Empress Eudoxia dies, and exiled St. John Chrysostom is not called back

CONSTANTINOPLE, October 6, 404 AD — The Empress Eudoxia died at Constantinople in the first days of October, 404 AD, days after a hailstorm struck the city. In June her husband’s edict had sent Saint John Chrysostom, the city’s archbishop, into exile. The empress had chosen where he would go: Cucusus, a mountain village on the borders of Cilicia and Armenia. Her death did not bring him back. He was still in that village when she died.

The empress wanted him out of her city, and the bishops who had condemned him wanted their sentence to stand. The archbishop wanted his church back, and a trial before judges who were not his declared enemies.

The quarrel had begun more than a year earlier. In 403 AD Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria, gathered thirty-six bishops at a suburb of Chalcedon called the Oak, and they declared St. John Chrysostom deposed on false charges. He was sent away, but the night after he left an earthquake shook the city, hardest of all in the empress’s bedroom, and she had him recalled at once. Two months after his return her silver statue went up on a porphyry column in the square before his cathedral, and the dancing and shows held around it disturbed the services. The empress took his sermon against the games as an insult to her, and worked to have a second council called against him. Because two councils had now declared St. John Chrysostom deposed, her husband, the Emperor Arcadius, could treat him as no longer the city’s bishop and keep him out of its churches.

At Easter 404 AD the emperor forbade him to enter his church. On Easter Eve, April 16, hundreds of catechumens, people preparing for baptism, were being baptised in the cathedral. Soldiers broke into the baptistery, scattered the congregation and dragged the archbishop out. His friend Palladius wrote of that night: “The waters of regeneration were stained with blood.” The priests who had been baptising were expelled, and the persecution of his followers, whom people called Johannites, began.

In June the emperor signed the edict of exile, and a notary brought St. John Chrysostom the final order: “Commend, therefore, your affairs to God, and leave the Church.” An official warned him that soldiers were waiting in the public bath to drag him out, and urged him to “get away unnoticed, to prevent the people from coming into conflict with the military”. St. John Chrysostom said goodbye to four women of the cathedral, three deaconesses and a widow. Among them was his closest friend, Saint Olympias. He asked the four women: “Remember me in your prayers.” Then he left quietly by a side door.

Just after he left the city, fire destroyed the cathedral and the senate-house. His friends were charged with starting it. Within days Arsacius, a man of more than eighty and the brother of an earlier archbishop, was made bishop in St. John Chrysostom’s place.

Then the city prefect summoned the women who were St. John Chrysostom’s best-known supporters. The prefect told them they would be left alone only if they acknowledged Arsacius as their bishop by taking communion in his churches. A few gave in. Saint Eutropius, a young reader, was ordered to name the people who had set the fire. He was flogged and tortured, named no one, and died in prison. St. Olympias told the prefect that “a person who has expended large sums of money to restore and embellish the churches of God is not likely to burn and demolish them”. The prefect fined her heavily. She paid without complaint, still refused communion with Arsacius, and left for Cyzicus, across the straits.

St. John Chrysostom had been taken east in July and August, through Galatia and Cappadocia in the heat. He reached Caesarea in Cappadocia late one evening “in the very height of a burning fever”, as he wrote to St. Olympias. The city’s officials and its people came to see him every day while he lay ill, but the bishop of Caesarea never came. One morning towards dawn a crowd of monks came to the house where he lay and threatened to set it on fire unless he left. The priests of the city hid from him, saying the monks were acting on their bishop’s instructions, and St. John Chrysostom suspected that the attention Caesarea had paid him had made the bishop jealous. At noon, still in fever, he had himself carried out in his litter, and a woman of the city who was his friend took him to her villa five miles outside the walls. The bishop threatened her until she gave in. At midnight, ashamed to tell St. John Chrysostom she had been forced, she had it announced that Isaurian raiders were close. A priest travelling with him woke him and hurried him onto the mountain road with the torches put out. The mule carrying his litter fell to its knees on the stones, he was thrown out, and the priest dragged him on by the hand. He reached Cucusus at the end of August, nearly seventy days after leaving Constantinople.

The bishop of Cucusus received him warmly and invited him to take the bishop’s chair in his church, so that the people could hear him preach; St. John Chrysostom declined. He was given a house fit for the winter. Dioscorus, who looked after him there along with the town’s bishop, saw to it that he would not feel the cold.

In Constantinople, at the end of September, huge hailstones fell on the city and its suburbs. Days later the empress died of a miscarriage. People in the city said the hail had been God’s anger at the archbishop’s unjust deposition, and her death made them surer of it. Others said St. John Chrysostom had deserved to be deposed for what he had done on a visit to Ephesus. There he had used force to take churches in the western provinces of Asia Minor from the Novatians and the Quartodecimans, two groups with bishops of their own. The historian Socrates would not choose between them: “whether the hail fell, or the empress died on John’s account, or whether these things happened for other reasons, or for these in connection with others, God only knows, who is the discerner of secrets, and the just judge of truth itself.”

With the empress dead, the persecution of his followers seemed bound to end. It did not. The men who had worked for his condemnation still controlled the emperor’s court, and they kept the persecution going. No order came to call St. John Chrysostom back to his city.

At Cucusus that autumn St. John Chrysostom wrote to St. Olympias. She had tried to have him moved from Cucusus and had failed, and her letters showed how distressed she was. He told her she had no reason to grieve over it: “Is it the desolation of this place which grieves you? Yet what can be pleasanter than my sojourn here? I have quietness, and tranquillity, plenty of leisure and good bodily health. For although the town has neither market-place nor market that is nothing to me.”

In the same letter he passed on news from the Danube. Unilas, the bishop he had ordained and sent into Gothia, had died, and the king of the Goths had written asking for another. St. John Chrysostom feared a bishop chosen “by these men who have wrought such great wickedness, and who have no right to appoint”, and asked St. Olympias to put the Goths off “on account of the winter season”. As for his own safety, he wrote, the Isaurians had gone home and would stay there once winter set in. “For in future,” he told her, “I have no one to fear so much as the bishops, with a few exceptions.”