St. John Chrysostom's oldest surviving letters ask a friend to come back

ANTIOCH, Roman Syria, about 370 AD — Theodore has come back. He had walked out of the small brotherhood of friends he belonged to at Antioch, gone back into the city to see to his money, and set about marrying. Saint John Chrysostom, who is in his early twenties and belonged to the same brotherhood, wrote him two letters. Theodore read them, gave up his possessions, gave up the marriage and returned.

The brotherhood was a handful of young men and it was new. Basil, St. John Chrysostom’s closest friend, had pushed him to leave his home so that the two of them could live together. Two of their fellow students from the rhetoric school of Libanius joined them. One was Theodore, a few years younger than St. John Chrysostom and Basil. The common life in a monastery was still new in Syria: a pupil of St. Antony had lately brought in the Egyptian rule of St. Pachomius, twenty years or so after both those men died.

Theodore had joined hard. The second letter recalls it: fine food ignored, costly clothes despised, whole days given to reading and whole nights to prayer, his family’s standing never mentioned and his money never thought about. Then he fell for a woman named Hermione, wanted to marry her, and went back into the city. He took up his business again, pressed on with the marriage, and defended himself out of ancient history. The two letters that went after him, written about this year, 370 AD, are the earliest of St. John Chrysostom’s writings that survive.

The first letter opens on Jeremiah’s words — “Oh! that my head were water, and mine eyes a fountain of tears!” — and St. John Chrysostom claims them more fairly than the prophet did. Jeremiah was weeping over cities. Then St. John Chrysostom states his own subject: “For it is not the overthrow of a city which I mourn, nor the captivity of wicked men, but the desolation of a sacred soul, the destruction and effacement of a Christ-bearing temple.”

He does not drop the image; he walks through the sacked building. Barbarian hands in the holy of holies, fire taken to the ark, the mercy seat and the cherubim — then the turn that makes it Theodore’s. That temple, St. John Chrysostom writes, “glistened not with gold and silver, but with the grace of the Spirit, and in place of the ark and the cherubim, it had Christ, and His Father, and the Paraclete seated within.” Now, he writes, it has “neither door nor bolt, and is laid open to all manner of soul-destroying and shameful thoughts.”

It is a hard letter to be sent, and the hardness is deliberate. St. John Chrysostom turns the parable of the lost coin round. In the parable the woman finds the coin and calls her neighbours together to be glad with her. St. John Chrysostom writes that he will call together every friend the two men share, and that he will tell each one not “Rejoice with me” but “Mourn with me.” Then he sets a term. “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,” he writes, “even if we manifest the greatest penitence, it will avail us naught … no one will be able even with the tip of his finger to cool us in the flame.”

The letter’s largest argument, though, is not against the marriage but against despair, and it runs the whole length. What sinks a man is despair, not the number of his sins. The devil’s object, St. John Chrysostom writes, is to cut the cord of hope and let the weight do the rest. He will not even say that Judas sinned beyond the reach of repentance. And he tells Theodore why he thinks he can be got back: “For if the devil had such great power as to cast thee down from that pinnacle and height of virtue into the extremity of evil doing, much more will God be able to draw thee up again to thy former confidence.”

The second letter is shorter and changes the ground. St. John Chrysostom begins by admitting what writing cannot do: “If it were possible to express tears and groans by means of writing I would have filled the letter, which I now send to you, with them.” Then he names the injury. It is neither the money nor the woman: “Now I weep not because you are anxious concerning your patrimony, but because you have blotted out your name from the list of the brethren, because you have trampled upon the covenant which you had made with Christ.” That covenant is what the argument turns on. Nobody indicts a private citizen for not enlisting, he writes, but a soldier caught leaving the ranks faces the heaviest penalty there is.

St. John Chrysostom asked him for one thing: “stand up bravely, and return speedily to the place from which thou hast departed, and deem not this blow, lasting but for a little while, any reproach.” Theodore did what he was asked.