John Chrysostom

John was trained in rhetoric at Antioch under the pagan orator Libanius, spent years as an ascetic in the hills outside the city, and returned with his health broken to be ordained and to preach. The Antiochene years produced most of the homilies that made his reputation, working through Genesis, the Psalms, Matthew, John and the letters of Paul verse by verse, and they are the reason his name survived: J. N. D. Kelly's biography notes that more manuscripts of Chrysostom survive than of any other Greek father.

In 398 he was taken to Constantinople, effectively against his will, and made archbishop. He preached in the capital the way he had preached in Antioch, which turned out to be a different act. He attacked the wealth of the rich and the display of the court, he cut the episcopal household budget and gave the money to hospitals, he intervened against bishops in Asia Minor whom he found guilty of selling ordinations, and he made enemies at every level, including the empress Eudoxia.

In 403 a synod convened outside Chalcedon, remembered as the Synod of the Oak, deposed him on a list of charges assembled by Theophilus of Alexandria. He was recalled almost at once after public disorder and an earthquake, deposed again the following year, and sent into exile in Armenia, from which he kept up a correspondence. In 404 the order came to move him further, to the eastern edge of the Black Sea, and he died on the road at Comana in 407.

The Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom is the eucharistic service used on most days of the year throughout the Byzantine rite, which makes it, by frequency of celebration, one of the most used liturgical texts in the world. The attribution to John is traditional and old, and Robert Taft's account of the rite treats the received text as the outcome of a long development in Constantinople rather than as a composition of his; the connection is best read as the rite of his city taking his name, not as a document he wrote out.

The harder part of his legacy is a set of eight homilies delivered at Antioch in 386 and 387, usually called Adversus Judaeos, against the Judaisers. The immediate target was Christians in his congregation who kept Jewish fasts and festivals and used the synagogue, and the language is violent even by the standards of ancient invective, describing the synagogue in terms that later readers put to uses John did not live to see. The homilies were quoted in medieval polemic and again in the twentieth century by people with murderous intentions.

Two things are true at once and the atlas records both. Historians of late antiquity, Kelly among them, place the texts in a specific local quarrel about religious boundaries in a city where the two communities lived close together, and note that this genre of attack was aimed at his own congregation. And churches that venerate him have themselves acknowledged the damage the texts have done. Neither observation cancels the other, and neither is the last word.