HistoricalChristian.Faith
HistoricalChristian.Faith
Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — the sermon that carries the line is not his, the two historians who report it are not independent, and the contemporary source knows only a differently-worded allegation · reported by Socrates Scholasticus and Sozomen
Related arguments: the case against Chrysostom — see also whether Chrysostom was deposed for Origenism
When John became aware of this, he delivered in the church that celebrated oration commencing with these words: ‘Again Herodias raves; again she is troubled; she dances again; and again desires to receive John's head in a charger.’ This, of course, exasperated the empress still more.
— Socrates, Church History VI.18, link. The assertion is that John Chrysostom, provoked by the empress Eudoxia's move to convene a second council against him, preached a sermon casting her as Herodias and himself as the Baptist — the single most-quoted moment of the whole affair, and the source of the popular picture of a fearless preacher denouncing a vindictive empress to her face.1
Socrates Scholasticus, writing at Constantinople about 439–443, is the source. Sozomen repeats it a few years later in almost the same words — “Herodias is again enraged; again she dances; again she seeks to have the head of John in a basin” — and from those two it passes into every later telling, ancient and modern. A homily beginning with exactly this sentence circulates among Chrysostom's works, which has generally been taken to confirm it.2
Two historians, close in time and place. Socrates wrote in the capital within about thirty-five years of the events, among people who had lived through them and in a city where the “Johannite” party was still a living memory; Sozomen, writing there shortly after, gives the same episode. Neither is hostile to Chrysostom, so the report is not obviously an enemy's slander.3
The setting is not in doubt. That Chrysostom denounced the games held at the dedication of Eudoxia's silver statue, that the empress took it as aimed at her, and that she moved for a second council in consequence, is common ground between Socrates, Sozomen, and the reference tradition; the earlier sermon “against the vices to which females are peculiarly prone” is likewise attested, and was likewise read as aimed at her. A man who did those two things is a man who could plausibly have said the third.4
An extant homily carries the line. The sermon In decollationem sancti Iohannis opens with precisely these words, and is printed among Chrysostom's works.5
What holds. The provocation itself is secure, and no part of this page disputes it. Chrysostom did attack the statue's games from the pulpit; Eudoxia did take the attacks personally; the second council followed. Even the most cautious reading leaves a bishop whose preaching the palace read as a public insult — and Sozomen, who reports the earlier sermon, records his own doubt only about whether the allusion was intended, not about whether it was made.
The homily is not his. In decollationem sancti Iohannis is classed among the pseudo-Chrysostomic works — catalogued in the Clavis Patrum Graecorum in the block reserved for the dubia et spuria, and rejected as spurious in the older critical tradition by Tillemont, Savile, and Montfaucon alike, the last two being the very editors who printed it. So no securely authentic sermon containing the line survives; what survives is a later composition that opens with it.6 The homily therefore cannot corroborate the historians — and the direction of dependence may well run the other way, a preacher supplying the sermon the histories said had been preached.
The two witnesses are one witness. Sozomen is not independent of Socrates here. That he worked from Socrates as his guide is the standard judgment on his sources, and at this very chapter the editors identify his authorities as Socrates VI.18 together with Palladius. Two attestations that reduce to one leave the line resting on a single writer some thirty-five to forty years after.7
The contemporary source has a different word, and no sermon. Palladius wrote his defence about 408, within a year of Chrysostom's death, as an insider who had been deposed at the Oak himself — and he is the one writer with an overwhelming motive to record so vivid a scene, since the treason charge turned on what Chrysostom had called the empress. He reports no Herodias sermon at all. What he reports is an allegation, and a different one: “The treason consisted in offensive language against the queen, whom, as they alleged, he had called Jezebel.” Note the shape of it — not a sermon Palladius quotes, but a charge he attributes to the prosecution and does not concede.8
The improbability of survival cuts both ways. A bishop who publicly compared a reigning Augusta to Herodias in the great church of the capital was inviting a capital charge, not a synodical one — and the synod that wanted him convicted of treason for insulting her did not, on the record we have, produce the sermon. It rested the charge on an allegation about a word.
Where the modern reading lands. Because the homily is spurious, recent scholarship treats the episode as very possibly a later dramatization rather than a report — the argument being that the whole Chrysostom-versus-Eudoxia confrontation was sharpened in Johannite circles after 407, when the empress, dead within months of the banishment, made an obvious and satisfying villain. That is a hypothesis about the story's growth, not a demonstration; but it does not need to be proved for this argument to fail. The argument fails on its own supports: the corroborating sermon is not Chrysostom's, and the second historian is the first historian.9
weak. That Chrysostom provoked Eudoxia from the pulpit, and was destroyed partly for it, is secure and is not what is rated here. That he preached this sermon, with these words, against her, does not hold on its best available case: the homily that carries the line is not reckoned his, the two historians who report it reduce to one, and the contemporary best placed to know it — who needed exactly such a scene for his defence — knows only that his opponents alleged a different insult altogether. The honest statement is that Chrysostom said something from the pulpit that the palace took as an attack on the empress, and that the celebrated form of the words is attested a generation later and cannot be traced to him. The line should not be quoted as his without that qualification.
Socrates Scholasticus, Church History VI.18 (NPNF² vol. 2) — the silver statue on its porphyry column, the games, Chrysostom's denunciation, and the “celebrated oration.” ↩
Socrates finished his history about 439–443 and wrote at Constantinople; Sozomen wrote there shortly after. See Chester D. Hartranft, “Sozomen as Author” (NPNF² vol. 2), on the sources. ↩
Socrates, Church History VI.15, VI.18; Sozomen, VIII.16, VIII.20 — including Sozomen's own caveat: “I am not in possession of sufficient data to determine whether there was any truth in the current report that John delivered the discourse above mentioned with express allusion to the empress”; J. Chapman, “St. John Chrysostom,” Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), which narrates the statue episode but says nothing of a Herodias sermon. ↩
In decollationem sancti Iohannis, incipit Πάλιν Ἑρωδιὰς μαίνεται (“Again Herodias raves…”) = CPG 4570 / BHG 859, printed at PG 59, 485–490. Record: Pinakes (IRHT-CNRS), work 7688. (The NPNF editor's note at Socrates VI.18 cites the volume as “PG liv”; the correct reference is PG 59.) ↩
CPG 4570 falls within the range the Clavis Patrum Graecorum assigns to Chrysostom's dubia et spuria (the genuine works ending at 4472). For the older critical verdict see Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church III, “Chrysostom and Eudoxia,” n. 18 — the homily “is unworthy of his pen and rejected as spurious by Tillemont, Savile and Montfaucon. But it is quite probable that Chrysostom made some allusion to Eudoxia which might be construed by his enemies in that way”; and the NPNF note at Socrates VI.18, recording that Savile placed it among the spurious. ↩
Hartranft, “Sozomen as Author,” §on his sources — “Socrates, therefore, manifestly preceded, and Sozomen employed the material thus amassed”; “Socrates was his guide to the chief writers from whom he drew directly with more or less freedom”; and, on Sozomen's errors, “the blind copying of his authority, especially Socrates.” Hartranft also notes that Palladius's Dialogue “was used in narrating the incidents of John's life in Book viii.” The NPNF note to Sozomen VIII.20 identifies that chapter's sources as Socrates VI.18 and Palladius. ↩
Palladius of Galatia, Dialogue on the Life of St John Chrysostom, ch. VIII, trans. Herbert Moore (SPCK, 1921) — the synod's referral of the treason charge to the emperor, and Palladius's gloss on it. The word “Herodias” does not occur anywhere in the Dialogue; “Jezebel” occurs once, in this sentence. That Palladius was himself among those deposed at the Oak: Photius, Bibliotheca, cod. 59. ↩
The case that the episode is a post-407 Johannite dramatization is argued by S. J. Voicu, “«Furono chiamati giovanniti…»: Un'ipotesi sulla nascita del corpus pseudocrisostomico,” in Philomathestatos (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 137; Leuven, 2004), 701–711, summarized and endorsed in Emilio Bonfiglio, John Chrysostom's Discourses on his First Exile (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2011), pp. 27–28 — “the problem arises from the fact that In decollationem is spurious and therefore this episode of Chrysostom's life may have actually never happened.” On the wider point that both the hostile and the pious portraits of Eudoxia are rhetorical constructions, see Wendy Mayer, “Doing Violence to the Image of an Empress: The Destruction of Eudoxia's Reputation,” in H. A. Drake (ed.), Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices (Ashgate, 2006), 205–213. ↩