The Catechetical Homilies

Among the treasures of St. John Chrysostom’s Antiochene preaching are his baptismal catecheses — instructions delivered to the catechumens preparing for baptism and to the newly illumined — and his homilies On the Incomprehensible Nature of God, his apophatic answer to the rationalism of the Anomoeans. The baptismal series, much of it lost for centuries and dramatically recovered in the twentieth, narrates the very rites of fourth-century Christian initiation; the Anomoean homilies defend the unknowability of the divine essence against those who claimed to comprehend God as God comprehends Himself.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Baptismal Catecheses and Their Rediscovery

Chrysostom’s baptismal instructions belong to his years as a presbyter at Antioch, where it fell to him to prepare each year’s candidates for baptism — administered, in the manner of the age, principally at Pascha. For centuries only a fraction of these catecheses was known. The modern recovery of the rest is one of the notable stories of twentieth-century patristic scholarship.

Three overlapping series are now recognized as authentically Chrysostom’s, named for their sources (Harkins, ACW 31, Introduction; Quasten, Patrology III, 459):

The Montfaucon catecheses, two homilies long known from the eighteenth-century Benedictine edition.
The Papadopoulos-Kerameus series of four catecheses, which A. Papadopoulos-Kerameus published in 1909 from a manuscript in Moscow (the library of the Holy Synod of the Russian Church).
The Stavronikita series of eight catecheses, discovered in 1955 by the French scholar Antoine Wenger in a codex (MS 6) of the Monastery of Stavronikita on Mount Athos and published in the Sources Chrétiennes series in 1957 — seven of them previously unknown.

It is the combined corpus that Paul W. Harkins translated as Baptismal Instructions in the Ancient Christian Writers series (ACW 31, 1963), the standard English collection (Harkins, ACW 31). Wenger’s Stavronikita discovery in particular transformed the field: where scholars had once known Chrysostom’s baptismal teaching only in fragments, they could now read a substantially complete cycle of instructions delivered to a single year’s candidates, following them from their enrolment through the night of baptism to the days of mystagogy that followed. The recovery is a reminder of how much of the patristic corpus survived unread in monastic libraries — in this case on Mount Athos — until modern cataloguing brought it to light.

The Rites of Fourth-Century Baptism

The chief value of these catecheses, beyond their spiritual force, is documentary: Chrysostom narrates the rites of initiation as he administered them, giving one of the fullest windows we possess onto baptismal practice in the late-fourth-century East. He describes the enrolment and scrutiny of the candidates through Lent, the daily instruction, the exorcisms, and the formula of renunciation — the candidate, standing and facing the west (the region of darkness), stretches out his hand and says, “I renounce thee, Satan, thy pomp, thy service, and thy works,” and then, turning to the east, makes the act of adherence: “I enter Thy service, O Christ” (Harkins, ACW 31, Stavronikita Catecheses; Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 7). He recounts the stripping and the pre-baptismal anointing of the whole body with oil, the threefold immersion accompanied by the words “[Name] is baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” — which he notes is spoken in the passive voice, since it is not the priest but God who baptizes — the white garment, and the entry of the newly illumined to the altar to receive the Eucharist for the first time.

Chrysostom’s emphasis throughout is moral and mystagogical: baptism is a true death and resurrection with Christ, a washing that effects the complete remission of sins and a genuine rebirth, a free gift to be guarded thereafter by a transformed life. He insists that the newly baptized are now soldiers enrolled under Christ, that the garment of incorruption must not be stained, and he repeatedly turns from the description of the rite to vigorous exhortation on Christian conduct — against oaths, against the theatre and the hippodrome, against drunkenness and immodest dress, and toward almsgiving and humility. The instructions thus join sacramental theology to a demanding ethic of post-baptismal life, and they are among the richest sources we have for how the fourth-century Church understood what it was doing when it made a Christian.

The Anomoean Homilies: On the Incomprehensible Nature of God

The doctrinal counterpart to this catechetical labor is the series On the Incomprehensible Nature of God (Greek Peri akatalēptou, often called the homilies Against the Anomoeans), a set of twelve sermons delivered over 386–387, the first ten at Antioch (Harkins, FC 72, Introduction; Quasten, Patrology III, 452).

Their target was the Anomoeans — the most radical wing of the Arian movement, founded by Aetius and led by Eunomius, from whom they are also called Eunomians. The Anomoeans held that the Son is unlike (anomoios) the Father in essence, and, more provocatively still, that the human mind can know the very essence of God — that man can comprehend God as fully as God comprehends Himself. Against this rationalist overreach Chrysostom mounted a sustained defense of apophatic theology: the divine essence is akatalēptos, incomprehensible, beyond the grasp not only of human beings but of the highest angelic powers.

He presses the point from the heavenly liturgy of the prophets. Drawing on Isaiah 6 and Ezekiel 1, he argues that if the Seraphim themselves veil their faces and cannot bear even the condescension of God’s glory, the claim of the Eunomian to comprehend God’s essence is exposed as a monstrous presumption. The Seraphim, he says, “turn away their eyes, not being able to bear” the radiance of God’s accommodated presence — and what they dare not gaze upon, the rationalist boasts he can define (Chrysostom, On the Incomprehensible Nature of God I and III; trans. Harkins, FC 72). God is, in his repeated doxological refrain, “incomprehensible, ineffable, invisible, ungraspable” — known truly in what He has revealed and in His works and condescension (synkatabasis), but never penetrated in His essence.

Chrysostom is careful, however, to distinguish his apophaticism from agnosticism: that the essence of God is incomprehensible does not mean that God is unknown or that nothing true can be said of Him. We know that God exists, that He is good, just, provident, the maker of all; what we cannot do is encompass His essence with the mind. The Anomoean error is not that it claims to know God at all, but that it claims to know Him exhaustively, as God knows Himself — collapsing the infinite distance between Creator and creature. This distinction between the unknowable divine essence and the God who is genuinely revealed and participable is the same apophatic instinct that runs through the Cappadocian answer to Eunomius (St. Basil and St. Gregory of Nyssa wrote Against Eunomius in the same controversy) and is foundational to Orthodox Trinitarian theology and to the later distinction between the divine essence and energies (see The Holy Trinity).

The pastoral aim of the series is unmistakable: Chrysostom is not constructing a polemical treatise for theologians but protecting an ordinary congregation from a clever heresy. He repeatedly tells his hearers that they need not be able to refute every Eunomian syllogism; it is enough to hold fast to the confessed faith and to recognize that the proud claim to measure God betrays itself. The homilies are punctuated by doxology — the argument continually breaks into worship — because for Chrysostom the right response to the incomprehensible God is not silence but praise. Several of the sermons in the series also turn aside, in his manner, to moral exhortation and to warnings against attending the synagogue, concerns that overlap with his contemporary Discourses against Judaizing Christians; the defense of the faith and the formation of conduct are, for him, one pastoral task.

The Other Antioch Series

The statues, the baptismal catecheses, and the Anomoean homilies are only part of the immense Antiochene output. The same years saw Chrysostom’s great expository series — running commentaries preached homily by homily through whole books of Scripture, including the homilies on Genesis, on the Gospel of Matthew, on the Gospel of John, on the Pauline epistles (Romans, the Corinthian letters, and others), and on the Psalms — together with the polemical Discourses against Judaizing Christians (Adversus Judaeos), occasional festal sermons, and panegyrics on the martyrs (Quasten, Patrology III, 433–451; Kelly, Golden Mouth, chs. 5–7). His Antiochene Pauline preaching in particular won lasting fame: later tradition held that St. Paul himself was Chrysostom’s master, and the homilies on Romans and the Corinthian correspondence became, like On the Priesthood, fixtures of the Eastern theological inheritance. This vast surviving corpus — far larger than that of any other Greek Father — is overwhelmingly the fruit of these Antioch years rather than of his shorter, embattled episcopate at Constantinople. It is this sustained labor of the Antioch pulpit — exegesis, catechesis, and the defense of the faith — that made Chrysostom the most prolific preacher of the Greek Church and earned him the name by which he is known.

Taken together, the baptismal catecheses and the Anomoean homilies show the two faces of a single pastoral vocation. In the catecheses Chrysostom builds up the faithful from the ground, leading the unbaptized through renunciation, immersion, and first communion into the life of the Church; in the homilies on the incomprehensible God he guards that same faithful against a heresy that would dissolve their faith into rationalist self-confidence. The one teaches them what it is to become a Christian; the other teaches them the humility before the divine mystery that being a Christian requires. Both rest on the conviction that animates all his Antiochene preaching — that doctrine is never an end in itself but exists to form holy lives, and that the pulpit is the place where the Church makes, instructs, and protects her own.

References

Chrysostom, John. Baptismal Instructions. Trans. Paul W. Harkins. Ancient Christian Writers 31. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1963 (Stavronikita, Papadopoulos-Kerameus, and Montfaucon series).
Chrysostom, John. On the Incomprehensible Nature of God. Trans. Paul W. Harkins. Fathers of the Church 72. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1984 (Homilies I–XII; esp. I, III).
Wenger, Antoine, ed. Jean Chrysostome: Huit catéchèses baptismales inédites. Sources Chrétiennes 50. Paris: Cerf, 1957.
Kelly, J. N. D. Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom — Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995, chs. 5–7.
Quasten, Johannes. Patrology, vol. 3. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1960, pp. 433–462.