Homilies on the Statues

In the spring of 387 a tax revolt in Antioch escalated into the toppling and abuse of the imperial statues — a capital offense against the majesty of the emperor. As the city waited in terror for the vengeance of Theodosius I, the priest John Chrysostom mounted the pulpit through Lent and delivered the twenty-one Homilies on the Statues, transmuting the people’s dread into a season of repentance and catechesis. The crisis ended in pardon, secured by the embassy of the aged Bishop Flavian, and the homilies stand as the high-water mark of Chrysostom’s Antiochene ministry.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Riot of 387

Early in 387, Emperor Theodosius I announced a new and heavy tax — by most accounts a special levy to fund the largesse marking imperial anniversaries — that fell hard on the citizens of Antioch (Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 6). Protest at the law-court swelled into a mob. The crowd turned on the symbols of imperial authority: the painted portraits and the bronze statues of the emperor, the late empress Flacilla, and the imperial sons were torn down, dragged through the streets, and abused (Chrysostom, Homilies on the Statues II; trans. NPNF I/9; Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 6).

In the legal world of the late Roman Empire this was no mere vandalism. The imperial image was sacred: an assault on the emperor’s statue was construed as an assault on the emperor himself, a species of treason (maiestas) for which the standard penalty could be the destruction of the offending city, the slaughter or enslavement of its people, and the confiscation of property. The same event was treated by the pagan rhetor Libanius — Chrysostom’s former teacher, still in Antioch — in several of his orations, so that the crisis is unusually well documented from both a pagan and a Christian vantage (Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 6). The riot subsided as quickly as it had flared, but when the people grasped what they had done, the mood turned from fury to terror.

The City’s Terror

Antioch fell into dread. Imperial commissioners arrived to investigate; arrests, trials, and executions of the leading rioters began at once, and rumor ran that Theodosius might raze the city, strip it of its rank, or massacre the population. Many fled to the mountains and the desert. Into this paralysis of fear the Church became the city’s refuge: the aged Bishop Flavian set out on the long winter journey to Constantinople to plead for his people, leaving his presbyter John to hold the terrified congregation together day by day (Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 6; Chrysostom, Homilies on the Statues I–III; trans. NPNF I/9).

The Twenty-One Lenten Homilies

It was this season — Lent of 387, only a year after his ordination to the priesthood — that produced the twenty-one Homilies on the Statues (Latin Ad populum Antiochenum de statuis). Delivered through the weeks of the crisis, they are Chrysostom’s response to a city waiting for a verdict that could mean its annihilation.

Their pastoral genius lies in what Chrysostom does with the fear. He neither minimizes the danger nor lets it crush his people; instead he turns it into an occasion of repentance and instruction. In the first homily, preached before the riot’s full weight had fallen, he had already been urging the avoidance of swearing and oaths; through the crisis he develops a sustained moral and theological catechesis on the fear of God, the providence that governs adversity, the vanity of wealth and worldly security, the right use of suffering, and the call to repentance. The terror of the emperor becomes a teacher of the fear of God:

“Let us then continually bear this fear in mind… For he who is afraid as he ought to fear God, has no need to fear an earthly tribunal.” (cf. Chrysostom, Homilies on the Statues VI; trans. NPNF I/9)

He consoles even as he exhorts, reminding the people that no place and no rank are secure, that the soul’s treasure cannot be confiscated, and that the present distress is an invitation to amendment rather than a sentence of despair.

The homilies also preserve a vivid record of the days themselves. Chrysostom describes the deserted streets, the flight of the wealthy, the empty city given over to fear, and the monks who came down from the surrounding mountains to plead with the imperial commissioners on behalf of the condemned — a striking image of the ascetics he so admired interceding for the city at the risk of their own lives (Chrysostom, Homilies on the Statues XVII; trans. NPNF I/9; Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 6). He repeatedly returns to his favorite moral themes — the avoidance of oaths above all, but also almsgiving, the danger of riches, and the providence of God — weaving the immediate crisis into a comprehensive Lenten catechesis. One of the most celebrated discourses in the series is the so-called homily “concerning the statues” proper, but several of the twenty-one barely mention the riot at all, turning instead to sustained scriptural instruction, so that the collection as a whole functions as a complete course of Lenten preaching framed by an extraordinary public emergency. The homilies are at once a chronicle of a city in crisis and a manual of how a pastor speaks to a frightened people — fear is never denied, but it is always redirected toward God.

Flavian’s Embassy and the Pardon

Meanwhile Bishop Flavian, despite his age and the rigors of the season, completed his journey and made his appeal to Theodosius — an appeal Chrysostom would later reconstruct and celebrate in the final homily of the series. He pleaded that the emperor’s clemency would be a glory greater than any conquest, urging him to “write this city’s name among the foremost in your love,” and pressing the paradox that to forgive an injury is a nobler crown than the diadem itself: “this contempt will procure you a crown more honourable and splendid than the diadem you wear!” (Chrysostom, Homilies on the Statues XXI; trans. NPNF I/9).

Flavian’s appeal was reinforced by other intercessions — the imperial officials Caesarius and Ellebichus, sent to investigate, urged moderation, and the monks’ pleas had their effect — and Theodosius, whose own instincts often inclined to clemency once his first anger had cooled, relented. The emperor granted a full pardon, sparing the city and its people, though Antioch suffered temporary penalties — the closing of its baths and theatres, the cessation of public entertainments, and the suspension of its rank as metropolis — before these too were lifted. Flavian, anxious to reach his flock before Pascha, hastened back over the mountain roads in time for the feast.

Homily XXI, the last of the series, was delivered on the day of the Resurrection after Flavian’s return, announcing the imperial pardon to the rejoicing congregation: mourning turned, in the very season of Pascha, into joy. Chrysostom reconstructs and praises Flavian’s speech before the emperor and dwells on the spectacle of imperial mercy as itself a sermon — proof that to forgive is the truest glory of power (Chrysostom, Homilies on the Statues XXI; trans. NPNF I/9; Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 6).

The Theology Within the Crisis

The Homilies on the Statues are not merely occasional pieces; they carry a developed theology of providence and the fear of God that gives them their lasting force. Chrysostom’s governing conviction is that the calamity, terrible as it is, lies within the hand of a God who chastens in order to save. He invites his hearers to read the crisis not as blind misfortune but as a summons — a divinely permitted shock meant to wake a complacent city to repentance. Hence the persistent redirection of fear: the dread of Theodosius is real and reasonable, but it is a lesser thing than the fear of God, and the man who rightly fears God need not be enslaved by fear of any earthly tribunal (Chrysostom, Homilies on the Statues VI; trans. NPNF I/9).

Two of his most characteristic teachings run through the series. The first is his campaign against the careless swearing of oaths, which he presses relentlessly as the besetting sin of Antioch and a fit object for Lenten amendment. The second is his insistence on the true treasures that no edict can confiscate: virtue, conscience, and the soul’s relation to God, set over against the wealth, honors, and civic status that the crisis had just shown to be so fragile. The threatened destruction of the city becomes, in his hands, an extended lesson in detachment — a demonstration that the only goods worth fearing to lose are the goods within. In this the homilies distill the whole moral vision of his Antiochene preaching, sharpened to urgency by the prospect of imminent catastrophe.

The High-Water Mark of the Antioch Ministry

The crisis of the statues made Chrysostom’s reputation. A presbyter barely a year ordained had become, through these weeks, the indispensable voice of a great city in its hour of terror — and had shown what Christian preaching could do with public catastrophe, bending the raw fear of a population toward repentance and hope. The Homilies on the Statues were prized and copied from antiquity onward and remain among his most admired works (Quasten, Patrology III, 455). They are rightly remembered as the high-water mark of his ten years in the Antioch pulpit: the moment when the gifts of the orator, the discernment of the pastor, and the courage of the priest met a single overwhelming occasion and proved equal to it.

The episode also illustrates a pattern that would mark Chrysostom’s whole career and finally cost him his see: the conviction that the Church’s pastor must speak to power on behalf of his people, fearlessly but not seditiously. Here, in 387, the dynamic worked to the city’s salvation — bishop and priest interceded, the emperor relented, and the Church appeared as the protector of the populace and the mediator of imperial mercy. The same instinct, exercised a decade later in Constantinople against the imperial court, would bring him to deposition and exile. The Homilies on the Statues thus stand at the threshold of his public greatness: the first occasion on which the whole Roman world saw what the preacher of Antioch could do, and a foretaste of both the authority and the danger that the prophetic pastorate would carry for him to the end.

References

Chrysostom, John. Homilies on the Statues (Ad populum Antiochenum de statuis), Homilies I–XXI. Trans. W. R. W. Stephens. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 9. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1889 (esp. Homilies II, VI, XXI).
Kelly, J. N. D. Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom — Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995, ch. 6.
Quasten, Johannes. Patrology, vol. 3. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1960, p. 455.