The Ascetic Years

St. John Chrysostom’s years of monastic withdrawal in the mountains near Antioch (c. 372–378): the ascetic communities and the solitary cave, the tradition that he memorized the Scriptures, the permanent damage to his health that the regime inflicted, his return to the city, and his ordination as deacon (381) and priest (386). These years gave his later preaching its moral weight.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Pull to the Mountain

The same Antiochene formation that gave John his exegetical method also gave him a hunger for the ascetic life in its most radical form. The asketerion of Diodore had wedded study to discipline; the next step, for a man of John’s intensity, was withdrawal. After the death of his mother (or at least once her circumstances permitted), he left Antioch around 372 for the mountains south of the city, where ascetics and small communities of monks had settled (Kelly, Golden Mouth, 24–31).

He first spent some four years under the guidance of an experienced Syrian ascetic, living the communal-eremitic life of the mountain. Then, around 375–376, he withdrew entirely alone into a cave, where he pushed his austerities to their extreme.

The Cave and the Memorized Scriptures

The tradition reports that during these solitary years John gave himself to an almost superhuman regime: prolonged standing, the denial of sleep, and the continuous study and memorization of the Bible. Our primary witness is his disciple and biographer Palladius, whose Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom (written c. 408, immediately after the saint’s death) records that John, in his zeal, “for two years scarcely slept” and committed the Scriptures to memory in his determination to master them (Palladius, Dialogue 5; trans. Meyer, ACW 45; cf. Kelly, Golden Mouth, 30). The popular formulation that he “memorized the entire New Testament by heart” in the cave is a reasonable distillation of this tradition, though the sources stress the ascetic feat — the standing and sleeplessness over the biblical text — more than they tabulate exactly which books.

This is hagiographical material and is reported here as what the earliest source attests: Palladius wrote as an admiring disciple within a year of John’s repose, and the account is shaped by the conventions of ascetic biography. What is historically secure beneath the marvel is the consequence.

The Ruined Health

The cave years broke John’s body. The cold, the sleeplessness, the standing, and above all the starvation regime permanently wrecked his digestion and his kidneys. Palladius reports that the damp and cold of the cave so injured his stomach and kidneys that he could no longer care for himself and was forced to return to the city for treatment (Palladius, Dialogue 5; cf. Kelly, Golden Mouth, 31). For the rest of his life John suffered from a fragile stomach, sensitivity to cold, and chronic gastric trouble — a permanent disability that his enemies would later exploit, and that shadowed his exhausting labors as preacher and bishop.

It is one of the ironies of his life that the asceticism undertaken in flight from the world returned him to it, and that the regime meant to free him for God left him with a lifelong infirmity. He himself came to a chastened view of solitary extremism; his mature ideal, voiced repeatedly from the pulpit, was that the heights of the monastic life should be lived out in the midst of the city, by married laypeople as much as by monks.

Return and Ordination: Deacon (381), Priest (386)

John returned to Antioch around 378. There he resumed the service of the Church under Bishop Meletius, who ordained him deacon in 381 — shortly before Meletius himself departed for Constantinople, where he presided over the opening of the Second Ecumenical Council and died (Kelly, Golden Mouth, 36–39; Mayer & Allen, John Chrysostom, 6–7). As deacon, John served the practical and charitable ministry of the church for several years; the diaconate at Antioch did not ordinarily preach.

In 386, Meletius’s successor Flavian ordained him priest (presbyter). This ordination is the hinge of his historical importance: as a presbyter of Antioch, John was given the office of preaching, which he exercised either in Flavian’s place or alongside him. From 386 until his elevation to the see of Constantinople in 398, the bulk of the great Antiochene homiletic corpus was preached — the sermons on Genesis, on the Pauline epistles, on the Statues, and much else (see Homily Series).

What the Ascetic Formation Did to His Preaching

The mountain years were not a detour from his preaching career but its foundation. They gave John three things that no rhetorical schooling could supply.

First, moral authority. When John denounced wealth, gluttony, and the neglect of the poor — themes that fill his sermons — he spoke as a man who had himself lived on next to nothing and had paid for it with his health. His audience knew it.

Second, the integration of asceticism and Scripture. The cave had fused the biblical text with the discipline of the will; his preaching never treated exegesis as an end in itself but always drove from the text to the reform of life. The Antiochene attention to the letter (see Antiochene Exegesis) served, in his hands, a relentlessly pastoral purpose.

Third, his democratized monastic ideal. Having tasted the eremitic extreme and been broken by it, John spent his preaching life insisting that the demands of the Gospel fall equally on everyone — that the layman in the marketplace is held to the same standard as the monk on the mountain. The ascetic years thus shaped not only his authority but the very content of his message.

See Also

References

  • Kelly, J. N. D. Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom — Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995.
  • Mayer, Wendy, and Pauline Allen. John Chrysostom. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2000.
  • Palladius. Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom. Trans. Robert T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 45. New York: Newman Press, 1985.
  • Quasten, Johannes. Patrology, vol. 3. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1960.