A martyr tells St. John Chrysostom the march is over

COMANA, Pontus, this month, 407 AD — The two soldiers taking Saint John Chrysostom to the far edge of the empire walked him past Comana in Pontus without stopping and lodged him for the night in the shrine of the martyr St. Basiliscus, five or six miles outside the wall. He had been three months on the road on foot. The march got no further than that shrine.

He was Bishop of Constantinople, about sixty, consecrated in February 398 AD and more than three years in exile. Bishops in Syria had been working to have him moved somewhere else, because three years at Cucusus had not silenced him: he was more of an obstacle to them as an exile than he had ever been in office. He wanted his see back, and had begun to believe God had kept him alive through so many dangers in order to give it to him. But only a rescript — the Emperor’s written answer to a petition — could move an exile on, so they sent to the capital, and in the middle of June this year they had their order. It sent him to Pityus, a desolate place on the shore of the Black Sea at the empire’s frontier, near the Caucasus. The order was harsher than the one that had put him in Cucusus: it fixed a narrow limit of time for delivering him, with a fine if he was not delivered inside it. That clause put the pace of the march into the hands of two soldiers of the imperial guard, who said their instructions were to hurry, and that the sooner he died by the roadside the higher their promotion would be.

In the first months of 401 AD several bishops of Asia invited St. John Chrysostom to Ephesus. There he appointed a new archbishop and, with the assembled bishops consenting, deposed six bishops for simony: they had bought their sees. He was accused of having gone beyond the boundaries of his own jurisdiction, and after that the accusations came easily. Toward the end of 402 AD the Emperor summoned Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, to Constantinople to answer several charges brought against him by Egyptian monks, before a synod over which St. John Chrysostom was to preside. Theophilus came, and instead of standing trial he held one. He gathered thirty-six bishops, all but seven of them Egyptians, in a suburb of Chalcedon called the Oak, and there procured the deposition and banishment of St. John Chrysostom on false charges. St. John Chrysostom was summoned three times and would not appear before a court made up of the men accusing him, so the court declared him deposed, and the Emperor Arcadius consented to it. Rather than let the city fight for him, he gave himself up to the soldiers on the third day.

He was back within days. The crowds in the streets turned threatening, an accident in the palace frightened the Empress Eudoxia into fearing a punishment from heaven for the exile, and she ordered his recall. It did not hold. The following Easter his enemies persuaded the Emperor to shut him out of his own church as a man condemned by two councils, and on June 5, 404 AD Arcadius signed the edict of banishment. He was marched across Galatia and Cappadocia in the heat of July and August to Cucusus, a mountain village on the border of Cilicia and Armenia.

From Cucusus, and from the fortress of Arabissus when the Isaurian raiders came down out of the hills, he kept up a correspondence that reached from Antioch to Rome. People kept going out of Antioch into Armenia to see him, and came home thinking more of him than when they set out.

He got through last winter better than the ones before it. He stayed in the house, mostly in bed, wrapped in blankets in a room where a fire was kept burning, and he used a medicine a woman had sent him. People in the district were astonished that a man so weak stood the climate at all. Well before the order came he had said he did not believe he could survive the fatigue of another long journey.

The soldiers started him off on foot from Cucusus. The harsher of the two set out one morning in a heavy shower rather than wait it out, so that the water ran in streams down the bishop’s neck and chest. One very hot day the same soldier pressed on gladly, because he knew the sun brought on the bishop’s headaches. Whenever they came to a town or village with a bath, he allowed no delay.

St. Basiliscus, the martyr of the shrine they came to this month, had been bishop of Comana, and was put to death at Nicomedia in the persecution under the Emperor Maximian. That night a priest shared the lodging with St. John Chrysostom.

According to longstanding Catholic Tradition, St. Basiliscus called first to the priest: “Get ready the place for our brother John; he is coming.” Then the martyr stood by St. John Chrysostom and said: “Be of good cheer, brother; to-morrow we shall be together.”

St. John Chrysostom took it as a sure warning. In the morning he asked the two soldiers to let him stay where he was until eleven o’clock. They refused, and pushed on. They had covered about thirty furlongs, under four miles, when the sickness took him so sharply that they could not go on with him. They turned round and carried him back to the shrine he had asked to stay in, and he died there a few hours later.

Inside, he asked for white clothes, and changed everything he had on, down to his shoes, and gave the clothes he took off to the clergy standing round him. He received the Eucharist, and said a few words of farewell to them. Then St. John Chrysostom prayed aloud in front of them all, in the words he had used all his life, and signed himself as he finished: “Glory be to God for all things, Amen.”