Saint John Chrysostom

St. John Chrysostom's father, Secundus, a high-ranking officer of the Syrian army, died while his son was a baby. His mother, Anthusa, was left a widow at twenty with the baby and an elder daughter. She refused every offer of a second marriage, spent her own fortune and dowry on his future, and sent him to the best schools in Antioch.

His teacher of rhetoric was Libanius, the most famous pagan speaker of the age. When Libanius learned that Anthusa had stayed a widow for twenty years, he cried out in astonishment to the people around him. St. John Chrysostom left a promising career in the law for the study of Scripture, and St. Meletius, the bishop of Antioch, baptized him.

St. John Chrysostom's closest friend, Basil, who had studied under the same teachers, urged him to leave home so the two could live together as monks. When his mother saw what he was planning, she took him into her room, sat on the bed where she had given birth to him, and wept. He stayed in Antioch while she lived.

About 374 AD the two friends heard that both were to be made bishops, though neither had reached the required age of thirty. When the ordaining bishop arrived, St. John Chrysostom hid. Basil, who believed his friend had promised to be ordained with him, was taken away on a pretext and made a bishop. St. John Chrysostom later defended the deception in six books On the Priesthood, written as a dialogue with Basil.

After his mother's death St. John Chrysostom went up to the hermits in the mountains south of Antioch. He spent four years under an old man named Syrus, then two alone in a cave, going without sleep for most of them. Frost and fasting wrecked his health, and he came back to Antioch because he could no longer look after himself.

He served as a deacon, and in 386 AD St. Flavian, bishop of Antioch, ordained him priest. St. Flavian made St. John Chrysostom one of the most frequent preachers in the city's churches.

Shortly before Lent in 387 AD, a crowd angry at a new tax dragged the statues of the Emperor Theodosius and his late wife through the streets. Magistrates put citizens to death by sword and fire, children among them. The emperor took away Antioch's privileges and gave its standing to its old rival, Laodicea.

St. Flavian set out in winter to plead with the emperor, though his sister was dying. While the city waited to hear whether it would be destroyed, St. John Chrysostom preached almost every day for twenty-two days to calm it and call it to repentance. St. Flavian came home on Easter Day with the emperor's pardon.

The people of Antioch seemed ready to risk anything to keep him, so the Emperor Arcadius had the Count of the East send him to Constantinople. He was consecrated bishop of Constantinople in February 398 AD. He founded hospitals and put two priests in charge of them, with physicians under them.

At Ephesus in 401 AD he deposed six bishops who had paid for their appointments. He also took in some fifty Egyptian monks whom Theophilus, the bishop of Alexandria, had driven out in a quarrel over the writings of Origen. When the monks brought charges against Theophilus, the emperor summoned him to answer them before a synod with St. John Chrysostom presiding.

Theophilus came to Constantinople in June 403 AD with twenty-nine bishops under his authority, money and gifts. Instead of standing trial, he held his own synod of thirty-six bishops at a villa called the Oak, on the far shore of the Bosphorus.

St. John Chrysostom refused to appear before a court made up of his accusers, and it declared him deposed. On the third day after the verdict he gave himself up to the waiting soldiers, to spare the city bloodshed. The angry crowds frightened the Empress Eudoxia, wife of the Emperor Arcadius, and so did a night of terror inside the palace; within days she recalled him.

Men, women and children came out with lighted candles to bring him back into the city. Two months later a silver statue of the Empress Eudoxia was set up before his cathedral, and its noisy dedication disturbed the services. He protested, and the protest was reported to the palace as an attack on the empress.

At the end of 403 AD a second council confirmed his deposition and charged him with returning to his church without a synod restoring him. On the night before Easter 404 AD, soldiers broke into the baptistery and scattered the congregation as hundreds were being baptized. In June the Emperor Arcadius signed the order banishing him, and he never saw his church again.

In 407 AD bishops in Syria, angry that his influence had grown in exile, obtained an order to march him on foot to Pithyus, on the Black Sea. One of his two guards hurried him through rain and hot sun for three months, hoping for promotion if he died on the road. According to longstanding Catholic Tradition, when the party lodged at the chapel of the martyr St. Basiliscus outside Comana, the martyr appeared to him and said the two would be together the next day.

In the morning he begged to rest there until eleven, but the guards marched on, and he fell so ill that they had to turn back to the chapel. There he put on white clothes, gave away his own, received the Eucharist, prayed a last time and died on September 14, 407 AD. Thirty-one years later his body was carried back into Constantinople and laid with the emperors and patriarchs beneath the altar of the Holy Apostles.