John Chrysostom
Bishop of Constantinople, theologian and preacher (c. 349–407), born in Antioch into a well-off Christian family, trained in classical rhetoric by the great pagan orator Libanius, who according to tradition lamented that his best student had been 'stolen by the Christians', and later ordained priest in Antioch, where his extraordinary oratorical eloquence earned him the posthumous byname 'Chrysostom' (Golden Mouth). His sermons in Antioch, especially the Homilies on the Statues, delivered during a popular uprising that threatened the city's destruction by the emperor, revealed both his pastoral ability and his fierce commitment to social justice, a recurring theme in his preaching: John relentlessly denounced the ostentatious luxury of ecclesiastical and civil elites, arguing that accumulated wealth was in reality theft from the poor and that true Christian piety demanded a radical redistribution of material goods. Elevated against his will to the patriarchal see of Constantinople in 397, his ascetic rigour and his reforms of church administration — which drastically cut the episcopate's sumptuary spending to redirect funds toward hospitals and charitable institutions — earned him powerful enemies, especially the empress Eudoxia, offended by sermons she interpreted as personal attacks on her vanity, and Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria, who orchestrated his overthrow at the Synod of the Oak (403). Exiled and briefly reinstated, he was ultimately exiled permanently to the remote frontiers of the Empire, dying during a forced march under circumstances that cemented his image as a martyr of ecclesiastical justice. A prolific author of biblical commentaries, treatises and hundreds of surviving sermons, John Chrysostom is regarded as one of the four great Doctors of the Greek Church and the most influential preacher of the entire Christian antiquity.