The Empress and the Bishop

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Every so often, a voice or preacher comes to challenge a city: Augustine in Hippo and Carthage, Savonarola in Florence, Calvin in Geneva and more recently Spurgeon in nineteenth-century London. In the late fourth century in Antioch, and then in Constantinople, it was the Golden Mouth (Chrysostom) of John whose voice and teaching carried the day.

Given to an ascetic life, he became the principal preacher in Antioch, where followers of the Way were first called Christians, and was then handpicked to be the Bishop of Constantinople, the New Rome founded by Constantine. Although loved by the people, he criticized the rich and their vanity, called for simplicity of life and chastity in sexual relations and methodically and engagingly preached through the Bible. But in Constantinople he made enemies both of the court and of the mercurial Empress Aelia Eudoxia, and more especially of jealous church leaders in Alexandria and elsewhere. Sent into exile precipitating a riot, he died of cold and exhaustion in an obscure part of Armenia, but not before conducting a moving correspondence with his soulmate Olympias, an Abbess in Constantinople.

His golden voice lived on in his luminous teaching, and the heavenly Orthodox liturgy to which his name was given.