Refused a morning's rest, St. John Chrysostom dies outside Comana
The Bishop of Constantinople was about sixty and three years into exile when the illness stopped him under four miles up the road, and the soldiers carried him back.
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AI-generated image, in the manner of a Byzantine mosaic of glass and stone tesserae, from the paper's reference portrait based on St. John Chrysostom, micromosaic icon (Anonymous Greek workshop, 14th century, Vatopedi Monastery, Mount Athos) View source artwork.
COMANA, Pontus, September 14, 407 AD — Saint John Chrysostom died today in the shrine of the martyr St. Basiliscus, five or six miles outside Comana in Pontus, a few hours after the two soldiers escorting him refused to let him rest there and marched him on. He never reached Pityus, the desolate place on the Black Sea shore at the empire’s frontier where they were taking him.
He was Bishop of Constantinople, about sixty years old, and had held the see for nearly ten years. He had been in exile for nearly three years and three months. Bishops in Syria had worked to have him moved further off, because three years at Cucusus, in the mountains on the Armenian border, had not silenced him: his influence had grown in exile rather than faded. Pope Benedict XVI has said of the removal to Pityus: “his condemnation to exile was a true death sentence.”
The trouble had begun in 401 AD. Several bishops of Asia invited St. John Chrysostom to Ephesus, and there he deposed six other bishops for simony: they had bought their sees. He was then accused of exceeding his own jurisdiction, and after that the accusations came easily. Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, was summoned to Constantinople to answer charges of his own before a synod St. John Chrysostom was to chair. Rather than answer them, Theophilus gathered thirty-six bishops at a suburb of Chalcedon called the Oak and had St. John Chrysostom deposed there on false charges. The Emperor Arcadius consented, and in June 404 AD he signed the edict that banished him.
By this summer he had begun to believe God had brought him through so many dangers in order to give him his church back. But in the middle of June his enemies petitioned the capital again, and the order that came back — the Emperor’s written answer to their petition — was harsher than the one that had put him in Cucusus. It sent him to Pityus, and it set a short deadline for delivering him there, with a fine for missing it. It put a sick man of sixty back on the road in the hands of two soldiers who had been told to hurry and promised a higher promotion if he died on the way. The march began three months ago.
Last night the soldiers took him past Comana without stopping in the town and lodged him outside the wall in the martyr’s shrine. St. Basiliscus had been bishop of Comana, and was put to death at Nicomedia in the persecution under the Emperor Maximian. According to longstanding Catholic Tradition, the martyr stood beside him in the night and said: “Be of good cheer, brother; to-morrow we shall be together.” He took the words as a warning that he would die the next day.
In the morning he asked the two soldiers to let him stay where he was until eleven o’clock, because he was ill. They refused, and pushed on. One of the two had been helping him quietly along the road; the other had driven the march for three months. That man had set out in a downpour rather than wait it out, and the water ran down the bishop’s neck and chest. He was glad of the hottest days, because he knew the sun brought on the bishop’s headaches. At every town on the road with a bath in it he allowed no stop at all. When travellers asked him to spare the bishop, he took it as an insult.
About thirty furlongs out — under four miles — the illness struck St. John Chrysostom so hard that the march could not go on. The two soldiers turned round and carried him back to the shrine they had started from.
Inside the shrine, he asked for white clothes. He changed into them, down to his shoes, and gave away what he took off to the people standing round him. Then he received the Eucharist and spoke a few words of farewell to them. He prayed his last prayer aloud in front of them all, in the words he had used all his life, and made the sign of the cross at the final Amen: “Glory be to God for all things, Amen.”
He died there, on the day the Church keeps the Triumph of the Holy Cross. Monks and nuns came to the shrine for the burial. Virgins, ascetics and men known for their devout lives came in from Syria, Cilicia, Pontus and Armenia. So many came that people there thought they must have been called in by a signal. The funeral rites were held at the shrine, and St. John Chrysostom was buried in it, beside the martyr.
About this story
Catholic Saints News tells the lives of the saints as news from their own time and place. This story was written with AI from the historical record, and we read and approved it before it ran.
The Saints' words. This newspaper will never make a saint say something the historical record does not preserve.
Read more
- · Palladius of Helenopolis, Dialogue concerning the Life of St John Chrysostom, ch. XI
- · Benedict XVI, Letter for the 16th centenary of the death of Saint John Chrysostom (2007)
Image. AI-generated image, in the manner of a Byzantine mosaic of glass and stone tesserae, from the paper's reference portrait based on St. John Chrysostom, micromosaic icon (Anonymous Greek workshop, 14th century, Vatopedi Monastery, Mount Athos) — see the original.
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