Chapter X: Chrysostom. 347-407 A.d

The most eloquent, and one of the most estimable, of the “Fathers” was born at Antioch, the Christian city _par excellence_. His family held a distinguished position, and his father was in high command in the Syrian division of the imperial army. He studied for the law, and was instructed in oratory by the famous rhetorician Libanius (the intimate friend and counsellor of the young Emperor Julian), who pronounced his pupil worthy to succeed to his chair, if he had not adopted the Christian faith. He soon gave up the law for theology, and retired to a monastery, near Antioch, where he passed four years, rigidly abstaining from flesh-meat and, like the Essenes, abandoning the rights of private property and living a life of the strictest asceticism.

Having submitted himself in solitude to the severest austerities during a considerable length of time, he entered the Church, and soon gained the highest reputation for his extraordinary eloquence and zeal. On the death of the Archbishop of Constantinople, he was unanimously elected to fill the vacant Primacy. The _nolo me episcopari_ seems, in his case, to have been no unmeaning formula. His beneficence and charity in the new position attracted general admiration. From the revenues of his See he founded a hospital for the sick--one of the very first of those rather modern institutions. The fame of the “Golden-mouthed” drew to his cathedral immense crowds of people, who before had frequented the theatre and the circus rather than the churches, and the building constantly resounded with their enthusiastic plaudits. He was, however, no mere popular preacher; he fearlessly exposed the corrupt and selfish life of the large body of the clergy. At one time he deposed, it is said, no less than thirteen bishops, in Lesser Asia, from their Sees; and in one of his _Homilies_ he does not hesitate to charge “the whole ecclesiastical body with avarice and licentiousness, asserting that the number of bishops who could be saved bore a very small proportion to those who would be damned.”[91]

At length, his repeated denunciations of the too notorious scandals of the Court and the Church excited the bitter enmity of his brother-prelates, and, by their intrigues at the Imperial Court of Constantinople, he was deposed from his See and exiled to the wildest parts of the Euxine coasts, where, exposed to every sort of privation, he caught a violent fever and died. So far did the hostility of the Episcopacy extend, that one of his rivals, a bishop, named Theophilus, in a book expressly written against him, amongst other vituperative epithets had proceeded to the length of styling him “a filthy demon,” and of solemnly consigning his soul to Satan. With the poor, however, Chrysostom enjoyed unbounded popularity and esteem. His greatest fault was his theological intolerance--a fault, it is just to add, of the age rather than of the man.

The writings of Chrysostom are exceedingly voluminous--700 homilies, orations, doctrinal treatises, and 242 epistles. Their “chief value consists in the illustrations they furnish of the manners of the fourth and fifth centuries--of the moral and social state of the period. The circus, spectacles, theatres, baths, houses, domestic economy, banquets, dresses, fashions, pictures, processions, tight-rope dancing, funerals--in fine, everything has a place in the picture of licentious luxury which it is the object of Chrysostom to denounce.” Next to his profession of faith in the efficacy and virtues of a non-flesh diet, amongst the most interesting of his productions is his _Golden Book_ on the education of the young. He recommends that children should be inured to habits of temperance, by abstaining, at least, twice a week from the ordinary grosser food with which they are supplied. As might be expected from the age, and from his order, the practice of Chrysostom, and of the numerous other ecclesiastical abstinents from the gross diet of the richer part of the community, reposed upon ascetic and traditionary principles, rather than on the more secular and modern motives of justice, humanity, and general social improvement. So, in fact, Origen, one of the most learned of the Fathers, expressly says (_Contra Celsum_, v.): “We [the Christian leaders] practise abstinence from the flesh of animals to buffet our bodies and treat them as slaves (ὑπωπιάζομεν καί δουλαγωγοῦμεν), and we wish to mortify our members upon earth,” &c.

Accordingly, the _Apostolical Canons_ distinguished, as Bingham (_Antiquities of the Christian Church_) reports them, between abstinents, διὰ τὴν ἀσκησιν and διὰ τὴν βδελυπίαν, _i.e._, between those who abstained to exercise self-control, and those who did so from disgust and abhorrence of what, in ordinary and orthodox language, are too complacently and confidently termed “the good creatures of God.” This distinction, it must be added, holds only of the prevailing sentiment of the Orthodox Church as finally established. During several centuries--even so late as the Paulicians in the seventh, or even as the Albigeois of the thirteenth, century--_Manicheism_, as it is called, or a belief in the inherent evil of all matter, was widely spread in large and influential sections of the Christian Church--nor, indeed, were some of its most famous Fathers without suspicion of this heretical taint. According to the _Clementine Homilies_, “the unnatural eating of flesh-meat is of demoniacal origin, and was introduced by those giants who, from their bastard nature, took no pleasure in pure nourishment, and only lusted after blood. Therefore the eating of flesh is as polluting as the heathen worship of demons, with its sacrifices and its impure feasts; through participation in which, a man becomes a fellow-dietist (ὁμοδίαιτος) with demons.”[92] That superstition was often, in the minds of the followers both of Plato and of St. Paul, mixed up with, and, indeed, usually dominated over, the reasonable motives of the more philosophic advocates of the higher life, there can be no sort of doubt; nor can we claim a monopoly of rational motives for the mass of the adherents of either Christian or Pythagorean abstinence. Yet an impartial judgment must allow almost equal credit to the earnestness of mind and purity of motive which, mingled though they undoubtedly were with (in the pre-scientific ages) a necessary infusion of superstition, urged the followers of the better way--Christian and non-Christian--to discard the “social lies” of the dead world around them. At all events, it is not for the selfish egoists to sneer at the sublime--if error-infected--efforts of the earlier pioneers of moral progress for their own and the world’s redemption from the bonds of the prevailing vile materialism in life and dietary habits.

We have already shown that the earliest Jewish-Christian communities, both in Palestine and elsewhere--the immediate disciples of the original Twelve--enjoined abstinence as one of the primary obligations of the New Faith; and that the earliest traditions represent the foremost of them as the strictest sort of Vegetarians.[93] If then we impartially review the history of the practice, the teaching, and the traditions of the first Christian authorities, it cannot but appear surprising that the Orthodox Church, ignoring the practice and highest ideal of the most sacred period of its annals, has, even within its own Order, deemed it consistent with its claim of being representative of the Apostolic period to substitute partial and periodic for total and constant abstinence.

The following passages in the _Homilies_, or Congregational Discourses, of Chrysostom will serve as specimens of his feeling on the propriety of dietary reform. The eloquent but diffusive style of the Greek Bossuet, it must be noted, is necessarily but feebly represented in the literal English version:--

“No streams of blood are among them [the ascetics]; no butchering
and cutting up of flesh; no dainty cookery; no heaviness of head.
Nor are there horrible smells of flesh-meats among them, or
disagreeable fumes from the kitchen. No tumult and disturbance and
wearisome clamours, but bread and water--the latter from a pure
fountain, the former from honest labour. If, at any time, however,
they may wish to feast more sumptuously, the sumptuousness consists
in fruits, and their pleasure in these is greater than at royal
tables. With this repast [of fruits and vegetables], even angels
from Heaven, as they behold it, are delighted and pleased. For if
over one sinner who repents they rejoice, over so many just men
imitating them what will they not do? No master and servant are
there. All are servants--all free men. And think not this a mere
form of speech, for they are servants one of another and masters
one of another. Wherein, therefore, are we different from, or
superior to, Ants, if we compare ourselves with them? For as they
care for the things of the body only, so also do we. And would
it were for these alone! But, alas! it is for things far worse.
For not for necessary things only do we care, but also for things
superfluous. Those animals pursue an innocent life, while we follow
after all covetousness. Nay, we do not so much as imitate the ways
of Ants. _We follow the ways of Wolves, the habits of Tigers; or,
rather, we are worse even than they. To them Nature has assigned
that they should be thus_ [carnivorously] _fed, while God has
honoured us with rational speech and a sense of equity. And yet we
are become worse than the wild beasts._”[94]

Again he protests:--

“Neither am I leading you to the lofty peak of total renunciation
of possessions [ἀκτημοσύνη]; but for the present I require you to
cut off superfluities, and to desire a sufficiency alone. Now,
the boundary of sufficiency is the using those things which it
is impossible to live without. No one debars you from these, nor
forbids you your daily food. I say ‘food,’ not ‘luxury’ [τροφὴν οὐ
τρυφὴν λέγω]--‘raiment,’ not ‘ornament.’ Rather, this frugality--to
speak correctly--is, in the best sense, luxury. For consider who
should we say more truly feasted--he whose diet is herbs, and who
is in sound health and suffered no uneasiness, or he who has the
table of a Sybarite and is full of a thousand disorders? Clearly,
the former. Therefore let us seek nothing more than these, if we
would at once live luxuriously and healthfully. And let him who
can be satisfied with pulse, and can keep in good health, seek for
nothing more. But let him who is weaker, and needs to be [more
richly] dieted with other vegetables and fruits, not be debarred
from them.... We do not advise this for the harm and injury of men,
but to lop off what is superfluous--and that is superfluous which
is more than we need. When we are able to live without a thing,
healthfully and respectably, certainly the addition of that thing
is a superfluity.”--_Hom._ xix. 2 _Cor._

Denouncing the grossness of the ordinary mode of living, he eloquently descants on the evil results, physical as well as mental:--

“A man who lives in pleasure [_i.e._, in selfish luxury] is dead
while he lives, for he lives only to his belly. In his other senses
he lives not. He sees not what he ought to see; he hears not what
he ought to hear; he speaks not what he ought to speak.... Look not
at the superficial countenance, but examine the interior, and you
will see it full of deep dejection. If it were possible to bring
the soul into view, and to behold it with our bodily eyes, that of
the luxurious would seem depressed, mournful, miserable, and wasted
with leanness, for the more the body grows sleek and gross, the
more lean and weakly is the soul. The more the one is pampered,
the more is the other hampered [θάλπεται--θάπτεται: the latter
meaning, literally, buried]. As when the pupil of the eye has the
external envelope too thick, it cannot put forth the power of
vision and look out, because the light is excluded by the dense
covering, and darkness ensues; so when the body is constantly full
fed, the soul must be invested with grossness. The dead, say you,
corrupt and rot, and a foul pestilential humour distils from them.
So in her who lives in pleasure may be seen rheums, and phlegm,
and catarrh, hiccough, vomiting, eructations, and the like, which,
as too unseemly, I forbear to name. For such is the despotism of
luxury, it makes us endure things which we do not think proper even
to mention....

“‘She that lives in pleasure is dead while she lives.’ Hear this,
ye women[95] who pass your time in revels and intemperance, and who
neglect the poor, pining and perishing with hunger, whilst you are
destroying yourselves with continual luxury. Thus you are the cause
of two deaths--of those who are dying of want and of your own, both
through ill-measure. If, out of your fulness, you tempered their
want, you would save two lives. Why do you thus gorge your own body
with excess, and waste that of the poor with want? Consider what
comes of food--into what it is changed. Are you not disgusted at
its being named? Why, then, be eager for such accumulations? The
increase of luxury is but the multiplication of filth.[96] For
Nature has her limits, and what is beyond these is not nourishment,
but injury and the increase of ordure.

“Nourish the body, but do not destroy it. Food is called
nourishment, to show that its purpose is not to hurt, but to
support us. For this reason, perhaps, food passes into excrement
that we may not be lovers of luxury. If it were not so--if it were
not useless and injurious to the body, we should hardly abstain
from devouring one another. If the belly received as much as it
pleased, digested it, and conveyed it to the body, we should see
battles and wars innumerable. Even as it is, when part of our food
passes into ordure, part into blood, part into spurious and useless
phlegm, we are, nevertheless, so addicted to luxury that we spend,
perhaps, whole estates on a meal. The more richly we live, the more
noisome are the odours with which we are filled.”--_Hom._ xiii.
_Tim._ v.[97]

* * * * *

From this period--the fifth century A.D. down to the sixteenth--Christian and Western literature contains little or nothing which comes within the purpose of this work. The merits of monastic asceticism were more or less preached during all those ages, although constant abstinence from flesh was by no means the general practice even with the inmates of the stricter monastic or conventual establishments--at all events in the Latin Church. But we look in vain for traces of anything like the humanitarian feeling of Plutarch or Porphyry. The mental intelligence as well as capacities for physical suffering of the non-human races--necessarily resulting from an organisation in all essential points like to our own--was apparently wholly ignored; their just rights and claims upon human justice were disregarded and trampled under foot. Consistently with the universal estimate, they were treated as beings destitute of all feeling--as if, in fine, they are the “automatic machines” they are alleged to be by the Cartesians of the present day. In those terrible ages of gross ignorance, of superstition, of violence, and of injustice--in which human rights were seldom regarded--it would have been surprising indeed if any sort of regard had been displayed for the _non-human_ slaves. And yet an underlying and latent consciousness of the falseness of the general estimate sometimes made itself apparent in certain extraordinary and perverse fancies.[98] To Montaigne, the first to revive the humanitarianism of Plutarch, belongs the great merit of reasserting the natural rights of the helpless slaves of human tyranny.

While Chrysostom seems to have been one of the last of Christian writers who manifested any sort of consciousness of the inhuman, as well as unspiritual nature of the ordinary gross foods, Platonism continued to bear aloft the flickering torch of a truer spiritualism; and “the golden chain” of the prophets of the dietary reformation reached down even so late as to the end of the sixth century. Hierokles, author of the commentary on the _Golden Verses_ of Pythagoras, to which reference has already been made, and who lectured upon them with great success at Alexandria; Hypatia, the beautiful and accomplished daughter of Theon the great mathematician, who publicly taught the philosophy of Plato at the same great centre of Greek science and learning, and was barbarously murdered by the jealousy of her Christian rival Cyril, Archbishop of Alexandria; Proklus, surnamed the Successor, as having been considered the most illustrious disciple of Plato in the latter times, who left several treatises upon the Pythagorean system, and “whose sagacious mind explored the deepest questions of morals and metaphysics”;[99] Olympiodorus, who wrote a life of Plato and commentaries on several of his dialogues, still extant, and lived in the reign of Justinian, by whose edict the illustrious school of Athens was finally closed, and with it the last vestiges of a sublime, if imperfect, attempt at the purification of human life--such are some of the most illustrious names which adorned the days of expiring Greek philosophy. Olympiodorus and six other Pythagoreans determined, if possible, to maintain their doctrines elsewhere; and they sought refuge with the Persian Magi, with whose tenets, or, at least, manner of living, they believed themselves to be most in accord. The Persian customs were distasteful to the purer ideal of the Platonists, and, disappointed in other respects, they reluctantly relinquished their fond hopes of transplanting the doctrines of Plato into a foreign soil, and returned home. The Persian prince, Chosroes, we may add, acquired honour by his stipulation with the bigoted Justinian, that the seven sages should be allowed to live unmolested during the rest of their days. “Simplicius and his companions ended their lives in peace and obscurity; and, as they left no disciples, they terminated the long list of Grecian philosophers who may be justly praised, notwithstanding their defects, as the wisest and most virtuous of their contemporaries. The writings of Simplicius are now extant. His physical and metaphysical commentaries on Aristotle have passed away with the fashion of the times, but his moral interpretation of Epiktetus is preserved in the library of nations as a classical book excellently adapted to direct the will, to purify the heart, and to confirm the understanding, by a just confidence in the nature both of God and Man.”[100]