The sooner the bishop died, the better their promotion

COMANA, Pontus, this month, 407 AD — Two soldiers were marching Saint John Chrysostom across the empire, and their orders were to hurry. They said out loud that the sooner he died by the roadside, the higher their promotion would be. He was the Bishop of Constantinople. He was about sixty, and he had been three months on the road on foot.

The trouble had started six years before, in 401 AD. He took the jobs of six bishops away from them for simony. They had paid money for their places. His enemies said he had no right to do it outside his own area. Then more charges came. In June 404 AD the Emperor Arcadius signed the order that sent him away from his city. Soldiers marched him across the empire in the heat of July and August, to Cucusus, a mountain village on the border of Cilicia and Armenia.

Three years there did not silence him. He wrote letters that went as far as Antioch and Rome. People walked out of Antioch into Armenia to see him, and went home thinking more of him than when they set out. So bishops in Syria set to work to have him moved somewhere else.

Only one thing could move a man in exile on: a rescript, the Emperor’s written answer to a petition. They sent to the capital, and in the middle of June this year the order came back. It sent him to Pityus, a lonely place on the shore of the Black Sea, right at the empire’s frontier. It also set a deadline, and a fine if he was not handed over in time. That is why the two soldiers were in such a hurry.

Long before that order came, St. John Chrysostom had said he didn’t think he could live through another journey like that one. He had got through the winter by staying in the house, mostly in bed. He stayed wrapped in blankets, in a room with a fire kept burning. People in the district could not believe that a man so weak had stood the weather there at all.

The soldiers started him off on foot from Cucusus. One morning the harsher of the two set out in a heavy shower instead of waiting it out. The water ran in streams down the bishop’s neck and chest. On a very hot day that same soldier was glad of the sun, because he knew it brought on the bishop’s headaches. Whenever they came to a town or a village with a bath in it, he wouldn’t let them stop.

The night outside Comana

This month the march reached Comana in Pontus. The soldiers walked him straight past it. They lodged him for the night in the shrine of the martyr St. Basiliscus, five or six miles outside the wall. St. Basiliscus had been bishop of Comana, and was put to death at Nicomedia in the time of the Emperor Maximian. A priest shared the lodging that night.

According to longstanding Catholic Tradition, St. Basiliscus called first to the priest: “Get ready the place for our brother John; he is coming.” Then the martyr stood by St. John Chrysostom and said: “Be of good cheer, brother; to-morrow we shall be together.”

St. John Chrysostom took it as a sure warning. In the morning he asked the two soldiers to let him stay where he was until eleven o’clock. They refused, and pushed on. They had gone under four miles when the sickness took him so sharply that they could not go on with him. They turned round and carried him back to the shrine he had asked to stay in, and he died there a few hours later.

Inside the shrine, before he died, he asked for white clothes and changed everything he had on, down to his shoes. He gave the clothes he took off to the clergy standing round him. He received the Eucharist, and said a few words of farewell to them. Then he prayed aloud in front of them all, in the words he had used all his life, and signed himself as he finished: “Glory be to God for all things, Amen.”