Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom

Deac. One moment; where are the five thousand reproved, as you said they were, by the Saviour? There is no record of reproof of them in scripture.

Bish. When they assembled and came to Jesus the second time, and were told, "Ye seek me, not because ye saw signs and wonders, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled."

That is very clear, said Theodorus.

Bish. If a man is blamed, he is so far bad.

Deac. Very true.

Bish. Then were those whom the Saviour fed bad, or good?

Deac. I admit that they were bad; for "they that are whole have no need of a physician, but they that are sick."

Bish. Well then; did Olympias do wrong in imitating her Lord, who "maketh his own sun to rise, and sendeth rain, upon righteous and unrighteous"? Even though the Pharisees reproach Him, and say to the disciples, "Your master eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners."

Deac. It appears that, contrary to the general instincts of mankind, noble actions are being condemned, and disgraceful actions approved.

Bish. What makes you say that, Theodorus, most truth-loving of men?

Deac. I mean that, if you had not made the matter clear to me, by your logical explanation, I should have been led astray to hold the same senseless opinion as other people; the babblings of Theophilus caught my attention more than the ideal of truth.

Bish. Then conversely, if these holy men are proved not only to be not bad men, but men who have turned many from vice to virtue, clearly their persecutor deserves not to be persecuted in his turn, but to be pitied, as one who is always oppressing the good, and receiving the bad.

Deac. Just so. Even if they cannot be proved to be wise and holy men, as most people say they are; by the lines of reasoning we have been following, Olympias must be freed from blame, as she put into practice the imitation of the Saviour.

Bish. And which testimony to the value of actions do you regard as strongest; that of the gospels, or that of Theophilus?

Deac. Hush, I beg you; I admit that he expelled the men through ill temper and love of domination, and that he reviled Olympias through superstition and enmity, making the monks his excuse. The fact is, that when he found his servile flatteries fail in getting anything out of her beyond food and hospitality, he turned and reviled her; this is his way with every one.

CHAPTER XVII. THE VIRTUES OF THE MONKS, AND OF OLYMPIAS

Bish. Listen, then, best of deacons. [You are worth the trouble], for I see that you will do much good in the world; your youthful zeal is a pledge of an honourable old age.

These men from their earliest childhood, brought up by Christian parents, submitted themselves to God, and when quite young refused to be the slaves of vanity, and to associate with the multitude, but found a desolate spot far out of the world, in the south, where they set up huts, to shield them from the fierce heat of the sun, and the dew from the air. Here they lived, spending their time in prayer and reading, producing by manual labour enough fruit of their toil to provide for their frugal nourishment; thinking it better to herd with deer and sparrows and buffaloes, than to feast with people who knew not God. The eldest of them, who was called Hierax, and is still generally known by that name, once an associate of the blessed Antonius, had attained the age of ninety years, or thereabouts; another was Ammonius, sixty years old, and there were besides two anchorite brethren, and one bishop, who were put in pillory and banished under Valens, as all Alexandria knows. Such masters of learning were they, that not a single point of difficulty which men generally find in the scriptures escaped them. Two of them fell asleep, ending their days in Constantinople; Ammonius, as Aurelius and Sisinnius related, had prophesied of his decease, that there would first be a great persecution and schism among the Churches, but that the originators of it would come to a most disgraceful end, and that so the Churches should be made one. This shall come to pass, as it has already come to pass in part.

For presently certain of the bishops, and of the lay people as well, were attacked by disease, which rent them with sufferings of various kinds, burning their vitals with slow fever, and setting up such intolerable itchings, that they excoriated with their nails the whole surface of their bodies, and by continual intestinal pains. One man had livid dropsical swellings in the feet; another found the fingers which had written the unrighteous signature shaking with discharges, now hot, now cold, which ran from his four limbs. The abdomen was inflamed, and putrefaction in one member exhaled a far-reaching stench, and bred worms. Other symptoms were asthma, and difficulty of breathing, and tensions of all the limbs; nightmares of ravening dogs changing to savages brandishing swords and yelling in strange tongues like the roaring of the sea, made their sleep to be no sleep. One had his right leg broken like a cabbage stalk, by a fall from his horse, and died immediately from the shock; another entirely lost the use of his voice, and for eight months suffered torments upon his bed, unable to lift his hand to his mouth. Another's legs were almost eaten away as far as the knees, apparently by aggravated erysipelas; the tongue of another swelled so terribly, they say, with raging fever, that it pressed against his teeth, and blocked the [main channel of] the body. As there was no room for his tongue in the space naturally appointed for it, he wrote a confession of his sins upon a tablet.

One could see the divine wrath carrying out its punitive operations by various forms of vengeance. For as they had provoked the Physician who brings relief to souls, and had driven His mouth-piece from the workshop of salvation, they were delivered over for torture to physicians of the body, who administered pains by the drugs usually prescribed as remedies, and wrought no salvation. For who shall heal him who is being punished by God? As the prophet says, "Shall physicians rise, and praise thee?" Thus perished all who work against the peace of Thy Church, O Lord.

On the other hand, it is said that the tomb of the monk Ammonius expels the shivering fever; he was buried in the shrine of the apostles, beyond the sea. Bishop Dioscorus, they say, had made it his special petition, that he might see either the peace of the Church, or his own death; as the world was not worthy of peace, he was granted death, and was buried in the martyr's shrine facing the gate of the city, with the result that most of the women gave up taking oaths by the martyr, and now swear by the prayers of Dioscorus. As for the rest of the anchorites, the telling of the tale would take many words; and perhaps you cannot spare the time, famous sir.

Deac. Nay, who is so sorely pressed, that he must refuse a hearing to tales of heroism? Speak, I pray you, and by every fair word at your command draw away my mind from earthly thoughts.

Bish. Well, there is another Hierax; though he bears a Greek name, his life is adorned by the beauty of his character. On first embracing the life of solitary retirement, he withdrew to Mount Porphyrites, quite outside the boundaries of Egypt and Thebais, free from the breath of men; where he lived for four years of strict devotion, finding the virtues of the life themselves sufficient for his comfort. Then he spent twenty-five years in Nitria, with the fathers I have mentioned. He was assailed by demons, as he told us himself, who were transformed into angels of light, and tried to shake him from the hope set before him, by promising him a long life. "You have fifty years to live," they said; "how shall you endure, here in the desert?" But he with the intelligence of faith replied, "You distress me when you tell me of a period shorter than my purpose; I had prepared myself for two hundred years in the desert." Hearing this they vanished howling. Such was the man, whom demons could not shake by the invention of a vast space of time to bring him to accidie, whom Pope Theophilus drove from his home by an edict, and brought to such distress, that he made his way to the capital; a man who now has again, since the falling asleep of Ammonius, returned to the sheer desert, in fearful remembrance of the parable of the plough.

Another, a priest called Isaac, a disciple of Macarius the disciple of Antonius, a man who loved the desert to a fault, fifty years of age, who had the whole scripture by heart, and took up horned snakes in his hands unharmed, a virgin from his mother's womb, who at seven years of age had taken to the desert, after forty years was sifted out by Pope Theophilus, with the aforesaid monks.

Another priest Isaac, also the disciple of a disciple of Antonius, the priest Cronius, whom he succeeded, extraordinarily learned, like the first Isaac, in the scriptures, hospitable if ever man was—so much so, that in his extraordinary love of his fellow-men, he established a hostel in the sheer desert for the refreshment of sick monks, and of strangers who visited the district to see the blessed fathers—a stranger, they say, to anger, who had lived for thirty years in retirement, was cruelly treated along with the others. The first of these Isaacs had a hundred and fifty ascetics under him; Theophilus, while he was really a Theophilus, appointed disciples of his, to the number of seven or eight, as bishops. The other had two hundred and ten, and many of his disciples, too, are on the roll of bishops.