Marriage and Family

St. John Chrysostom is often remembered as the ascetic who exalted virginity and disparaged the world, and the early treatises on the monastic life can be read that way. But the mature preacher who addressed congregations of married laypeople produced some of the warmest and most reciprocal teaching on marriage in the whole patristic corpus: a theology of conjugal love as the image of Christ and the Church, of the household as a “little church,” and of children’s formation as the parents’ most serious work. This file presents that teaching at full strength — Homily 20 on Ephesians, the SVS collection On Marriage and Family Life, the ecclesiola theme, and the disputed catechism on child-rearing — while setting it honestly beside his enduring monastic preference.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Against the Merely-Ascetic Reading

It is true that the young Chrysostom wrote in praise of the monastic life with a fervor that could disparage everything else. His early treatise On Virginity ranks the virgin state above marriage in the strongest terms, and his exhortations Against the Opponents of the Monastic Life defend the flight to the desert against worldly parents. A reader who knew only these works might conclude that Chrysostom tolerated marriage as a concession to weakness and nothing more — the reading St. Paul’s “it is better to marry than to burn” (1 Corinthians 7:9) seems to license.

This reading is incomplete, and the preaching corrects it. When Chrysostom climbed into the pulpit at Antioch and Constantinople, he was speaking not to monks but to married men and women, and the teaching he gave them is not a grudging concession but a high and tender theology of the married life. The corrective is not that Chrysostom abandoned his ascetic convictions — he held them to the end — but that those convictions coexisted in him with a genuine exaltation of marriage as a path of sanctification in its own right. Both things are true at once, and the honest presentation keeps both.

Homily 20 on Ephesians: Love and Mutuality

The center of Chrysostom’s married teaching is his twentieth homily on the Epistle to the Ephesians, an extended exposition of Ephesians 5:22–33 (“Wives, submit… Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved the Church”). What is striking is where Chrysostom places the emphasis. The verse on the wife’s submission he handles briefly; the command to the husband he expands into the heart of the homily, because in his reading the husband’s burden is by far the heavier. Christ’s headship over the Church is shown not in domination but in self-emptying love unto death, and the husband who would be a head on that model must love in the same costly way.

Chrysostom scripts for the husband a speech to his wife that has few parallels in ancient literature:

“I have taken thee in my arms, and I love thee, and I prefer thee to my life itself… I value thy affection above all things, and nothing is so bitter or so painful to me, as ever to be at variance with thee. Yes, though it should be my lot to lose my all, and to become poorer than Irus, and to undergo the extremest hazards, and suffer any pain whatever, all will be tolerable and endurable, so long as thy feelings are true towards me.”

(Chrysostom, Homily 20 on Ephesians [on Eph. 5:22–24], NPNF First Series, Vol. 13.) The husband is to win his wife not by fear but by love, never to insult or strike her, to count her affection a treasure above wealth, and to consider that her body is now as much his concern as his own soul. Submission, in this frame, is the response love draws from a wife who is so loved; it is not extracted by command. The homily’s anthropology is reciprocal even where its grammar of “headship” is hierarchical, and Orthodox commentators have read it as one of the earliest and fullest patristic statements of marriage as a communion of mutual self-gift.

On Marriage and Family Life: The SVS Collection

The most accessible gathering of this material in English is On Marriage and Family Life (trans. Catharine P. Roth and David Anderson, SVS Popular Patristics 7, 1986), which collects Homily 20 on Ephesians with several other homilies — on 1 Corinthians 7, on Colossians, and on the relevant passages of Genesis — into a single thematic volume. The translators’ framing captures Chrysostom’s central and counter-intuitive claim: that marriage, lived as a holy union imaging Christ and the Church, can carry husband and wife to the same sanctity ordinarily thought reserved for monastics. Chrysostom tells the married couple to “pray together at home and go to Church,” to study together the meaning of the Scripture readings, and concludes that a marriage so ordered will rival the holiest monks in its perfection (Chrysostom, in On Marriage and Family Life; trans. Roth & Anderson, SVS PPS 7). The ascetic ideal is not lowered; it is relocated into the home.

Chrysostom also teaches, against a long-standing tendency to treat procreation as marriage’s sole justification, that God instituted marriage for two ends — chastity and the begetting of children — and that with the world now filled, the first end, the binding of two persons into a sanctifying communion of love and self-control, has come into its own. This is a notably high valuation of the conjugal bond as such, independent of fertility.

The Household as a “Little Church”

From this theology of the couple Chrysostom draws his most influential ecclesial image: the Christian household is itself a church in miniature. He states it plainly at the close of Homily 20 on Ephesians: “If we thus regulate our own houses, we shall be also fit for the management of the Church. For indeed a house is a little Church” (Chrysostom, Homily 20 on Ephesians, NPNF First Series, Vol. 13). The Greek behind the phrase — the household as ekklēsia in small — became the patristic root of the later Orthodox commonplace of the “domestic church” (kat’ oikon ekklēsia), the home as the first place where the Gospel is lived, taught, and prayed. The father is, in this image, a kind of pastor to his household; the table a kind of altar; the daily ordering of the home a liturgy.

The image is doing real theological work. It dignifies the ordinary married household as a site of salvation rather than a lesser sphere from which the serious Christian must escape, and it makes the formation of the family — its prayer, its almsgiving, its discipline — a properly ecclesial task. It is the natural complement of Chrysostom’s social teaching: the household that learns mercy at its own table is the seedbed of the larger Church’s care for the poor (see Wealth and Almsgiving).

The Formation of Children

Chrysostom’s concern for children’s formation is most fully developed in the treatise usually titled On Vainglory and the Right Way for Parents to Bring Up Their Children (also Address on Vainglory). It presents the child’s soul as a city to be governed, or a statue to be shaped, with the parents as artisans responsible before God for what they make; it gives detailed, practical counsel on guarding the senses, telling formative stories from Scripture, governing anger and appetite, and modeling almsgiving — all aimed at raising “an athlete for Christ.”

Its authenticity is a genuine scholarly question and should be flagged rather than hidden. The work survives in only two late manuscripts (Parisinus graecus 764 and Lesbos 42, both tenth- or eleventh-century copies), and it was not included in the major collected editions of Chrysostom’s works precisely because its attribution was doubted; the editio princeps was produced only in 1656 by the Dominican François Combefis [Disputed: omitted from the principal collections on authenticity grounds and long treated with suspicion; but defended as genuinely Chrysostom’s by Basilios Exarchos, whose critical edition appeared in 1955, a judgment many subsequent scholars have accepted]. The prudent statement is that the treatise is widely received as Chrysostomic and is wholly consistent with his known pedagogy, while its attribution rests on a thinner manuscript and editorial base than his securely transmitted homilies. Nothing in the substance of its teaching is anomalous; the caution attaches to authorship, not orthodoxy.

The Monastic Preference, Honestly Presented

To present Chrysostom honestly is to hold his high theology of marriage together with his abiding conviction that virginity is, in the abstract, the higher state — a conviction he shared with most of the Fathers of his age and never renounced. He did not teach that marriage is impure or that the married cannot be saved; he taught the opposite, vigorously and at length. But neither did he teach an equality of states in the modern sense. His settled position is better described as a hierarchy of goods in which both are genuinely good: virginity is the greater gift for those called and able to bear it, and marriage, lived in love and chastity, is a true and sanctifying path to the same holiness — not a second-class compromise but the ordinary road by which most Christians are saved. The tension between the early ascetic treatises and the mature married preaching is real, and the Orthodox tradition has resolved it not by choosing one against the other but by receiving the preaching as the fuller and more pastoral expression of a man whose love of the ascetic ideal never curdled into contempt for the home.

References

John Chrysostom. On Marriage and Family Life. Trans. Catharine P. Roth and David Anderson. Popular Patristics Series 7. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1986. [Homily 20 on Ephesians; homilies on 1 Cor. 7, Colossians, and Genesis.]
John Chrysostom. Homily 20 on Ephesians [on Eph. 5:22–33]. Trans. NPNF First Series, Vol. 13. [“A house is a little Church”; the husband’s address to his wife.]
John Chrysostom. An Address on Vainglory and the Right Way for Parents to Bring Up Their Children. Trans. M. L. W. Laistner, in Christianity and Pagan Culture in the Later Roman Empire. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1951. [Critical edition of the Greek: B. K. Exarchos, De inani gloria et de educandis liberis, Munich, 1955; on the authenticity question.]
J. N. D. Kelly. Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. [The early ascetic treatises and the mature married preaching.]
Wendy Mayer and Pauline Allen. John Chrysostom. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2000.