile, corresponded with learned men in all parts of Europe, in order to procure materials and further collations. His correspondents in England were Potter, Bishop of Oxford, Bentley, and Needham; and in Ireland, Godwin, Bishop of Kilmore. The result was that, after more than twenty years of incessant toil, Montfaucon produced an edition, in which several pieces saw the light for the first time, and others, imperfect in previous editions, were presented entire. The text after all is the least satisfactory part of the work. Mr. Field has discovered that the eight principal MSS. employed were not very carefully collated, and that, though Savile’s text is extremely praised, that of Morel, by a curious inconsistency, is most closely followed, which is little more than a reproduction of the original Commelinian. The main value of the edition consists in the prefaces, written by Montfaucon to every set of homilies and every treatise, in which the chronology, contents, and character of the composition are most fully and ably discussed. The chronological arrangement also of the pieces is a great improvement on the editions of Savile and Fronton le Duc, who had made no attempt of that kind. The last volume, the thirteenth, contains a life of St Chrysostom, a most copious index, and dissertations on the doctrine, discipline, and heresies prevalent in his age, illustrated by notices collected from his works. On the whole, the edition must be pronounced a marvellous monument of ability and industry, especially when it is considered that at the date of its completion, 1738, Montfaucon was eighty-three years of age, and had been engaged for upwards of fifty years in literary work of a most laborious description. He died in 1741.

(5.) The last edition, which leaves little or nothing to be desired, is that which I have used in preparing this volume—the Abbé Migne’s, in 13 vols., Paris, 1863. It is substantially a reproduction of the Benedictine, in a rather less cumbrous size, and embodies some of the best corrections, notes, and prefaces of modern commentators, especially those of Mr. Field to the Homilies of St. Matthew, and some by the learned editor himself.

A brief sketch of the principal forms in which Chrysostom’s works have appeared seemed an appropriate introduction to the history of the man himself. If the perusal of that history shall afford to readers half as much interest, pleasure, and instruction as I have myself derived from the composition of it, I shall feel amply rewarded for my labour; and I gladly take this opportunity of expressing my gratitude to my father-in-law for originally suggesting a work of this kind, and to many friends, and especially my wife, for constant encouragement, without which a mixture of indolence and diffidence might have prevented the completion of my design.

Densworth Cottage, Chichester,

All Saints Day 1871.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

I. There are many great names in history which have been familiar to us from almost our earliest years, but of the personal character, the actual life of those who bore them, we are comparatively ignorant. We know that they were men of genius; industrious, energetic workers, who, as statesmen, reformers, warriors, writers, speakers, exercised a vital influence for good or ill upon their fellow-men. They have achieved a reputation which will never die; but from various causes their personality does not stand out before us in clear and bold relief. We know something about some of the most important passages in their life, a few of their sayings, a little of their writings; but the men themselves we do not know.

Frequently the reason of this is, that though they occupy a place, perhaps an important place, in the great drama of history, yet they have not played one of the foremost parts; and general history cannot spare much time or space beyond what is necessary to describe the main progress of events, and the actions and characters of those who were most prominently concerned in them. Other men may have been greater in themselves; they may have been first-rate in their own sphere, but that sphere was too much secluded or circumscribed to admit of the extensive and conspicuous public influence of which alone history takes much cognisance. They are to history what those side or background figures in the pictures of great medieval painters are to the grand central subject of the piece: they do but help to fill up the canvas, yet the picture would not be complete without them. They are notable personages, well worthy of being separately depicted, though in the large historical representation they play a subordinate part.

To take out one of these side figures of history, and to make it the centre of a separate picture, grouping round it all the great events and characters among which it moved, is the work of a biographer. And by many it will be felt that nothing invests the general history of any period with such a living interest as viewing it through the light of someone human life. How was this individual soul affected by the movement of the great forces with which it was surrounded? How did it affect them, in its turn, wherever in its progress it came into contact with them? This one consideration will confer on many details of history an importance and freshness of which they seemed too trivial or too dull to be susceptible.

II. Among these side characters in history, characters of men in themselves belonging to the first rank, men whose names will be renowned and honoured to the end of time, but precluded, by disposition or circumstances, from taking the foremost place in the larger canvas of general history, must be reckoned many of the great ecclesiastics of the first four or five centuries of Christianity. Every one recognises as great such names as Origen, Tertullian, Cyprian, Basil, the two Gregories, and many more. Every one would admit that the Church owes them a debt, but it may be safely affirmed that here the acquaintance of many with these eminent men begins and ends. A few scraps from their writings quoted in commentaries, one or two remarkable acts or sayings which have been thought worthy to be handed down, a few passages in which their lives flit across the stage of general history, complete the knowledge of many more. Such men, indeed, as Athanasius and Ambrose are to some extent exceptions. The magnitude of the principles for which they contended, the energy and ability which they displayed in the contest, were too conspicuous to be passed over by the general historian, civil or ecclesiastical. The proverbial expression Athanasius contra mundum attests of itself the pre-eminent greatness of the man. But with other luminaries of the Church, whose powers were perhaps equally great, but not exercised on so public a field or on behalf of such apparently vital questions, history has not dealt, perhaps cannot consistently with its scope deal, in any degree commensurate with their merits. Nor does this remark apply entirely to civil history. Ecclesiastical history also is so much occupied with the consideration of subjects on a large scale and covering a large space of time,—the course of controversies, the growth of doctrines, the relations between Church and State, changes in discipline, in liturgies, in ritual,—that the history of those who lived among these events, and who by their ability made or moulded them, is comparatively lost sight of. The outward operations are seen, but the springs which set them going are concealed. How can general history, for instance, adequately set forth the character and the work of such men as Savonarola or Erasmus, both in their widely different ways men of such incomparable genius and incessant activity? It does not; it only supplies a glimpse, a sketch, which make us long for a fuller vision, a more finished picture.¹

III. It is designed to attempt, in the following pages, such a supplementary chapter in ecclesiastical history. An endeavour will be made not merely to chronicle the life and estimate the character of the great preacher of Antioch and Constantinople, but to place him in the centre of all the great movements, civil as well as religious, of his time, and see what light he and they throw upon one another.

The age in which he lived was a troublous one. The spectacle of a tempestuous sea may in itself excite our interest and inspire us with awe, but place in the midst of it a vessel containing human life, and how deeply is our interest intensified!

What was the general character and position of the clergy in the fourth century? What was the attitude of the Church towards the sensuality, selfishness, luxury, of an effete and debased civilisation on the one hand, and the rude ferocity of young and strong barbarian races on the other? To what extent had Christianity leavened, or had it appreciably leavened at all, popular forms of thought and popular habits of life? What was the existing phase of monasticism? What the ordinary form of worship in the Catholic Church? What the established belief respecting the sacraments and the great verities of the Christian faith? In answer to such inquiries, and to many more, much useful information may be extracted from the works of so prolific a writer and preacher as Chrysostom. Being concerned also, as a preacher, with moral practice more than with abstract theology, his homilies reflect, like the writings of satirists, the manners of the age. The habits of private life, the fashionable amusements, the absurdities of dress, all the petty foibles, as well as the more serious vices of the society by which he was surrounded, are dragged out without remorse, and made the subjects of solemn admonition, or fierce invective, or withering sarcasm, or ironical jest.

IV. Nor does secular history, from which not a single chapter in ecclesiastical history can without injury be dissociated, want for copious illustration. Not only from the memorable story of the sedition at Antioch, and from the public events at Constantinople, in which Chrysostom played a conspicuous part, but from many an allusion or incidental expression scattered up and down his works, we may collect rays of light on the social and political condition of the Empire. We get glimpses in his pages of a large mass of the population hovering midway between Paganism and Christianity; we detect an oppressive system of taxation, a widely-spread venality in the administration of public business, a general insecurity of life arising from the almost total absence of what we understand by police regulations, a depressed agriculture, a great slave population, a vast turbulent army as dangerous to the peace of society as the enemies from whom it was supposed to defend it, the presence of barbarians in the country as servants, soldiers, or colonists, the constantly-impending danger from other hordes ever hovering on the frontier, and, like famished wolves, gazing with hungry eyes on the plentiful prey which lay beyond it. But in the midst of the national corruption we see great characters stand out; and it is remarkable that they belong, without exception, to the two elements which alone were strong and progressive in the midst of the general debility and decadence. All the men of commanding genius in this era were either Christian or barbarian. A young and growing faith, a vigorous and manly race: these were the two forces destined to work hand in hand for the destruction of an old and the establishment of a new order of things. The chief doctors of Christianity in the fourth century—Augustine, Chrysostom, Ambrose — are incomparably greater than their contemporary advocates of the old religion and philosophy, Symmachus or Libanius; even as the Gothic Alaric and Fravitta, and the Vandal Stilicho, were the only generals who did not disgrace the Roman arms.

V. Some remarks on the theology of Chrysostom will be found in the concluding chapter. The appellation of preacher,² by which he is most generally known, is a true indicator of the sphere in which his powers were greatest. It was in upholding a pure and lofty standard of Christian morality, and in denouncing unchristian wickedness, that his life was mainly spent, rather than, like Augustine’s, in constructing and teaching a logical system of doctrine. The rage of his enemies, to which he ultimately fell a victim, was not bred of the bitterness of theological controversy, but of the natural antagonism between the evil and the good. And it is partly on this account that neither the remoteness of time, nor difference of circumstances, which separate us from him, can dim the interest with which we read his story. He fought not so much for any abstract question of theology or point of ecclesiastical discipline, which may have lost its meaning and importance for us, but for those grand principles of truth and justice, Christian charity, and Christian holiness, which ought to be dear to men equally in all ages.

VI. But there is also in the struggle of Chrysostom with the secular power an ecclesiastical and historical interest, as well as a moral one. We see prefigured in his deposition the fate of the Eastern Church in the Eastern capital of the Empire. As the papacy grew securely by the retreat from the old Rome of any secular rival, so the patriarchate of the new Rome was constantly, increasingly depressed by the presence of such a rival. Of all the great churchmen who flourished in the fourth century, Athanasius, Basil, the Gregories, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Chrysostom, the last three alone survived into the fifth century. But the glory of the Western Church was then only in its infancy; the glory of the Eastern culminated in Chrysostom. From his time the patriarchs of Constantinople fell more and more into the servile position of court functionaries. The working out of that grand idea, a visible organised Catholic Church, uniform in doctrine and discipline, an idea which grew more and more as the political disintegration of the Empire increased, was to be accomplished by the more commanding, law-giving spirit of the West. Intrepid in spirit, inflexible of purpose, though Chrysostom was, he could not subdue, he could only provoke to more violent opposition, the powers with which he was brought into collision. Ineffectual was his contest with ecclesiastical corruption and secular tyranny, as compared with a similar contest waged by his Western contemporary, Ambrose; ineffectual also were the efforts, after his time, of the Church which he represented to assert the full dignity of its position.

VII. Chrysostom, and the contemporary fathers of the Eastern Church, naturally seem very remote from us; but, in fact, they are nearer to us in their modes of thought than many who in point of time are less distant. They were brought up in the study of that Greek literature with which we are familiar. Philosophy had not stiffened into scholasticism. The ethics of Chrysostom are substantially the same with the ethics of Butler. So, again, Eastern fathers of the fourth century are far more nearly allied to us in theology than writers of a few centuries later. If we are to look to the rock whence our Anglican liturgy was hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence Anglican reformed theology was digged, we must turn our eyes, above all other directions, to the Eastern Church and the Eastern fathers. It was observed by Mr. Alexander Knox,³ that the earlier days of the Greek Church seem resplendent with a glow of simple, fervent piety, such as in a Church, as a whole, has never since been seen; and that this character is strikingly in harmony with our own liturgy, so overflowing with sublime aspirations, so Catholic, not bearing the impress of any one system of theology, but containing what is best in all. We may detect in Chrysostom the germ of medieval corruptions, such as the invocation of saints, the adoration of relics, and a sensuous conception of the change effected in the holy elements in the Eucharist; but these are the raw material of error, not yet wrought into definite shape. The Bishop of Rome is recognised, as will be seen from Chrysostom’s correspondence with Innocent, as a great potentate, whose intercessions are to be solicited in time of trouble and difficulty, and to whose judgment much deference is to be paid, but by no means as a supreme ruler in Christendom.

Thus, the tone of Chrysostom’s language is far more akin to that of our own Church than of the medieval or present Church of Rome. In his habit of referring to Holy Scripture as the ultimate source and basis of all true doctrine, so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man as an article of faith; in his careful endeavour to ascertain the real meaning of Scripture, not seeking for fanciful or mystical interpretations, or supporting preconceived theories, but patiently labouring, with a mixture of candour, reverence, and common sense, to ascertain the exact literal sense of each passage;—in these points, no less than in his theology, he bears an affinity to the best minds of our own reformed Church, and fairly represents that faith of the Catholic Church before the disruption of East and West in which Bishop Ken desired to die; while his fervent piety, and his apostolic zeal as a preacher of righteousness, must command the admiration of all earnest Christians, to whatever country, age, or Church, they may belong.

CHAPTER II.

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,⁴ 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 afterwards⁵ 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 Galilæans, or to give away to the poor, while they would not expend the smallest trifle upon the worship of the gods.⁶ 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 female 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 letter⁷ 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.⁸ 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!⁹

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,¹⁰ 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.¹¹ 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,¹² 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.¹³ 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.¹⁴ 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.¹⁵ 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.¹⁶ 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 Prætorian 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.¹⁷

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.¹⁸ 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,¹⁹ Bishop of Cæsarea, 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 Raphanea 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:²⁰ 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.²¹ 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?²² 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 someday, 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 contend²³ 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.²⁴ 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.²⁵ 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.²⁶ But uno avulso non deficit alter; he was succeeded by another Arian, the eunuch Leontius.²⁷ 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.²⁸ 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.²⁹ 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