Chrysostom and the Exegetical Homilies

St. John Chrysostom — “the golden-mouthed” — is the great master of the patristic exegetical homily, and his commentaries, delivered as sermons to the congregations of Antioch and Constantinople, remain the most widely read patristic expositions of Scripture in the Orthodox Church. This file treats the homily as the Church’s ordinary way of reading the Bible: the text expounded verse by verse and applied to the life of the hearer. (Chrysostom’s life is treated in his own collection.)

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Homily as the Church’s Ordinary Exegesis

The most characteristic form of patristic biblical interpretation is not the scholarly monograph but the homily — the sermon preached on the appointed Scripture in the assembly. For the Fathers, exegesis was in the first place a liturgical and pastoral act: the bishop or presbyter, standing before the people after the reading, opened the text to them, drawing out its meaning and pressing it upon their lives. The great patristic “commentaries” are very often, in origin, series of such homilies, taken down by stenographers as they were delivered and later collected. This means that Orthodox exegesis is, at its root, ecclesial and oral — Scripture read aloud in the Church and expounded to the gathered faithful, not primarily a text produced in the study (Frances M. Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, Cambridge, 1997, on the homiletic setting of patristic exegesis; and see The Bible as the Liturgical Book).

Chrysostom, the Golden-Mouthed Preacher

No Father embodies this tradition more fully than St. John Chrysostom (c. 347–407), archbishop of Constantinople, whose very surname — Chrysostomos, “golden-mouthed,” given him by later generations — names his fame as a preacher (the fuller account of his life belongs to his own collection: see St. John Chrysostom). Formed in the Antiochene tradition and its respect for the historical and literal sense (see Antioch and Alexandria), Chrysostom left the largest surviving body of exegetical preaching from the ancient Church. His homily series cover much of the Bible: the Homilies on Genesis (sixty-seven homilies), the Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew (ninety homilies — the first complete commentary on Matthew to survive), the Homilies on the Gospel of John, the Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, and above all his homilies on the Pauline Epistles, expounding the entire corpus from Romans through Hebrews (the Pauline homilies are collected in the NPNF First Series, vols. 11–14; the Matthew homilies in NPNF I/10; the John homilies in NPNF I/14). It was said in antiquity, in a saying reported by later tradition, that Paul himself was Chrysostom’s teacher — so thoroughly had he made the Apostle’s mind his own (the tradition of Chrysostom’s devotion to Paul is recounted in his own homilies and in his encomia on Paul).

Preaching the Text Verse by Verse

Chrysostom’s method is the model of the patristic homiletic exposition. He proceeds through the biblical book continuously, homily by homily, taking up a passage, reading it, and expounding it — often nearly phrase by phrase — before turning to application. His Antiochene training shows in his close attention to the wording, the grammar, the historical circumstances, and the flow of the argument: he asks what Paul actually says and why, what the occasion of a Gospel scene was, what a word means in its context. He is suspicious of ungrounded allegory and prefers to reach the spiritual and moral sense through the plain sense of the text, by way of the disciplined spiritual insight the Antiochenes called theoria (Bradley Nassif, “Antiochene Theoria in John Chrysostom’s Exegesis,” in New Perspectives on Historical Theology, ed. Nassif, Eerdmans, 1996; Robert C. Hill, intro. to St. John Chrysostom: Homilies on Genesis, Fathers of the Church series, CUA Press). Yet he is no dry literalist: the historical sense is the doorway, not the destination.

The Turn to Application

What distinguishes Chrysostom, and the exegetical homily generally, is the turn to application — the moral or tropological reading in which the expounded text is pressed upon the conscience and life of the hearer. Chrysostom characteristically spends the first part of a homily on the exposition of the passage and the second part on its moral and pastoral consequence: almsgiving and the care of the poor, the dangers of wealth and the theatre, the duties of marriage and the raising of children, the practice of prayer, the reception of the Eucharist. His preaching is famously concrete and unsparing, naming the sins and evasions of his urban congregations of Antioch and the capital (the pattern is visible throughout the Homilies on Matthew and the Pauline homilies; see the analysis in Wendy Mayer and Pauline Allen, John Chrysostom, Routledge, 2000, on his preaching to the city). This is the tropological sense in action: Scripture read not as antiquarian information but as a word addressed now, to these hearers, for their salvation.

Chrysostom also insisted, against any notion that Scripture is the preserve of monks and clergy, that the laity should read the Bible at home. He rebukes those who plead that the reading of Scripture is not their business: “This is what has ruined everything — your thinking that the reading of the divine Scriptures pertains only to monks, when you need it far more than they do” (a recurring theme of his preaching; see, e.g., his exhortations to lay Scripture reading in the prologues and moral sections of the Homilies on Matthew and on the Gospel of John, NPNF I/10 and I/14). For Chrysostom the whole people of God are called to live within the Scriptures — a conviction that undercuts any caricature of Orthodoxy as indifferent to the personal reading of the Bible (see Reading with the Church).

The Homily and the Fathers of the Word

Chrysostom is the greatest but not the only master of the form. St. Basil the Great’s Hexaemeron — nine homilies on the six days of creation — is a classic of the genre, expounding Genesis 1 to a working congregation (see St. Basil the Great). St. Gregory of Nyssa’s homilies on the Song of Songs and the Beatitudes, and his Life of Moses, show the more contemplative and mystical reading (see St. Gregory of Nyssa). St. Cyril of Alexandria‘s Old Testament and Johannine commentaries carry the Alexandrian christological reading (see St. Cyril of Alexandria). Origen, for all the later controversy over his speculations, was the pioneer of the running homiletic commentary that all these inherited. Together they constitute the great tradition of the exegetical homily — the Church’s Scripture read aloud and opened to her people, generation after generation (Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, 1997).

Why Chrysostom Endures in Orthodoxy

Chrysostom’s homilies have a peculiar authority in the Orthodox Church. The Liturgy most often celebrated bears his name; he is numbered among the “Three Holy Hierarchs” (with Basil and Gregory the Theologian); and his commentaries are, to this day, the patristic expositions most frequently printed, read, and cited by Orthodox clergy and laity (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993; and see St. John Chrysostom). The reasons lie in the very character of his exegesis: it is scriptural without being speculative, spiritual without abandoning the letter, and relentlessly pastoral — always returning from the text to the salvation of the hearer. In Chrysostom the Orthodox tradition finds its model of what it is to read the Bible in the Church: to expound the word faithfully and to apply it lovingly, so that the Scriptures do their proper work, which is not to inform the mind only but to change the life (see Scripture and the Transformation of the Reader).

References

John Chrysostom. Homilies on Genesis (trans. Robert C. Hill, Fathers of the Church, CUA Press); Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew (NPNF I/10); Homilies on the Gospel of John (NPNF I/14); Homilies on the Pauline Epistles (NPNF I/11–14). (The exegetical homily; verse-by-verse exposition; the moral application; exhortations to lay reading.)
Mayer, Wendy, and Pauline Allen. John Chrysostom. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2000. (His preaching to the urban congregations.)
Nassif, Bradley. “Antiochene Theoria in John Chrysostom’s Exegesis.” In New Perspectives on Historical Theology, ed. Bradley Nassif. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996.
Young, Frances M. Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. (The homiletic setting of patristic exegesis.)
Basil the Great. Hexaemeron (Homilies on the Six Days of Creation); Gregory of Nyssa. Homilies on the Song of Songs; The Life of Moses. (Other masters of the exegetical homily.)
Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (Chrysostom’s stature in Orthodoxy.)