Whence is this devotion to St. John
Chrysostom, which leads me to dwell upon the thought of
him, and makes me kindle at his name, when so 10
many other great Saints, as the year brings round
their festivals, command indeed my veneration,
but exert no personal claim upon my heart?
Many holy men have died in exile, many holy
men have been successful preachers; and what 15
more can we write upon St. Chrysostom's
monument than this, that he was eloquent and that he
suffered persecution? He is not an Athanasius,
expounding a sacred dogma with a luminousness
which is almost an inspiration; nor is he 20
Athanasius, again, in his romantic life-long adventures,
in his sublime solitariness, in his ascendency over
all classes of men, in his series of triumphs over
material force and civil tyranny. Nor, except
by the contrast, does he remind us of that 25
Ambrose who kept his ground obstinately in an
imperial city, and fortified himself against the
heresy of a court by the living rampart of a
devoted population. Nor is he Gregory or Basil,
rich in the literature and philosophy of Greece,
and embellishing the Church with the spoils of
heathenism. Again, he is not an Augustine,
devoting long years to one masterpiece of thought, 5
and laying, in successive controversies, the
foundations of theology. Nor is he a Jerome, so dead to
the world that he can imitate the point and wit
of its writers without danger to himself or
scandal to his brethren. He has not trampled upon 10
heresy, nor smitten emperors, nor beautified the
house or the service of God, nor knit together the
portions of Christendom, nor founded a religious
order, nor built up the framework of doctrine, nor
expounded the science of the Saints; yet I love 15
him, as I love David or St. Paul.
How am I to account for it? It has not
happened to me, as it might happen to many a man,
that I have devoted time and toil to the study of
his writings or of his history, and cry up that 20
upon which I have made an outlay, or love what
has become familiar to me. Cases may occur
when our admiration for an author is only
admiration of our own comments on him, and when
our love of an old acquaintance is only our love 25
of old times. For me, I have not written the
life of Chrysostom, nor translated his works, nor
studied Scripture in his exposition, nor forged
weapons of controversy out of his sayings or his
doings. Nor is his eloquence of a kind to carry 30
any one away who has ever so little knowledge
of the oratory of Greece and Rome. It is not
force of words, nor cogency of argument, nor
harmony of composition, nor depth or richness of
thought, which constitute his power,--whence,
then, has he this influence, so mysterious, yet so 5
strong?
I consider St. Chrysostom's charm to lie in his
intimate sympathy and compassionateness for
the whole world, not only in its strength, but in
its weakness; in the lively regard with which he 10
views everything that comes before him, taken
in the concrete, whether as made after its own
kind or as gifted with a nature higher than its
own. Not that any religious man--above all,
not that any Saint--could possibly contrive to 15
abstract the love of the work from the love of
its Maker, or could feel a tenderness for earth
which did not spring from devotion to heaven;
or as if he would not love everything just in that
degree in which the Creator loves it, and 20
according to the measure of gifts which the Creator
has bestowed upon it, and preëminently for the
Creator's sake. But this is the characteristic
of all Saints; and I am speaking, not of what St.
Chrysostom had in common with others, but what 25
he had special to himself; and this specialty, I
conceive, is the interest which he takes in all
things, not so far as God has made them alike,
but as He has made them different from each
other. I speak of the discriminating 30
affectionateness with which he accepts every one for what is
personal in him and unlike others. I speak of his
versatile recognition of men, one by one, for the
sake of that portion of good, be it more or less,
of a lower order or a higher, which has severally
been lodged in them; his eager contemplation of 5
the many things they do, effect, or produce, of
all their great works, as nations or as states;
nay, even as they are corrupted or disguised by
evil, so far as that evil may in imagination be
disjoined from their proper nature, or may be 10
regarded as a mere material disorder apart from
its formal character of guilt. I speak of the
kindly spirit and the genial temper with which
he looks round at all things which this
wonderful world contains; of the graphic fidelity with 15
which he notes them down upon the tablets of
his mind, and of the promptitude and propriety
with which he calls them up as arguments or
illustrations in the course of his teaching as the
occasion requires. Possessed though he be by 20
the fire of Divine charity, he has not lost one
fiber, he does not miss one vibration, of the
complicated whole of human sentiment and affection;
like the miraculous bush in the desert, which, for
all the flame that wrapt it round, was not thereby 25
consumed.
Such, in a transcendent perfection, was the
gaze, as we may reverently suppose, with which
the loving Father of all surveyed in eternity that
universe even in its minutest details which He 30
had decreed to create, such the loving pity with
which He spoke the word when the due moment
came, and began to mold the finite, as He
created it, in His infinite hands; such the watchful
solicitude with which he now keeps His
catalogue of the innumerable birds of heaven, and 5
counts day by day the very hairs of our head and
the alternations of our breathing. Such, much
more, is the awful contemplation with which He
encompasses incessantly every one of those souls
on whom He heaps His mercies here, in order 10
to make them the intimate associates of His own
eternity hereafter. And we too, in our measure,
are bound to imitate Him in our exact and vivid
apprehension of Himself and of His works. As to
Himself, we love Him, not simply in His nature, 15
but in His triple personality, lest we become mere
pantheists. And so, again, we choose our patron
Saints, not for what they have in common with
each other (else there could be no room for choice
at all), but for what is peculiar to them severally. 20
That which is my warrant, therefore, for particular
devotions at all, becomes itself my reason for
devotion to St. John Chrysostom. In him I
recognize a special pattern of that very gift of
discrimination. He may indeed be said in some sense to 25
have a devotion of his own for every one who
comes across him,--for persons, ranks, classes,
callings, societies, considered as Divine works and
the subjects of his good offices or good will, and
therefore I have a devotion for him. 30
It is this observant benevolence which gives to
his exposition of Scripture its chief characteristic.
He is known in ecclesiastical literature as the
expounder, above all others, of its literal sense.
Now in mystical comments the direct object which
the writer sets before him is the Divine Author 5
Himself of the written Word. Such a writer
sees in Scripture, not so much the works of God,
as His nature and attributes; the Teacher more
than the definite teaching, or its human
instruments, with their drifts and motives, their courses 10
of thought, their circumstances and personal
peculiarities. He loses the creature in the glory
which surrounds the Creator. The problem
before him is not what the inspired writer directly
meant, and why, but, out of the myriad of 15
meanings present to the Infinite Being who inspired him,
which it is that is most illustrative of that Great
Being's all-holy attributes and solemn dispositions.
Thus, in the Psalter, he will drop David and Israel
and the Temple together, and will recognize 20
nothing there but the shadows of those greater truths
which remain forever. Accordingly, the
mystical comment will be of an objective character;
whereas a writer who delights to ponder human
nature and human affairs, to analyze the 25
workings of the mind, and to contemplate what is
subjective to it, is naturally drawn to investigate
the sense of the sacred writer himself, who was the
organ of the revelation, that is, he will investigate
the literal sense. Now, in the instance of St. 30
Chrysostom, it so happens that literal exposition
is the historical characteristic of the school in
which he was brought up; so that if he commented
on Scripture at all, he anyhow would have
adopted that method; still, there have been
many literal expositors, but only one 5
Chrysostom. It is St. Chrysostom who is the charm of
the method, not the method that is the charm
of St. Chrysostom.
That charm lies, as I have said, in his habit and
his power of throwing himself into the minds 10
of others, of imagining with exactness and with
sympathy circumstances or scenes which were
not before him, and of bringing out what he has
apprehended in words as direct and vivid as the
apprehension. His page is like the table of a 15
_camera lucida_, which represents to us the living
action and interaction of all that goes on around
us. That loving scrutiny, with which he follows
the Apostles as they reveal themselves to us in
their writings, he practices in various ways 20
towards all men, living and dead, high and low,
those whom he admires and those whom he weeps
over. He writes as one who was ever looking
out with sharp but kind eyes upon the world of
men and their history; and hence he has always 25
something to produce about them, new or old,
to the purpose of his argument, whether from
books or from the experience of life. Head and
heart were full to overflowing with a stream of
mingled "wine and milk," of rich vigorous thought 30
and affectionate feeling. This is why his manner
of writing is so rare and special; and why, when
once a student enters into it, he will ever
recognize him, wherever he meets with extracts from
him.