St. John Chrysostom answers his critics with his widowed mother's speech

ANTIOCH, Roman Syria, 381 AD — Saint John Chrysostom has finished six books answering the closest friend of his youth. Early in the first book he breaks off the argument to set down a speech his mother, Anthusa, made to him in her own bedroom. She had been widowed at twenty and had never married again. Anthusa told St. John Chrysostom what widowhood had cost her and how she had kept his father’s estate whole, then asked one thing back: that he stay in her house as long as she lived.

The book is On the Priesthood, a conversation with that friend, Basil. A few years ago a report went round Antioch that both were about to be made bishops, though neither had reached thirty, the age the canons require. St. John Chrysostom hid when the bishop who was to ordain them arrived. Basil knew nothing about it, was led away on some other excuse and consecrated alone, and was told that his friend had already accepted ordination without a struggle. Afterwards he asked what answer St. John Chrysostom meant to make in public, since the city called him arrogant and vain.

The six books are that answer, written at Antioch in the years that followed and finished no later than his diaconate. They argue who is fit to carry the priesthood, and St. John Chrysostom makes his own case the example. He hid, he writes, because he could see nothing in himself that deserved the office, while Basil was fit to be put in charge of a great many people.

St. John Chrysostom was born in this city about 349 AD. His father, Secundus, an officer of high rank in the Syrian army, died while his son was still an infant. Anthusa was twenty, left with the baby and an elder daughter, and she brought him up on her own.

Basil had already turned to the ascetic life. Once St. John Chrysostom had left the law courts, Basil asked him for something. He “persistently urged that we should each of us abandon our own home and share a common dwelling”, St. John Chrysostom writes, “in fact he persuaded me, and the affair was taken in hand”.

He did not go. “But the continual lamentations of my mother hindered me from granting him the favor,” St. John Chrysostom writes.

“For when she perceived that I was meditating this step,” he goes on, “she took me into her own private chamber, and, sitting near me on the bed where she had given birth to me, she shed torrents of tears” — “to which she added words yet more pitiable than her weeping”.

Anthusa began with his father. “My child, it was not the will of Heaven that I should long enjoy the benefit of your father’s virtue,” she told him. “For his death soon followed the pangs which I endured at your birth, leaving you an orphan and me a widow before my time to face all the horrors of widowhood, which only those who have experienced them can fairly understand.”

By the horrors she meant the work of running a house alone, and she described it as what happens to any young woman widowed as she had been. “For she has to correct the laziness of servants,” Anthusa said, “and to be on the watch for their rogueries, to repel the designs of relations, to bear bravely the threats of those who collect the public taxes, and harshness in the imposition of rates.”

Offers of marriage came, and she turned them all down. “None of these things, however, induced me to enter into a second marriage, or introduce a second husband into your father’s house,” Anthusa told her son: “but I held on as I was, in the midst of the storm and uproar, and did not shun the iron furnace of widowhood.”

The money came next, the estate his father had left him. “For, besides keeping the whole of it intact,” Anthusa said, “I spared no expense which was needful to give you an honorable position, spending for this purpose some of my own fortune, and of my marriage dowry.”

Then she asked for one thing. “Yet do not think that I say these things by way of reproaching you,” Anthusa said; “only in return for all these benefits I beg one favor: do not plunge me into a second widowhood; nor revive the grief which is now laid to rest: wait for my death: it may be in a little while I shall depart.” She set the terms: “When, then, you shall have committed my body to the ground, and mingled my bones with your father’s, embark for a long voyage, and set sail on any sea you will: then there will be no one to hinder you: but as long as my life lasts, be content to live with me.”

St. John Chrysostom ends the speech with a line of his own: “These words, and more, my mother spoke to me, and I related them to that noble youth. But he, so far from being disheartened by these speeches, was the more urgent in making the same request as before.”

He stayed. He left Antioch for the mountains south of the city only after Anthusa died, and spent six years there.