A book from a mountain town with no market

CUCUSUS, Armenia, 407 AD — Cucusus is a deserted mountain town on the Armenian frontier. St. John Chrysostom’s enemies picked it for him. It has no market square and no market at all. The winters are hard and his digestion is weak. Letters get out by whatever hands come up the road: monks and the deacon Moduarius.

St. John Chrysostom was Archbishop of Constantinople. Then two councils of bishops declared him deposed, and in June 404 AD the Emperor Arcadius signed an order sending him away from the capital. While he was alive and in exile, an old man named Arsacius was put in his place at Constantinople. Then came a law, on November 18, 404 AD. It ordered governors in every province to drive people out of the churches if they would not take communion with Arsacius.

The woman who wouldn’t make a deal

St. Olympias is a deaconess of that church. She is a widow who gave her fortune to the churches and the poor. Hours after the soldiers took St. John Chrysostom out of the capital, the cathedral and the Senate House burned. His friends were charged with setting the fire.

She was questioned harder than the others. Asked why she had set fire to the Great Church, she answered: “My past life ought to avert all suspicion from me, for I have devoted my large property to the restoration of the temples of God.”

Then came the offer. Optatus, the prefect of the city, said he would end the case against her if she would accept Arsacius. She told him she would accept no terms until she was cleared of the charge. Force would not make her take communion from men she ought to leave, she said. Optatus fined her a lot of money. She paid it without arguing and crossed the straits to Cyzicus. Word of how she had stood reached Cucusus, and it cheered St. John Chrysostom up.

A book that starts with a horse

He wrote the book this year, in exile. He sent it with a letter telling her to read it over and over, and out loud if she had the strength. The title is the whole argument: That No One Can Harm the Man Who Does Not Injure Himself.

Right at the top he writes that readers who are greedy for things they can hold now will find the book “of a strange and paradoxical kind”. They “will laugh immoderately”, he says. Then he says it flat out: “no one of those who are wronged is wronged by another, but experiences this injury at his own hands.”

He starts with animals. What makes a horse a good horse? Not the gold-studded bridle, he says, and not the plaited mane. What counts is speed, sound hoofs, and the sense to carry its rider out of a rout. Then he turns to people. “What then is the virtue of man?” Not riches, he answers, and not health, reputation, liberty or life itself. What counts is “carefulness in holding true doctrine, and rectitude in life. Of these things not even the devil himself will be able to rob a man.”

Before anyone knew if the fire would burn

One chapter is for a reader who has been driven into exile or taken captive. The same chapter is for a reader who has been tied up, burned or put to death. It turns on the three young men in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace.

He doesn’t admire them because the fire spared them. He writes that their crown was already being woven “before the issue of events”. It began the moment they answered the king, before anyone knew whether the fire would burn them or not. He quotes what they said, from the book of Daniel: “But if not, be it known unto you, O King, that we will not serve your Gods nor worship the golden image which you have set up.”

By the time the book was finished, St. Olympias was ill. She had written that her sickness came from despondency. In the letter that went with the book, St. John Chrysostom asked her to “go over it constantly”. If her health allowed, she was to “recite it aloud”. He told her to “shake off the despondency which now oppresses you, and do not exact inordinate and cruel penances from yourself”. Of the book he wrote: “if you will, it may prove an effectual remedy for you.”