The Reforming Archbishop

In 398 John was abducted from Antioch and made archbishop of Constantinople. His reforms — austerity in the episcopal household, discipline of the clergy, the regulation of widows and deaconesses, and the funding of hospitals — won the city’s poor but made implacable enemies of the clergy he corrected, the court, and the empress Eudoxia. The Tall Brothers affair drew his rival Theophilus of Alexandria into the capital, and his missionary projects among the Goths and in Phoenicia mark him as a pastor of the whole oikoumene.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Abduction to the Capital (398)

When Nectarius, bishop of Constantinople, died on 27 September 397 (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 6.2 [PG 67]; trans. NPNF II/2), the dominant figure at the court of the emperor Arcadius — the eunuch grand chamberlain Eutropius — resolved to fill the see with John, the celebrated presbyter and preacher of Antioch. Because John was beloved in Antioch and would surely have refused, the operation was carried out by stealth. The emperor sent secret instructions to Asterius, the comes Orientis, who lured John outside the city walls on the pretext of visiting the martyrs’ shrines and there had him seized and conveyed under escort to the capital. Sozomen states the motive plainly: the removal was managed before the Antiochenes knew of it, “for they would probably have excited a sedition” (Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 8.2 [PG 67]; trans. NPNF II/2; Palladius, Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom 5; J. N. D. Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 8).

The consecration was performed on 26 February 398 by Theophilus of Alexandria — and performed under duress. Theophilus had come to Constantinople pressing his own candidate, the Alexandrian presbyter Isidore, and was hostile to John from the first; he consented to consecrate him only when Eutropius confronted him with accusations and a choice between ordaining John or standing trial himself (Socrates, HE 6.2; Sozomen, HE 8.2, who marks the threat as hearsay — “they say”; Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 8). Theophilus’s resentment, born in this moment, would ripen into the alliance that destroyed John five years later.

The Reforms

John brought to the wealthiest see in the East the asceticism of a monk and the moral severity of a desert father.

The episcopal household. Succeeding the lavish-living Nectarius, John audited the church accounts, halted wasteful expenditure, stripped the episcopal residence of its costly plate and furnishings, and diverted the proceeds to the poor and to the city’s hospitals (Palladius, Dialogue 5; Kelly, Golden Mouth, chs. 9–10). He himself ate the simplest fare alone in his chamber — partly from a chronically weak digestion, partly from ascetic habit — and declined to host the banquets a metropolitan was expected to give. His enemies turned this into a charge of antisocial pride. The sources divide predictably: Socrates reports both the medical and the ascetic explanation and frames the solitary table as “superciliousness” (Socrates, HE 6.4), while Sozomen attributes it to “pain in the head and stomach” induced by rigorous asceticism (Sozomen, HE 8.9), and Palladius defends it outright as a guard against gossip and the theft of stewards (Palladius, Dialogue 12).

Clergy discipline. John at once set about reforming a worldly and wealthy clergy — correcting their “ways and diet,” deposing some for grave crimes, barring others from the Eucharist (Sozomen, HE 8.2–3; Socrates, HE 6.4). His sharpest campaign was against the syneisaktoi (Latin subintroductae), the consecrated virgins who lived in the households of celibate clergy; he wrote two treatises on the scandal, one addressed to the men and one to the women (Adversus eos qui apud se habent subintroductas virgines and Quod regulares feminae viris cohabitare non debeant [PG 47]; ed. Dumortier, 1955; see Elizabeth A. Clark, “John Chrysostom and the Subintroductae,” Church History 46 [1977]: 171–185).

Widows, deaconesses, and the poor. He regulated the enrolled order of widows and the deaconesses, and formed a famously close pastoral bond with the wealthy deaconess Olympias, whom he taught to give her fortune away with discernment rather than indiscriminately (Sozomen, HE 8.9; Palladius, Dialogue 17). He built additional hospitals (nosokomeia), staffing them with priests, physicians, and cooks drawn from among his celibates (Palladius, Dialogue 5). His Constantinopolitan homilies — on Lazarus and the rich man, on Matthew, on Acts — return again and again to the sin of luxury and the claim of the poor (Sozomen, HE 8.9; on the social preaching see Wendy Mayer and Pauline Allen, John Chrysostom).

The Enemies the Reforms Made

Every reform created a faction. The corrected clergy, the deacons he disciplined (the affair of the deacon Serapion is recorded as a flashpoint at Socrates, HE 6.4), and the bishops he later deposed for simony on his Asian tour of 401 formed a clerical opposition. His denunciations of greed and his handling of the fallen minister Eutropius in 399 — preached while Eutropius clung to the altar for sanctuary — alienated the court, and won him the personal enmity of court bishops such as Severian of Gabala, Antiochus of Ptolemais, and Acacius of Beroea. His attacks on extravagant dress and cosmetics offended the aristocratic women of the capital.

Above all there was the empress Aelia Eudoxia, wife of Arcadius. At first a supporter, she came to take John’s sermons against female luxury as aimed at her, and the hostile court party fed the impression. The breach hardened over the silver statue of Eudoxia, erected in 403 on a porphyry column near the Senate House by the Augustaion, beside John’s cathedral. The statue is historically attested — its inscribed base, naming the city prefect Simplicius, survives (catalogued as Last Statues of Antiquity LSA-27) — and its dedication was accompanied by noisy public games and dances that disturbed the church’s services. John denounced the festivities, and the empress took it as contempt for her person (Socrates, HE 6.18; Sozomen, HE 8.20). The inflammatory “again Herodias rages” sermon attached to this episode is treated in the companion file; the surviving homily bearing that line is spurious, though that John said something provocative is plausible (see The Synod of the Oak and Exile).

The Tall Brothers Affair

The conflict that gave John’s enemies their occasion began in Egypt. The four “Tall Brothers” — Ammonius, Dioscorus, Eusebius, and Euthymius, learned Nitrian ascetics of Origenist sympathy — fell foul of Theophilus of Alexandria when he reversed his own earlier position and launched an anti-Origenist campaign, raiding the Nitrian monasteries (Socrates, HE 6.7; Palladius, Dialogue 7; Sozomen, HE 8.12–13). Fleeing to Constantinople around 401, they sought refuge with John. He acted with deliberate caution: he gave them hospitality and the fellowship of prayer but withheld the communion of the mysteries until their case could be examined, and wrote courteously to Theophilus seeking reconciliation (Socrates, HE 6.9 — which also notes that Theophilus was inflamed by a false report that John had fully communed them; Palladius, Dialogue 7).

When the monks, frustrated, appealed over John’s head to the emperor and especially to Eudoxia, Arcadius summoned Theophilus to Constantinople to answer for his treatment of them — with John, as bishop of the capital, the intended judge (Socrates, HE 6.9; Sozomen, HE 8.13; Palladius, Dialogue 8). The irony was lost on no one: Theophilus was summoned as defendant. He came instead as prosecutor, arriving in 403 with a body of Egyptian bishops, refusing John’s hospitality, and allying himself with the court party and the disaffected clergy — the coalition that would convene the Synod of the Oak (Kelly, Golden Mouth, chs. 14–16).

The Missionary Archbishop

John’s vision reached far beyond the capital. For the Gothic-speaking Christians of Constantinople he set apart a church, appointed presbyters, deacons, and readers fluent in Gothic, and himself preached there through an interpreter, laboring to draw the largely Arian Goths toward Nicene orthodoxy (Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 5.30 [PG 82]; trans. NPNF II/3). One sermon delivered on such an occasion survives — the homily preached after a Gothic presbyter had spoken (PG 63:499–510; see C. L. de Wet, “John Chrysostom and the mission to the Goths,” HTS Teologiese Studies 68 [2012]). His concern reached beyond the frontier: learning that Goths along the Danube and in Gothia desired the faith, he recruited missionaries and directed the work by correspondence, even from exile — his letters report the ordination of the bishop Unila, sent into Gothia, and his anxiety over a successor when Unila died (Theodoret, HE 5.31; Chrysostom, Letter to Olympias 9 [= NPNF Letter 4]; Kelly, Golden Mouth, pp. 142–143).

In Phoenicia he organized and equipped teams of monks to root out the surviving paganism of the countryside, funding the mission not from imperial or church treasuries but by persuading wealthy and devout women to give — and continuing to direct and finance it from exile through his letters to the presbyter Constantius (Theodoret, HE 5.29; Chrysostom, Letters [PG 52]). In all of this the archbishop who emptied his own residence to fill the hospitals showed himself the same man: the Gospel was a debt owed to the poor at home and the pagan abroad alike.

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 and New York: Routledge, 2000.
Palladius of Helenopolis. Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom. Ed. A.-M. Malingrey and P. Leclercq, Sources Chrétiennes 341–342. Paris: Cerf, 1988. Trans. Herbert Moore, London: SPCK, 1921; R. T. Meyer, Ancient Christian Writers 45, 1985.
Socrates Scholasticus. Ecclesiastical History, Book VI [PG 67]. Trans. NPNF II/2.
Sozomen. Ecclesiastical History, Book VIII [PG 67]. Trans. NPNF II/2.
Theodoret of Cyrrhus. Ecclesiastical History, Book V [PG 82]. Trans. NPNF II/3.
Clark, Elizabeth A. “John Chrysostom and the Subintroductae.” Church History 46, no. 2 (1977): 171–185.
de Wet, Chris L. “John Chrysostom and the mission to the Goths: Rhetorical and ethical perspectives.” HTS Teologiese Studies 68, no. 1 (2012).