Chapter 5 Losing the Empress’s Favour: on the Margins of John Chrysostom’s Homily 48 on Matthew
In: Gaining and Losing Imperial Favour in Late AntiquitySearch for other papers by Kamil Cyprian Choda in
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Abstract
This chapter examines in detail the Homilia 48 on Matthew delivered by John Chrysostom at Antioch in the year 390. This homily, dealing with the biblical personages of John the Baptist, Herod and his wife Herodias is especially interesting in the context of the later life of John Chrysostom. Elevated to the episcopal see of Constantinople, he is reported to have verbally abused the empress Eudoxia, equating her with wicked female characters from the Bible, an assault that resulted in his banishment from the imperial capital. The homily is representative of a mental framework that enabled a swift translation of biblical characters and episodes into a contemporary setting, where the audience could be asked to both imitate the biblical heroes and to abstain from vices of the villains of old. While John’s audience acclaimed his preaching and was prepared to be challenged, some at Constantinople found both his preaching and his habits unacceptable. That in turn contributed to the polarisation of the ecclesiastical milieu in the capital and opened the way for the fall of John. While the sources on John’s exile and death are far from being unanimous, a verbal confrontation with the empress Eudoxia that sealed his fate is likely to have happened. Having failed to correctly identify and adequately approach the person upon whose favour his position depended, John approached the empress with the very biblically-loaded rhetoric he used habitually as a preacher.