Exiled St. John Chrysostom sends a book to a woman facing prosecution

CUCUSUS, Armenia, 407 AD — Saint John Chrysostom has sent a book down out of these mountains to Constantinople, to a woman who was prosecuted there three years ago for burning his cathedral down. Its title is the whole of its argument: That No One Can Harm the Man Who Does Not Injure Himself. He wrote it this year in exile and sent it with a letter to the deaconess Saint Olympias, telling her to read it over and over and, if she had the strength, aloud.

He was Archbishop of Constantinople until two councils of bishops declared him deposed and the Emperor Arcadius signed an edict of banishment in June 404 AD. St. Olympias is a deaconess of that church, a widow who gave her fortune to the churches and the poor. While St. John Chrysostom was alive and in exile, an old man named Arsacius was installed in his place at Constantinople. A law of November 18, 404 AD then ordered governors everywhere to drive anyone who refused communion with Arsacius out of the churches.

Hours after the soldiers took St. John Chrysostom out of the capital, the cathedral and the Senate House burned, and his friends were charged with setting the fire. A reader named Eutropius, ordered to name the men who had done it, refused, was scourged and died in a prison cell. St. Olympias was examined harder than the others. Asked why she had set fire to the Great Church, she answered: “My past life ought to avert all suspicion from me, for I have devoted my large property to the restoration of the temples of God.” The prefect of the city, Optatus, then offered to end the prosecution if she would acknowledge Arsacius. She told him that she would accept no terms until she was cleared of the charge, and that force would not make her take communion from men she ought to leave. Optatus fined her heavily; she paid without arguing and crossed the straits to Cyzicus. Word of how she had stood reached Cucusus and cheered St. John Chrysostom.

Cucusus is a deserted mountain town on the Armenian frontier, picked for him by his enemies, with neither market-place nor market. The winters are hard and his stomach is weak. He has asked St. Olympias not to worry about either, or about the Isaurian raiders. Letters go out by whatever hands come up the road: monks, her servants, and the deacon Moduarius. By the time the book was done she was ill, and had written that her sickness came of despondency.

Readers greedy for present things, he writes at the top of the book, will find it “of a strange and paradoxical kind” and “will laugh immoderately”. Then he states the case flat: “no one of those who are wronged is wronged by another, but experiences this injury at his own hands.”

He builds his one definition out of animals first. He asks what the virtue of a horse is: not the gold-studded bridle and the plaited mane, but speed, sound hoofs and the sense to carry its rider out of a rout. Then he turns to man. “What then is the virtue of man?” Not riches, he answers, nor health, reputation, liberty or life itself, but “carefulness in holding true doctrine, and rectitude in life. Of these things not even the devil himself will be able to rob a man.” Job lost all the rest to the devil, and the attack “not only did him no damage but rendered him more glorious”.

He carries the argument into torture, exile and violent death — “all these sufferings when they are unjustly inflicted by any one on another, expiate sins, and work righteousness”. He raises the obvious objection, that if nobody is harmed there is no purpose in hell. “I did not say that no one injures, but that no one is injured,” he answers. Punishments stand, St. John Chrysostom goes on, because of what the wrongdoer wills, not because of what the sufferer loses: “For God does not abolish penalties on account of the virtue of those who suffer; but he ordains punishments on account of the malice of those who do wickedly.”

One chapter is addressed to a reader driven into exile, taken captive, bound, burned or put to death. It turns on the three young men in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace. He does not admire them because the fire spared them. He writes that their crown was being woven “before the issue of events” — from the moment they answered the king, before anyone knew whether the fire would burn. He quotes their answer from the book of Daniel: “But if not, be it known unto you, O King, that we will not serve your Gods nor worship the golden image which you have set up.”

The covering letter says what he meant the book to do. He asked St. Olympias to “go over it constantly” and, if her health allowed, to “recite it aloud”. He was blunt about what he was treating: she was to “shake off the despondency which now oppresses you, and do not exact inordinate and cruel penances from yourself”. Of the illness he wrote that in it she had “a perpetual executioner residing with you”. Of the book he wrote: “if you will, it may prove an effectual remedy for you.”