The Homily Series

A survey of St. John Chrysostom’s great cycles of expository homilies — on Matthew (90), John (88), Romans (32, often judged the finest patristic commentary on the epistle), Genesis (67, anchored in R. C. Hill’s FOTC translation), and the rest of the Pauline corpus — together with the practicalities of his preaching (stenographers, the applause he deplored) and the sheer scale of the surviving body, the largest of any Greek Father.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Scale of the Corpus

No Greek Father left a larger body of work. Chrysostom’s extant writings outnumber those of any other Father of the East; in the whole patristic tradition only Augustine, in the Latin West, produced a larger corpus (Quasten, Patrology III, 424). The bulk of it is preaching: more than six hundred homilies survive, the majority of them consecutive expository series that march verse by verse through whole books of the Bible. This is what makes Chrysostom unique among the Fathers — not isolated sermons but sustained, book-length commentaries delivered orally from the pulpit and preserved.

The major series belong mostly to two periods: the years as presbyter at Antioch (386–398), which produced the Old Testament series and much of the Pauline exposition, and the years as bishop of Constantinople (398–404), which produced several of the great New Testament cycles.

The Gospel Cycles: Matthew and John

The Homilies on Matthew — 90 homilies — are the oldest complete commentary on the First Gospel to survive and were prized in antiquity; they were translated and read in both East and West (Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew; trans. NPNF I/10). Thomas Aquinas is said to have remarked that he would rather possess Chrysostom’s homilies on Matthew than be master of all Paris — a tradition that, whatever its exactness, registers the work’s standing.

The Homilies on John — 88 homilies — expound the Fourth Gospel with characteristic attention to the precise wording of the text, though John handles the Gospel’s high theology with notable restraint, holding to the Antiochene preference for the historical sense even amid the most exalted material (Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of John; trans. NPNF I/14).

Romans and the Pauline Corpus

Chrysostom loved Paul above all the biblical writers, and his Pauline exposition is the heart of his achievement. He preached consecutive homily series on Romans, the two Corinthian letters, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, the Thessalonian letters, the Pastorals, Philemon, and Hebrews — effectively the whole Pauline corpus.

The Homilies on Romans — 32 homilies — are the most admired. The judgment that they are the finest patristic commentary on the epistle is a commonplace of the scholarship: Johannes Quasten calls them “by far the most outstanding patristic commentary on this Epistle and the finest of all Chrysostom’s works” (Quasten, Patrology III, 446; cf. Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans, trans. NPNF I/11). The praise is old: Chrysostom’s near-contemporary Isidore of Pelusium wrote that if Paul had wished to expound his own letters in Attic Greek he could not have done it otherwise than Chrysostom did.

His genuine teaching on the state of the departed belongs to this Pauline preaching — most directly to the Homilies on Philippians (Homily 3 on Phil 1:21–24), where he discusses the condition of the faithful dead. This is worth flagging because a much-circulated deathbed-consolation passage about the soul’s passage through “the powers of the air,” often quoted under Chrysostom’s name, comes from a spurious homily falsely attributed to him, not from his authentic works; his real thought on the departed is found in the Philippians series and the like, not in that text (Mayer & Allen, John Chrysostom, on the spuria; cf. Quasten, Patrology III, on the dubia et spuria).

Genesis: The Great Old Testament Series

The Homilies on Genesis — 67 homilies — are Chrysostom’s richest Old Testament series, preached at Antioch (largely during Lent). They are anchored, throughout this compendium, in the standard English translation by Robert C. Hill in the Fathers of the Church series: FOTC 74 (Genesis 1–17), FOTC 82 (Genesis 18–45), and FOTC 87 (Genesis 46–67) (Hill, trans., Homilies on Genesis, FOTC 74/82/87). It is in this series that Chrysostom develops his theology of synkatabasis — God’s considerate accommodation to human limits — at greatest length, reading the anthropomorphisms of Genesis as marks of divine considerateness rather than as embarrassments (see Antiochene Exegesis). The forming of Adam from the dust of the earth (Gen 2:7) is treated in Homily 13 of this series.

Preaching Practice: Stenographers and Applause

Chrysostom’s homilies survive because they were taken down as he spoke. Stenographers (notarii, shorthand-writers) recorded the sermons in the church, and these transcripts — sometimes lightly revised, often not — are essentially what we read. This accounts for their immediacy: the direct address, the asides, the responses to the congregation’s reactions in real time are all there because the text is, in substance, a live recording.

Those reactions included a habit Chrysostom deplored: applause. His Antiochene and Constantinopolitan congregations would clap and acclaim a striking passage mid-sermon, as audiences did for rhetoricians and stage performers. Chrysostom complained of this repeatedly. In his thirtieth homily on Acts he laments the preacher who is elated by applause “as if he had obtained a kingdom” and despondent at silence “worse than hell,” and he diagnoses the deeper fault: the hearers come seeking sermons “to delight the ear” like “singers and lute-players,” and “whatever benefit they might have had is killed by the applause” (Chrysostom, Homilies on Acts 30; trans. NPNF I/11). The irony, preserved in the tradition, is that when he once proposed banning applause outright, the proposal itself was met with applause.

Significance

Taken together, the homily series are the foundation of Chrysostom’s enduring authority. They made him the most widely read of the Greek Fathers, the model expositor for Byzantine and later Orthodox preaching, and the indispensable patristic commentator on the New Testament — above all on Paul. The Liturgy that bears his name carries his title through every ordinary Sunday of the Orthodox year, but it is the homilies that carry his mind.

See Also

• Antiochene Exegesis — the method displayed in these series
• Antioch: Youth and Formation — where he learned to read Scripture this way
• The Ascetic Years — the formation behind his preaching
• Homilies on the Statues — his most dramatic Antiochene preaching crisis
• Holy Scripture — the Orthodox doctrine of Scripture
• The Church Fathers — Chrysostom among the Fathers

References

• Hill, Robert C., trans. St. John Chrysostom: Homilies on Genesis. Fathers of the Church 74 (1–17), 82 (18–45), 87 (46–67). Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1986–1992.
• Chrysostom, John. Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew. Trans. NPNF I/10.
• Chrysostom, John. Homilies on the Gospel of John. Trans. NPNF I/14.
• Chrysostom, John. Homilies on the Epistle to the Romans; Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles. Trans. NPNF I/11.
• Chrysostom, John. Homilies on Philippians. Trans. NPNF I/13.
• Kelly, J. N. D. Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995.
• Mayer, Wendy, and Pauline Allen. John Chrysostom. London: Routledge, 2000.
• Quasten, Johannes. Patrology, vol. 3. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1960.