Vigils Reading – St John Chrysostom

ST CHRYSOSTOM’S CHARM

From “Historical Sketches” by St John Henry Newman1

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Whence 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 many other

great Saints command indeed my veneration, but exert no personal claim upon

my heart? Many holy people have died in exile, many holy people have been

successful preachers; and what 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, except by the contrast, does he remind us of that

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. 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

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 him, as I love David or St. Paul.

How am I to account for it? 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 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. It 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…13

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 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 the fire of ardent charity, he has not lost one fibre, 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 consumed.

That loving scrutiny, with which he follows the Apostles as they reveal

themselves to us in their writings, he practices in various ways towards all

people, 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 humans and their history; and hence he has always

something to produce about them, new or old, to the purpose of his argument,

whether from books or from the experience of life… 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.