A strong soldier of the Cross and from good fighting stock was that John
of Antioch who, among the people that were first of the earth to bear
the name of Christian, was called Chrysostom--"mouth of gold." His
father Secundus, who died about the time of Chrysostom's birth, was a
military commander in Syria under Constantine and Constantius II. John
was born at Antioch, A.D. 347, when the Eastern Empire and the City of
Constantine were new. His young mother Arethusa, a Christian, then but
twenty years of age, devoted herself to widowhood and the education of
her son in the city of his birth. The youth's early years were passed
under her careful guidance, and at the age of twenty he entered on the
study of oratory and philosophy under the celebrated Libanius. In 369 he
became a baptized Christian and reader in the house of Melitius the
bishop. The unhappy reigns of Valens and Valentinian, when neo-paganism
in the West and in the Gothic settlement in the East began to work the
Empire's fall, saw John devoted to an ascetic life, after the example of
the monks and hermits who sheltered in the mountains about the gay and
queenly city of his birth. His mother's grief and loneliness brought him
back from his cave to an energetic career as an outspoken preacher of
God's Word and the eternal profit of good stout-hearted workaday
well-doing. He made himself dear to the people of Antioch, for he had
eloquence such as had been unknown to Greeks since Demosthenes, and he
shrank not from labor and self-denial. So they called him
"golden-mouth," as the Indians call their tried men "straight-tongues."
On the death of Nectarius, the successor of Gregory of Nazianzenus,
Theophilus of Alexandria and Arcadius the Emperor made him Metropolitan
of Constantinople, A.D. 397. All before this time he was laying about
him with good ear-smiting Greek at vice and luxury, of which there was
abundance both in palace and in hovel; and his elevation to an Imperial
neighborhood did not stay him. He cleared Byzantium of pagan shows,
gathered the relics of the martyrs, and sent missionaries to preach to
the Goths in their own speech. Not many years of this kind of leadership
were allowed him. Arcadius, well disposed but indolent, was under the
rule of a willful woman; and when Chrysostom turned his swayful voice
against her pet vanities, the vexed Eudoxia intrigued his deposition.
In 403 John went to exile in Bithynia, with the words "The Lord hath
given, the Lord hath taken away" upon his lips. A great earthquake so
frightened the Imperial City and family that with one outcry they called
Chrysostom back. When the fear of the infirm earth had worn away,
Eudoxia remembered her enmity and took it back to nurse. So one day when
John had said in his sword-like invective that "Herodias was raging
again," she showed less mercy than the Baptist had obtained; for under
the plea that his restoration had been unwarranted, the Metropolitan was
sent to a forced wandering in the wilds of outer provinces, from which
there returned of him only the venerated relics of a martyr. Driven from
spot to spot, sometimes in chains, always under the prod of guarding
spears, one day of September, 407, he dragged himself to the tomb of the
martyr Basiliscus at Comana in Pontus, and laid his soul in the hands of
God. Thirty years afterward, Theodosius the Younger brought the body
back to Constantinople.
In person Chrysostom was small and spare. His life of rigorous fasting
and toil made him still more slight and hollow-cheeked, but it is told
that there was always a blaze of fire in the deep-set eyes. The work of
Chrysostom was chiefly ecclesiastical oratory, in which no one of his
own or later time surpassed him. First of the great Christian preachers
after the Church came from the caves, he was not less able as a teacher.
His letters, full of sweetness and firm honesty, his poetry, delicate
and musical, and his philosophic essays, rich with the clear-cut jewels
of dialectics, are worthy of his station in the first order of the
Doctors of the Church.
[Signature: John Malone]