Lim, 'Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom, Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9601
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9601-lim-golden
@@@@96.1.7, Kelly, Golden Mouth
J.N.D. Kelly, Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom,
Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1995. viii + 310 pp. $47.50. ISBN 0-8014-3189-1.
Reviewed by Richard Lim -- Smith College
rlim@smith.smtih.edu
One of the towering Christian figures of late antiquity, John
Chrysostom (ca. 349-407) has commonly received his due
through being studied piece-meal: as an ascetic wedded to his
vocation, as an advocate of virginity, as a populist preacher, as
an vocal opponent of "judaizers," as a Christian counterpart and
rival to his teacher Libanius of Antioch, the famous rhetor, and
as a player in the dangerous and turbulent game of high
ecclesiastical and imperial politics. This new biography of the
rich and multi-layered man promises to fill a long-standing need
for an up-to-date comprehensive treatment in English, if only to
replace the old stand-by, the two-volume work of Chrysostomus
Baur: John Chrysostomus and His Time (translated from the
German original published in 1929-30).
Kelly's treatment follows the contours of a traditional
historical biography, taking the reader, as the sub-title
suggests, on a journey from the world of Chrysostom's childhood
in Antioch, through his early ascetic training in the Syrian
desert, his role as a preacher and author back in his native
city, and finally to his years as the bishop of Constantinople.
The book is a rewarding, maybe sometimes deceptively
straightforward, read as well as a rich mine of historical
information. Kelly does not aim to create an overarching
framework of unity beyond that which Chrysostom's own life
imposes, nor does he seek to use his subject's experiences to
speak to larger issues in the culture and society of the late
Roman east. When faced with the question of why Chrysostom chose
to retire to a cave and pursue a solitary life, for example,
Kelly dismisses as "fanciful" scholarly theories that locate the
context for Chrysostom's action in an enthusiastic local
community's attempt to ordain a "reluctant" man of god to
priestly or episcopal office, a well-known and much-studied late
antique phenomenon, opting instead to fall back on a more
"obvious" reason: "his yearning for a less distracted, richer,
ever more continuous converse with God." (p. 32) A preference
for such a direct, "no-frills" approach characterizes the tone of
the work throughout.
Even so, Golden Mouth is not just a smooth, linear
narrative that spins a good yarn. While it may be open to the
charge of positivism for its unquestioned faith in factual
narrative and disregard of interpretive theories, Kelly's book is
far from being a synthetic work that presents no controversy or
fresh interpretations. Instead, it is peppered with new,
revisionist insights about the facts of Chrysostom's life: these
are usually offered with a sure economy of argument so that the
narratival train is never derailed. An undesirable side-effect
of this, however, is that fairly important points, such as the
re-dating of Ep. 4 to Olympias to early 407 (p. 282),
receive only one or two casual sentences in the text and a
footnote, and are therefore far too easy to miss.
No life can be completely self-referential, let alone that of a
public man who grappled with numerous current issues in important
cities such as Antioch and Constantinople. What we find in the
twenty chapters (counting the "Epilogue") is a programmatic
description of Chrysostom's life and works into which learned
information about changes in the political landscape, and late
antique cultural, administrative and religious practices are
introduced at appropriate moments in an unassuming and
unobtrusive manner. There are no lengthy digressions, only
concise, sensible paragraphs giving the reader what he or she
needs to know about the late antique world to understand a
particular episode in Chrysostom's life. The author never loses
sight of the fact that he is writing a biography.
More than half the book is devoted to the period after John
Chrysostom had been consecrated bishop of Constantinople (398).
His political activities in the capital, particularly his (often
difficult) dealings with the empress Eudoxia, received and repaid
Kelly's careful scrutiny. The author untangles in a masterly and
convincing way the complex manoeuvres surrounding the affair of
the Long Brothers and the Synod of the Oak in 403.
The most enlightening and sympathetic chapters I find to be those
which depict the priest or bishop at work (esp. Chs. 5, 10).
John Chrysostom was the foremost late antique preacher, and it is
only through understanding the context and concerns of his
sermons that we can begin to appreciate his historical
significance. Through close readings of particular sets of
sermons, Kelly offers complex descriptions of the wide range of
activities and contexts with which Chrysostom was associated.
Here, the author depends in the main for the order in this
narrative on the chronology of the sermons established by M. von
Bonsdorf, Zur Predigtaetigkeit des J. Chrysostomus
(Heilsingsfors 1922), while remaining perfectly willing to depart
from it as needed (see e.g., p. 166); it would be interesting to
see whether the ongoing project by Pauline Allen and others in
Australia to re-date Chrysostom's (esp. his exegetical) sermons
would eventually produce results that could materially affect
Kelly's arguments.
For many well-known public figures, their earlier, more obscure
history often presents would-be biographers with thorny problems
in that it can only be known through much later works composed
with pronounced apologetic, polemical or hagiographic intent.
John Chrysostom's life offers no exceptions in this regard. Two
main sources, Chrysostom's own Dialogus de sacerdotio and
Palladius of Helenopolis' Dialogus de vita S. Joannis
Chrysostomi, offer ponderous hermeneutical obstacles to any
who would mine them as sources for historical biography: the
first cannot be securely dated before 392 when Jerome read it
(De viris inlustribus 129); the later was composed ca. 408
as a posthumous defense of Chrysostom's reputation against the
charges advanced by his enemy Theophilus of Alexandria.
While the occasional discussion of source problems in Kelly's
running text is neither too long nor too involved to distract a
reader who has been given to expect narrative, such material may
be relegated to an appendix, or better yet, to an introductory
chapter that is devoted to the methodology and problems
surrounding the use of such sources. Instead, Kelly sometimes
places comments and arguments about the reliability and limits of
particular documents in the text and at other times in an
appendix (A: "Some Ancient Sources"). This creates in the reader
a certain amount of completely avoidable confusion.
At one point Kelly brushes aside the prevailing skepticism
regarding the usefulness of the De sacerdotio as a
historical document of Chrysostom's life: "It is difficult to
believe that he could have written anything but the truth about
himself in a work designed to be read by, and to convince, people
among whom he had lived, and many of whom had known him
personally, most of his life." (p. 14) But it is only in the
next chapter (III.2) that Kelly presents the necessary arguments
against those--a majority it should be said--who would view the
"autobiographical" segments of the work as not much more than
"literary fiction." (pp. 25-28). This reviewer is persuaded by
the arguments which, Kelly maintains, show that these sections
were unlikely to have been totally fabricated but would still
like to see a more comprehensive and fundamental consideration of
the work's trustworthiness as a historical source, esp. when used
to plug "gaps" in our knowledge. Augustine of Hippo's
Confessions, read also by contemporaries, might not be
purely a work of "literary fiction" either, but scholars have
wisely avoided taking its retrospective narratives of youth and
adolescence as unproblematic descriptions. But such problems are
too well-understood as a problem to require much treatment here.
Regarding Palladius' vita, Kelly pronounces it to be
"generally ... a trustworthy source." (p. 292) While the author
does enumerate areas where this account is likely to be biased or
deficient, his basic tendency is to accept the authenticity of
accounts that provide biographical knowledge about Chrysostom.
This generally optimistic appraisal has something to do with the
author's desire to create, as much as possible, a complete
portrait of his subject. Since a linear narrative abhors
vacuums, it compensates by resorting to every possible means of
offering information about each significant phase of Chrysostom's
life. The strain this tall order unfortunately but inevitably
produces is evident in some of the prefatory remarks that precede
Kelly's attempts at "filling in the blanks." For instance: "As a
boy and teenager, John's figure remains largely in the shadows,
and we catch few if any reliable glimpses of his personality or
activities. The picture changes strikingly when he reaches the
end of his school days, and from this date we can follow his
development in at any rate broad outline" (p. 14); or "So far as
particular events or experiences are concerned, John's life
during these four critical years [372-6] remains a complete blank
to us, but we can form a fairly clear, if general, picture of its
patterns" (p. 30); and "It is ... disappointing that, with one or
two significant exceptions, we are completely in the dark about
his personal life during the decade, and also about the major
events in which he must have been involved from time to time.
Fortunately, substantial portions of his work as an author and
preacher have been preserved, and these enable us to form some
idea of the issues which chiefly interested him as a pastor and,
in much more shadowy outline, of his steadily growing stature in
the community." (p. 83)
Kelly finds human contradictions less worrisome than silences and
does not try to present a "homogenized" Chrysostom. In this
work, we encounter a complex character who might be capable at
times of unbending heroism and yet remained able, "when the
occasion seemed appropriate, to address the emperor and empress
with fulsome flattery." (p. 115) Though this may be by design,
no clear, coherent portrait of Chrysostom the man, even as the
author adopts the genre of narrative biography, emerges
ultimately from these pages. The "ascetic, preacher, bishop"
appears as an engaged actor, deeply involved with his world, but
as an "individual" person, the "Golden-mouthed" remains opaque
and elusive. A book that is built around the external
circumstances of Chrysostom's life is understandably ill-suited
for a sensitive discovery of the latter. I find this unfortunate
because, while we are continually challenged by this work in our
understanding of specific details about Chrysostom's life and
thought, it leaves left fundamentally unchanged the prevailing
assessment of the man as a stern, devoted and somewhat
impractical moral crusader. To what extent this is the
predictable result of trying to know someone mainly through his
sermons and moralizing tracts is an inviting question that is
regrettably left unexplored here. Yet even Kelly's consideration
of Chrysostom's correspondance with Olympias and others during
the final years of his life fails to break the mold.
In terms of apparatus, the book provides two useful maps of
Antioch and Constantinople that can help the reader negotiate in
topographical terms Chrysostom's everyday world. The index is
helpful but not as full in subject-headings and sub-headings as
it can be given the fact that the table of contents is of little
or no help to a reader who wishes to look something up in a
hurry. What would have been most useful is a chronological
synopsis of Chrysostom's career that is correlated with his
datable works; either presented as an appendix or a table, it
would have served beautifully as a guide to the perplexed. All
told, this is a book written for those who will sit down and read
it through; it is much more difficult to use as a reference work,
especially given the absence of a bibliography in the back.
Those who take the time to do the former, however, will find
between the covers a rich and compelling story.