The Mouth God Was Making

About this volume

Before Saint John Chrysostom ever climbed an ambo or earned the name history would give him, Golden-Mouthed, he was a boy in a widow's house in Antioch, and that house is where this first volume begins. The Mouth God Was Making does not open with sermons or councils or the great confrontations of his later years. It opens with Anthusa, twenty and widowed, refusing the second marriage the world expected of her, and with the son she raised alone in a city that, as the second chapter makes plain, could as easily ruin a promising young man as make one. Readers who come to Saint John Chrysostom already knowing the preacher of Constantinople, the scourge of the wealthy, the exile who died still dictating letters, may be surprised by how much of what he became was decided quietly, years before anyone outside Antioch had heard his name.

The volume follows him through the classroom of Libanius, the great pagan rhetorician whose training in eloquence John absorbed without absorbing his gods, a chapter that takes seriously both the debt and the distance, refusing to flatten either. It follows him to Diodore of Tarsus, the theologian who taught him to open Scripture in the plain, historical, almost stubbornly literal way that would mark his preaching for the rest of his life. And it follows him, crucially, to the night he chose not to climb: the moment when ambition, or the clear path to advancement that Antioch's Christian establishment seemed to be laying before him, was set aside for something harder to name and slower to arrive.

What follows is not triumph but formation, and the book is honest about how unglamorous formation can look. There are chapters here about learning to be small, about two years spent alone with almost nothing but a rock for a pillow and the Word for company, about a body that finally would not sustain the austerities his soul had chosen for it. This is the John Chrysostom before rhetoric became proclamation, a man whose health broke in the desert, who came back to the city changed and diminished and, in some way the book takes care to show rather than assert, more ready. The ascetic years are not treated as a detour from his real life's work but as the forge of it.

The volume closes where a public life properly begins: in the hands of Meletius, the bishop who ordained him, and in the five years John spent watching Bishop Flavian work before he himself was finally called to the ambo as priest. That final chapter, the priest steps to the ambo, is deliberately restrained. This is not yet the John Chrysostom of the great Antiochene homilies or the throne of Constantinople; those belong to volumes still to come. What this book offers instead is the patient, sometimes painful, always concrete story of how a widow's son from a provincial capital of the Roman East became the vessel later ages would call golden-mouthed, and it insists, chapter by chapter, that the mouth was made long before the world heard it speak.

Readers drawn to the great Doctors of the Church for their eloquence sometimes skip past the years that produced it, treating early life as mere prelude. This volume asks for patience with prelude. It sits with Anthusa's grief, with Libanius's classroom, with the silence of the mountains, because it takes seriously the conviction, Chrysostom's own, expressed later in his treatise on the priesthood, that nothing in a life devoted to God is accidental, least of all its beginning. Those who want to understand the sermons will do well to first understand the years in which no one was listening.