St. John Chrysostom protests the noise at the empress's new silver statue

CONSTANTINOPLE, September 403 AD — A silver statue of the Empress Eudoxia went up this month on a porphyry column in the square outside the cathedral of St. Sophia, and the noise of the celebrations reached the services inside the church. Saint John Chrysostom, the Archbishop of Constantinople, told his people in church that the dancing and mimes at the statue dishonoured the Church. The empress took his words as an insult aimed at her, and she set about getting him tried by a council of bishops for the second time this year.

Late last year the emperor summoned Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria to answer charges before a synod that St. John Chrysostom was to chair. Theophilus arrived in June. Instead of answering the charges, he gathered thirty-six bishops of his own at the Oak, a suburb of Chalcedon across the Bosphorus. They deposed St. John Chrysostom on false charges and sent him into exile. The night after he was taken away, an earthquake shook the city. It was felt hardest in the empress’s bedroom. Eudoxia was frightened and ordered him recalled. Crowds met him with candles and hymns.

St. John Chrysostom had been back in the city for only two months. Since his return he and the empress had praised each other in public. But Eudoxia had taken offence at his preaching before, when she was told that a sermon of his against women’s vanity and love of luxury was aimed at her. Now she wanted her statue given the same homage as the statues of the emperors. St. John Chrysostom wanted the noise at his doors stopped.

The square where the statue went up was the smaller forum of the city. On one side stood the senate-house. The Emperor Constantine had filled it with statues taken from pagan temples, among them the Muses brought from their grove on Mount Helicon in Greece. Facing it across the square was the entrance to St. Sophia. Public buildings and a few private houses, all fronted with colonnades, closed the other two sides. In the middle was a stone platform paved with marbles of several kinds, where speeches were made on great public days.

The column went up on that platform: a tall shaft of porphyry on a high base, with the empress on top in silver, dressed in a long robe. Only half the width of a street separated it from the church.

The dedication followed the custom kept whenever a statue of an emperor was put up: applause, dances and mimes. Music and dancing were the old pagan rites of homage to the emperor’s image. Christian emperors had kept them as a way of holding the people’s loyalty. The celebrations did not end with the dedication. Games went on regularly at the foot of the column, and the crowd’s noise carried through the church doors into the services.

St. John Chrysostom spoke as he always had. The historian Socrates wrote that he had “regained his ordinary freedom and keenness of tongue.” He regarded the games, in Socrates’ words, as “an insult offered to the church.” In Socrates’ view the proper course was a petition asking the authorities to stop them. St. John Chrysostom chose to speak in church instead. In a public sermon he told the people that what was going on at the statue brought dishonour on the Church, and he mocked the people who had ordered the games. He also complained to the prefect of the city, the official who governed Constantinople for the emperor. The prefect was no friend of St. John Chrysostom, and he carried the complaint to the empress. The sermon reminded Eudoxia of her earlier grievances against the archbishop. She took it as open contempt for her person and decided to have another council of bishops called against him. St. John Chrysostom knew what she intended, and he did not give way. He went on speaking against her in church, more openly than before.