The Synod of the Oak and Exile

The coalition of enemies John’s reforms had made convened the Synod of the Oak in 403 and deposed him on a list of trumped-up charges. A brief recall gave way to a second condemnation, the Easter violence of 404, and exile to Cucusus. Driven on a forced march toward the remote fortress of Pityus, he died at Comana on 14 September 407 with the words “Glory to God for all things.” The West, led by Pope Innocent I, refused to recognize his deposition, and the Johannite schism endured until his name was restored and his relics translated to Constantinople in 438.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Synod of the Oak (403)

In the summer of 403 Theophilus of Alexandria — summoned to the capital as a defendant in the Tall Brothers affair (see The Reforming Archbishop) — turned the tables on John. He convened a synod not in Constantinople, where John’s populace would have resisted, but across the Bosphorus at a suburban villa called “the Oak” (epi Drys, Latin ad Quercum) near Chalcedon. It was packed with John’s enemies: roughly thirty-six bishops, the majority of them Egyptian suffragans Theophilus had brought with him (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 6.15 [PG 67]; trans. NPNF II/2; Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 17).

The character of the charges is best judged from the fullest surviving list, preserved by Photius from the lost Acts of the synod — two sets of accusations, twenty-nine brought by the deacon John and eighteen by the monk Isaac, totaling forty-seven (Photius, Bibliotheca, cod. 59). They are conspicuously petty and mutually contradictory: that he had sold off church property and the marble Nectarius had set aside; that he received women alone after dismissing others from the room; that he “ate gluttonously alone, living like a Cyclops” (a man elsewhere charged with excessive austerity); that he had wronged the deacon John by deposing him; that he taught laxity by saying, “If thou sin again, repent again” (Photius, Bibliotheca, cod. 59; Mayer and Allen, John Chrysostom, who translate the charges). John refused to appear before a tribunal composed of his declared accusers, was condemned and deposed in absentia, and had a charge of treason appended to secure the civil power’s cooperation; the verdict was ratified by the emperor Arcadius, with the empress Eudoxia as its decisive political backer (Palladius, Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom 8; Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 17).

The First Exile and the Recall

John surrendered himself and left the city, but was recalled within days. The recall itself is firmly historical: the populace of Constantinople rose in uproar, and the court, fearing disorder, brought him back (Palladius, Dialogue 8; Socrates, HE 6.16).

The familiar dramatization — that an earthquake struck the night of his departure, terrifying Eudoxia, who took it as a sign of divine wrath and begged Arcadius to recall him — must be handled as a hagiographical claim pinned to its earliest attestation. It is not given as a firsthand datum in Palladius, the partisan eyewitness; it is carried by the later Greek historians Socrates (HE 6.16) and Sozomen (HE 8.18), writing a generation afterward, and elaborated in the apologetic tradition. (A related strand reads the “shaking” of the imperial bedchamber as a euphemism for a miscarriage rather than a literal earthquake.) Modern scholarship accepts the recall as driven by popular pressure and court calculation while bracketing the earthquake-as-cause as a providential interpretation that grew in the telling (Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 18; Mayer and Allen, John Chrysostom).

The Second Condemnation and the “Herodias” Question

The reconciliation lasted only months. The quarrel reignited over the dedication of the silver statue of Eudoxia near Hagia Sophia (autumn 403), whose boisterous games disturbed the services and which John denounced (Socrates, HE 6.18; Sozomen, HE 8.20). The notorious report is that John opened a sermon: “Again Herodias rages, again she is troubled, again she dances, again she desires to receive the head of John on a platter” (Socrates, HE 6.18, who gives the Greek; Sozomen, HE 8.20, in slightly different words).

This inflammatory line must be presented honestly. The homily that actually begins with it — In decollationem praecursoris et de Herodiade (PG 59:485–490; CPG 4570) — is spurious: it was rejected as inauthentic already by Tillemont, Savile, and Montfaucon, Migne prints it among the spuria, and the leading modern authority on pseudo-Chrysostomica, S. J. Voicu, treats the “Herodias seeking the Baptist’s head” motif as itself a marker of inauthenticity. What is genuinely attested is only Socrates’s report (HE 6.18) that John uttered such a sting; the polished homily transmitted under his name is not his work. The balanced verdict of the NPNF prolegomena still holds: it is “quite probable that Chrysostom made some allusion to Eudoxia which might be construed by his enemies in that way,” even though the surviving homily is not authentic (NPNF I/9, Prolegomena). The “Again Herodias rages” wording should therefore be cited to Socrates, not to Chrysostom.

A second synod over the winter of 403–404 condemned John anew, invoking a canon of Antioch that barred a deposed bishop from resuming his see without synodical restoration; he was confined to his residence and forbidden to officiate (Sozomen, HE 8.20; Kelly, Golden Mouth, chs. 19–20).

The Expulsion of 404 and the Easter Violence

The decisive rupture came at Pascha 404. On Holy Saturday imperial soldiers broke into the baptistery where the paschal baptisms were in progress, scattering the catechumens, driving half-clothed women into the streets, and profaning the rites; in the phrase preserved in the Johannite tradition, “the waters of regeneration were stained with blood” (Palladius, Dialogue 9; the Funerary Speech of ps.-Martyrius; Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 21). John was held some weeks more and then finally expelled from the city in June 404. The precise day is unsettled in the sources — June 5 (the date of the imperial edict), 9, 20, and 24 all appear — and is best given as “June 404”; the day most often cited as his departure is 20 June (Socrates, HE 6.18; Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 21). Almost immediately a great fire destroyed the cathedral of Hagia Sophia and the Senate house; the authorities blamed John’s supporters, the “Johannites,” and a persecution of them followed (Socrates, HE 6.18; Sozomen, HE 8.22).

The Exile Route and Death

John was sent to Cucusus (Koukousos), a harsh mountain town on the Cappadocian–Armenian frontier, where he spent roughly three years, taking refuge for a time during an Isaurian raid at the fortress of Arabissus. From this isolation he conducted an immense correspondence — the great majority of his surviving letters date from these years — exercising, as the sources note, a wider influence from exile than from the episcopal throne. In 407 a harsher place of banishment was decreed: Pityus (Pitius), at the remote eastern end of the Black Sea in the Caucasus. Put on a forced march and driven hard by his guards, he never arrived. Worn out, he died en route at Comana in Pontus on 14 September 407 (Palladius, Dialogue 11; Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 25).

Palladius narrates the death: lodged near Comana at the shrine of the martyr Basiliscus, John was told in a night vision, “Be of good cheer, brother; tomorrow we shall be together”; the next day, carried back gravely ill to the chapel and clothed at his request in white, he received the Eucharist and died with the words “Glory to God for all things” (Doxa tō Theō pantōn heneken) (Palladius, Dialogue 11).

The Letters to Olympias

The Cucusus exile produced one of the monuments of Christian consolation literature: a series of seventeen letters to the deaconess Olympias of Constantinople, his steadfast supporter, together with the kindred treatise That No One Can Be Harmed Except by Himself (Quod nemo laeditur nisi a se ipso). Their burden is the sovereignty of providence and the conviction that nothing external — exile, loss, the sword — can truly injure a soul, and that sin alone is the real evil. The opening of the first letter crystallizes the whole stance:

“For there is only one thing, Olympias, which is really terrible, only one real trial, and that is sin… but as for all other things — plots, enmities, frauds, calumnies, insults, accusations, confiscation, exile, the keen sword of the enemy, the peril of the deep, warfare of the whole world, or anything else you like to name — they are but idle tales.” (Chrysostom, Letter to Olympias 1; trans. NPNF I/9; see also Letters to Olympia, trans. David C. Ford, Popular Patristics Series, SVS Press, 2016.)

Western Support and the Johannite Schism

The West refused to ratify John’s fall. Pope Innocent I of Rome declared his deposition canonically void, broke communion with Theophilus and the Eastern bishops who had condemned and replaced him, and pressed — with the Western emperor Honorius interceding with his brother Arcadius — for a general council to retry the case; the legates sent East were detained and turned back without effect (Sozomen, HE 8.26; Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 24; Catholic Encyclopedia, “St. John Chrysostom”). In Constantinople John’s loyal supporters, the Johannites, refused communion with his intruded successors Arsacius and Atticus and held separate assemblies, enduring as a schism — the central concern of Palladius’s apologetic Dialogue (see Peter Van Nuffelen, “Palladius and the Johannite Schism,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 64 [2013]: 1–19).

The breach healed in stages as John’s name was restored to the diptychs — by Atticus of Constantinople around 412–413, and definitively under Proclus, who preached a famous panegyric of his predecessor and arranged the return of the relics. On 27 January 438, thirty-one years after his death, John’s relics were brought back from Comana and received in the capital by the emperor Theodosius II and his sister Pulcheria, and enshrined in the Church of the Holy Apostles — an event that sealed the end of the schism and is commemorated liturgically to this day (Socrates, HE 7.45; Kelly, Golden Mouth, ch. 26).

See Also

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, SPCK, 1921; R. T. Meyer, Ancient Christian Writers 45, 1985.
  • Pseudo-Martyrius. Funerary Speech for John Chrysostom. Ed. M. Wallraff, trans. C. Ricci, Spoleto, 2007.
  • Socrates Scholasticus. Ecclesiastical History, Books VI–VII [PG 67]. Trans. NPNF II/2.
  • Sozomen. Ecclesiastical History, Book VIII [PG 67]. Trans. NPNF II/2.
  • Photius. Bibliotheca, codex 59 (summary of the Acts of the Synod of the Oak).
  • John Chrysostom. Letters to Olympias [PG 52]. Trans. NPNF I/9; Letters to Olympia, trans. David C. Ford, Popular Patristics Series 56. Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2016.
  • In decollationem praecursoris et de Herodiade [PG 59:485–490; CPG 4570] — spurious (Tillemont, Savile, Montfaucon, Voicu).
  • Van Nuffelen, Peter. “Palladius and the Johannite Schism.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 64, no. 1 (2013): 1–19.