"They speak truly but touch on only half the matter: we must go deeper." John Calvin
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| Chrysostom on Friendship |
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| Monday, 25 February 2008 13:37 | ||||
Page 1 of 2 At the first Still Deeper conference, on Friendship, Dr Chad Van Dixhoorn gave a talk about John Chrysostom's views of friendship. As Dr Van Dixhoorn went deeper into the early church father's teaching, he teased out important applications for modern Christians. I count a fourth century Christian named John among my friends because when I wanted to learn about friendship, he taught me to go still deeper. I first want to tell you something about John and his friendships. I’ll then turn to what John has to say friendship itself. John Chrysostom (c. 349-407)A. The early years: friendship with Basil John, later called Chrysostom, was born around 349 AD. By this time in Church history the great Athanasius was in his prime and the Cappadocian Fathers were in their mid or late teens. If it is helpful to have reference points, Jerome was born a couple of years before Chrysostom,[1] Augustine a few years after.
John was a native of Antioch, in the Roman province of Syria, now in Southern Turkey. Antioch was one of the largest and most splendid of Roman cities, with ten percent of the population very rich and ten percent very poor. John was born into a family of the middling sort, but with his father’s early death, it required careful financial management for John’s Christian mother to provide for the boy and his education as well as the needs of John’s older sister.
Following his education in school and then in rhetoric under the great Libanios, John decided to chase a career in the civil service, perhaps with a view to politics. But he had not reckoned with his boyhood friend, Basil. The latter was a godly youth, intent on pulling John away from the world, and toward a life of godliness. Eventually, Chrysostom was won for Christ and then was easily convinced to live a life of solitary study of the Scriptures with Basil.
The only wrinkle in the plan was Anthousa, John’s mother. She pleaded effectively that if he became a monk that it would be like a second widowhood to her. Clearly John could not in good conscience leave home for a monastery, but he could bring a monastery to his home, which is what he did, shortly after his baptism around 368. He joined a quasi-monastic ring of close friends which permitted no luxuries in life. John daily commuted to another part of town to study true spiritual dedication under the tutelage of an urban ascetic, while spending part of his time assisting one of the local bishop, who ordained him as a reader, the lowest office in the church, just below the level of a deacon. Unfortunately this holy club was not kept secret, and its members always ran the risk of being employed in active ecclesiastical service. Quite sensibly, when the church was looking for new clergy, it would look to this group first to find its pastors and preachers.
B. On the priesthood: writing about friendship The story of these early years, save John’s ordination as reader, is found in the opening pages of John’s delightful work, On the priesthood. This manual of pastoral theology spans six brief ‘books’. Unusually, it takes the form of a dialogue between John and Basil, and the subtext is all about friendship and benevolent deceptions.
As the first of these books explains, the inevitable finally happened. The church in Antioch faced an acute shortage of clergy. It was rumoured that John and Basil should be ordained to serve in the church. This was an idea that did not please the spiritual pair, who were still devoted to the ideal of living lives of prayer, meditation and study of Scripture. But as it happens, this was a time in the history of the church when a man’s sense of divine calling to the ministry was a matter of relative priority. If he did not want to be ordained, he would be strongly urged to set his own inclinations aside. Labourers were needed for the harvest, and the church was going to do more than simply pray for help. Even if persuasion failed, ecclesiastical press-gangs would not. Ignoring all decency and good order (and the rulings of councils and synods against coerced ordinations), strong armed ecclesiastics would lay hands on potential ordinands by force.
Suspecting that they could be captured by well-meaning clerical commandos from the local church, Basil discussed the matter with John, and came to the understanding that whatever they did, they would do it together. Well how wrong he was. John thought highly of his friend, much more highly of Basil than of himself. John had privately determined that although he must avoid ordination, Basil must not. Through a series of white lies and quick stratagems, Basil was captured and ordained while John escaped.
On the priesthood recounts John’s dialogue with his newly ordained friend. John seeks to justify his pious fraud to his incredulous friend. The longer part of his argument involves cataloguing the solemnity, variety, difficulty and complexity of the pastor’s task. As John saw it, each aspect of this task was one more reason why Basil was eminently fitted to be a priest and John was not.
Of course there is a delicious irony for readers at every turn in the dialogue. John presents profound arguments for his own inadequacies in the pastorate – and yet the reader knows that he later became the patriarch of the new Roman capital, the overseer of countless Christians and the pastor of the imperial family. John also waxes eloquent on why he is not fit to be a preacher – and yet we know that he would soon be named Chrysostom, ‘the golden-mouth’, for the beauty and majesty of his sermons, for he would become the most famous preacher in the history of the church.
C. The rest of the story: famous but friendless? After avoiding ordination, Chrysostom spent three years in the hills around Antioch as a monk, finally breaking his health in a period of sleepless solitude in a lonely cell. Forced to return to civilization, he was again urged to accept ordination.
It was probably about this time that Basil moved to minister in a nearby town, and probably about this time that John stopped to write his enduring treatise about his friendship, and about service for Christ in his church.
Well John was first ordained as a deacon and, after the usual three years, as a priest. Starting with his first sermon, John was a tremendous success. Vast crowds came to hear him and professional scribes tried to capture his every word. Spontaneous applause was not uncommon; nor was Chrysostom’s rebuke, that the only applause that he wanted was a change in their lives.
John’s general tendency was to preach through books of the Bible, breaking only for special apologetic sermons or for special events in the Christian calendar. Most of his writing was accomplished during this remarkably fruitful period in Antioch. Indeed, John would have lived out his days in Antioch if he was not in 398 secretly and summarily appointed as the bishop of Constantinople, widely recognized in the unofficial ranking of the day as the second most powerful bishop in the church, second only to the one in Rome.
He arrived in Constantinople to find himself acclaimed by the crowds across the social spectrum – acclaimed by all, but not loved by those in power. Constantinople was the place to be if one wanted to enter the inner ring of politics. It was the place to be if one wanted wealth or power. Perhaps for that very reason it was a place where there was more infighting than friendship.
As it was, the new preacher in Constantinople would not please the rich, and they resented his open opposition to their worldliness. The clergy were of little help. Many needed discipline, but were unwilling to hear his rebukes against their laziness and lasciviousness. Others who were innocent felt condemned by John’s general statements about corruption among the clergy.
Chrysostom reformed the churches of Constantinople with puritan vigour, beginning at home. The start of his service in the capital marked the end of great banquets in the bishop’s palace, for he loved solitude and simplicity. John also ‘auctioned’ off episcopal assets, beautiful marble and gold plate were sold to provide for the poor, to the great dismay of his peers, many of whom lived in splendour.
Perhaps John could have survived on the good will of the people if Empress Eudoxia had not felt so sure, on an increasing number of occasions, that his general denunciation of immorality quite pointedly condemned her own flagrant lifestyle. Not without reason, she felt that her sins were targeted by John, and it is alleged that John twice made thinly veiled parallels between the empress and Jezebel, and the empress and Herodias.
At the first report of such preaching John was banished, but he was hardly undone. He says that he ‘felt no anxiety’: [I] said to myself: If the empress wishes to banish me, let her do so; ‘the earth is the Lord’s.’ If she wants to have me sawn asunder, I have Isaiah for an example. If she wants me to be drowned in the ocean, I think of Jonah. If I am to be thrown into the fire, the three men in the furnace suffered the same. If cast before wild beasts, I remember Daniel in the lion’s den. If she wants me to be stoned, I have before me Stephen, the first martyr. If she demands my head, let her do so; John the Baptist shines before me. Naked I came from my mother’s womb, naked shall I leave this world. Paul reminds me, ‘If I still pleased men, I would not be the servant of Christ.’
In the event, John was quickly summoned back to calm angry crowds and to appease God after a calamity in the imperial family. The city rejoiced, but the imperial court did not reform its ways.
And so in the following year, John preached his second pointed sermon, and this time it was the empress who tasted triumph. John was banished to an inhospitable location nearby Antioch, a haunt of highway robbers and the centre of tribal revolts. It was a good place for John to disappear.
But John still had some friends, and through much effort they were able to reach him. His health began to revive and his influence only expanded through his industry in letter writing. The empress and her ecclesiastical allies were incensed that John’s lonely home had become a destination for pilgrims, and irritated that their actions were censured by leaders across much of the church, many of whom responded with heartfelt sympathy and outrage to John’s treatment.
Eventually the imperial family decided that John must die. The final solution was twofold: to remove him from his friends, who provided the love that gave him hope; and to send the old man on a death march, forced by his guards to journey by foot to Pontus during particularly harsh weather. No one was surprised when his frail body finally gave way. Carried back to a small chapel, he died on 14 September 407, still under the custody of his guards, but perhaps in the company of some local Christians.
John Chrysostom’s earthly pilgrimage only ended thirty years later, when his body was exhumed, and carried back to Constantinople.
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Blog - Walk
| Quiet Times |
Is it the unforgivable sin - to not have a quiet time? Is there any flexability in the way we read the Bible, or is it best to have a set time each day when we read a portion of the Bible? I have found that variety is just as necessary as discipline. Sometimes we focus only on the need for the latter! This leads to a lot of guilt and frustration when Bible reading is not coming along well, but is not often part of a solution. The goal of reading the Bible each day is to feed and sustain us in our relationship with God. I have, at different times, found various methods of reading more or less helpful in pursuing that aim. That this is so, is a recognition of the nature of the written revelation and the way it impacts us as creatures who read in the context of real lives. Sometimes using study notes, sometimes spending a week or a month on a single book, sometimes scan reading the whole Bible over a few months, sometimes (rarely as I'm not very good at it!) memorising a verse or two. Having just been on holiday for a week, my wife and I read through Romans together - three chapters a night. We were struck by the many ways God shows his power through the Gospel - in dealing with his wrath, sin, death, the Law and lovelessness - and we enjoyed the extra time a holiday gives to chat about these things. Are you struggling to read the Bible? Don't just feel guilty about your lack of discipline - try reading it in a fresh way, try reading it any way. Just try reading it - as the Psalmist sings, 'Taste and see!' |