On the Priesthood (De Sacerdotio)

St. John Chrysostom’s On the Priesthood (Greek Peri hierosynes, “Concerning the Priesthood”; Latin De Sacerdotio) is a treatise in six books, composed around 390 during his years as a presbyter at Antioch. Built as a dialogue between John and his friend Basil, it opens with the famous story of how John evaded ordination by a “pious deception” and then unfolds into the most celebrated meditation on the pastoral office in Christian antiquity — the work that defined priestly formation for the Christian East and, in translation, for the West.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Work and Its Date

On the Priesthood is a literary treatise in six books, written in polished Attic Greek and modeled formally on the Platonic dialogue. It is universally counted among Chrysostom’s earliest major works. The standard view, defended by J. N. D. Kelly, dates it to around 390, when John was a presbyter in his early forties — well after the events it narrates, which belong to his youth (Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 4). Chrysostom had been ordained deacon by Bishop Meletius of Antioch in 381 and priest by Meletius’s successor Flavian in 386 (NPNF I/9, “Prolegomena”). The treatise is thus the mature reflection of a man already bearing the office on the crisis of his youth, when he first fled from it.

The work survives in an immense manuscript tradition and was among the most copied of all patristic texts — a measure of how quickly and completely it became the book on the subject (Quasten, Patrology III, 462).

The Literary Frame: The Story of Basil

The treatise opens autobiographically. John tells how, in their youth, he and his dearest friend — named Basil (not St. Basil the Great, who was older, but a less prominent friend of the same name) — pursued the ascetic life together and were of one soul in everything. When word spread that both were to be seized and ordained bishops against their will — a common practice in an age when the most reluctant were thought the most worthy — the two agreed to act as one: they would either both accept the burden or both flee it (Chrysostom, On the Priesthood I; trans. NPNF I/9).

John then did the opposite of what he had promised. When the ordainers came, he hid himself; Basil, trusting that John had already submitted, allowed himself to be ordained. Discovering the “deception,” Basil came to John in tears, reproaching him for the betrayal and for the dishonor he now suffered before those who would think he had broken faith. The remaining length of Book I and the heart of Book II are John’s defense — his argument that the deception was a good and loving act, an “honourable” guile exercised for his friend’s true benefit, since Basil was worthy of the office and John (on his own account) was not (Chrysostom, On the Priesthood I–II; trans. NPNF I/9).

John’s defense turns on a distinction that occupies the close of Book I: not every deception is blameworthy. A physician deceives a feverish patient for his health, a general feigns to save his army, a father misleads a child for the child’s good — and so, John argues, a well-meant deceit practiced “not to his injury, but for his benefit” is no betrayal but a service (Chrysostom, On the Priesthood I; trans. NPNF I/9). The argument is calculated to make the reader uneasy, and it is meant to: it forces the question of what the office must be, that a man should so labor to avoid it and yet call his avoidance an act of reverence. John insists he fled not from contempt of the priesthood but from awe of it — knowing his own unfitness and refusing to handle holy things with unholy hands.

The Genre-and-Historicity Question

How much of this is history and how much literary device has been debated since antiquity. The model is openly Platonic: the dialogue form, the intimate friendship, the staged objection answered by long expository speech, all recall the Socratic conversations that any product of the Antiochene rhetorical schools would have known intimately. The dialogue with Basil supplies the rhetorical occasion — a why-did-you-do-this that lets John expound the whole theology of the office — and it is constructed with evident art. Some modern scholars have judged the episode, and even Basil himself, to be largely or wholly fictional: a literary frame, in the manner of a Platonic interlocutor, devised to dramatize the argument (Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 4, surveying the debate). Others hold that a real friend named Basil and a real flight from ordination lie behind the stylization, embellished but not invented.

Kelly’s own assessment is the balanced one now generally followed: the core — John’s deep friendship, his ascetic ideals, and his genuine dread of the office — is rooted in fact, while the neat symmetry of the mutual pact and the staged “deception” is a literary heightening that need not be pressed as a transcript (Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 4). The point of the frame is theological, not biographical: the “deception” exists in the text to be defended, and the defense is the whole argument that ordination is so awesome a thing that to flee it can be reverence rather than cowardice.

The Six-Book Structure

The treatise moves from personal apologia to a systematic vision of the office:

Book I — The friendship with Basil, the threat of ordination, the mutual pact, and the “deception”; the opening defense of well-meant guile.
Book II — The completion of the apologia: why John’s flight was an act of love and reverence, not contempt for the office. The dignity of the pastoral charge over Christ’s flock (John 21:15–17, “Feed my sheep”) is set out.
Book III — The center of the work: the surpassing dignity and awesome danger of the priesthood, the eucharistic and sacramental powers entrusted to the priest, and a long catalogue of the temptations (vainglory above all) that beset the office.
Book IV — The priest’s need for the power of teaching, the defense of sound doctrine against heretics, and the dangers of an unworthy or unprepared ordination.
Book V — The art and burden of preaching: the orator-priest who must please his hearers without becoming their slave, and bear both praise and censure.
Book VI — The comparison of the priest’s life with the monk’s, the far greater peril of the active pastoral office, and the standard of purity it demands — closing the dialogue on a note of holy fear.

The Famous Passage (Book III)

The single most quoted lines of the treatise come in Book III, where Chrysostom defends the priesthood against the charge that to exalt it is pride. The office, he says, transcends the earthly sphere in which it operates:

“For the priestly office is indeed discharged on earth, but it ranks among heavenly ordinances; and very naturally so: for neither man, nor angel, nor archangel, nor any other created power, but the Paraclete Himself, instituted this vocation, and persuaded men while still abiding in the flesh to represent the ministry of angels.” (Chrysostom, On the Priesthood III.4; trans. NPNF I/9)

He drives the claim home with the power of binding and loosing:

“They who rule on earth have indeed authority to bind, but only the body: whereas this binding lays hold of the soul and penetrates the heavens; and what priests do here below God ratifies above.” (Chrysostom, On the Priesthood III.5; trans. NPNF I/9)

He presses the point with a comparison to the prophet Elijah and the descent of fire on the sacrifice: if that visible wonder filled the bystanders with awe, how much more should awe attend the priest at the Christian altar, where the Holy Spirit is invoked and the sacrifice is the Lord Himself (Chrysostom, On the Priesthood III.4; trans. NPNF I/9). These passages, with their staggering estimate of the office, are the kernel from which the whole theology of the work unfolds (treated in the companion file). They also explain the logic of the entire frame: only an office of this magnitude could justify both the dread that drove John to flight and the lifetime of labor by which he afterward answered for it.

The Classic of Priestly Formation

On the Priesthood became, almost at once, the standard treatise on the pastoral office. In the East it was read and re-copied without interruption and shaped every later Byzantine reflection on the priesthood. Its influence radiated west as well: St. Gregory the Great’s Liber Regulae Pastoralis (the Pastoral Rule, c. 590) — the manual of pastoral care for the Latin Middle Ages — stands in the same tradition, and St. Gregory Nazianzen’s Oration 2 (his own defense of flight from ordination) is its closest Greek companion (Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 4; Quasten, Patrology III, 462).

Through the modern era it has remained in continuous use in Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant seminaries alike as foundational reading on what ordination is and what it demands. The accessible Graham Neville translation in St. Vladimir’s Popular Patristics Series (Six Books on the Priesthood, 1984) made it the standard English text for Orthodox formation, while the older NPNF rendering remains the public-domain verification anchor.

Part of the work’s durability is its candor. Chrysostom does not idealize the office into a serene dignity; he dwells at length, especially in Books III and V, on the very human temptations that beset the man who holds it — the craving for praise, the wound of unjust criticism, the politics of clergy and people, the pressure to flatter rather than to teach. A treatise that begins by defending a deception is unsentimental about the moral perils of ministry throughout, and that realism has kept it useful to every generation of pastors who have recognized themselves in it. For a work that opens with a young man hiding from a bishop, its career has been a remarkable one: the flight from the altar produced the Church’s enduring meditation on standing before it.

References

Chrysostom, John. On the Priesthood, Books I–VI. Trans. W. R. W. Stephens. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 9. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1889 (Books I, II–III esp. III.4–5).
Chrysostom, John. Six Books on the Priesthood. Trans. Graham Neville. Popular Patristics Series. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984 (Graded reprint).
Kelly, J. N. D. Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom — Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995, ch. 4.
Quasten, Johannes. Patrology, vol. 3. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1960, pp. 460–462.
Gregory the Great. The Book of Pastoral Rule (Liber Regulae Pastoralis). Trans. George E. Demacopoulos. Popular Patristics Series 34. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2007.