ILLNESS OF CHRYSOSTOM—HOMILIES ON FESTIVALS OF SAINTS AND MARTYRS—CHARACTER OF THESE FESTIVALS—PILGRIMAGES—RELIQUES—CHARACTER OF PEASANT CLERGY IN NEIGHBOURHOOD OF ANTIOCH. A.D. 387.

Very probably the physical labour and mental strain which Chrysostom had undergone during the events recorded in the previous chapter may have brought on the illness to which he alludes in the homily preached on the Sunday before Ascension Day.328 He was prevented by this attack from taking part in the services which were held some time after Easter under the conduct of Bishop Flavian at the chapels built over the remains of martyrs and saints.329 A variety of homilies delivered by Chrysostom at such “martyries” on other occasions are extant, and it may be as well to introduce here such indications as can be collected from them of the general feeling of the Church, as well as of himself, with regard to saints, and such kindred subjects as pilgrimages and reliques.

Churches had in most instances been erected to commemorate the death of a martyr, or to mark the spot where he died. Tertullian’s saying that “the blood of martyrs was the seed of the Church” thus became verified in a literal, material sense. Socrates (iv. 23) even speaks of the churches of St. Paul and St. Peter at Rome as their “martyries,” as Eusebius330 also calls the church which Constantine built on Golgotha the “martyry” of our Saviour. By the age of Chrysostom the festivals of martyrs and saints had grown so numerous that frequently more than one occurred in the same week.331 Good Friday and Ascension Day, and the Sunday after Whitsun Day (not observed as Trinity Sunday till much later), were especially dedicated to the commemoration of saints.332 The congregation kept a vigil the night before, or very early before dawn on the Saints’ day itself. The vigil consisted of psalms, hymns, and prayers, and was followed early in the day by a full service, when, in addition to the ordinary lessons of the day, the acts or passions of the saint or martyr were read. St. Augustine permitted his people to sit during the reading of them because they were often of great length. Pope Gelasius forbade them to be read because they were so seldom authentic.333 The martyries were generally outside the city walls, not always built over the grave of the saint, but close to it; in which case the congregation assembled at the grave first, and walked in procession from it to the church, singing hymns as they went. There can be no doubt that Chrysostom believed in the intercessory power of departed saints, and encouraged the invocation of their intercession. They were nearer to the Divine ear, and by virtue of their glorious deaths had justly obtained more confidence in making their requests to God than had the inhabitants of earth. He implores Christians not to resort for medical assistance to Jews, who were the enemies of Christ, but to seek aid from His friends the saints and martyrs, who had much confidence in addressing God.334 At the close of his homily on the festival of two soldiers who had been beheaded by Julian for obstinate adherence to Christianity, he says: “Let us constantly visit them, touch their shrine, and with faith embrace their reliques, that we may derive some blessing therefrom; for like soldiers who converse freely with their sovereign when they display their wounds, so these, bearing their heads in their hands, are easily able to effect what they desire at the court of the King of Heaven.”335 So, again, in the homily on Bernice and Prosdoke: “Let us fall down before their reliques ... let us embrace their shrines: not only on their festival, but at other times, let us resort to them and invoke them to become our protectors; for they can use much boldness of speech when dead, more, indeed, than when they were alive, for now they bear in their bodies the marks of Jesus Christ ... let us therefore procure for ourselves, through them, favour from God.”336 Thus the saint is to be appealed to as a kind of friend at court, who will present petitions, and use his influence to obtain a favourable answer from the Monarch; but the further step of invoking saints as the direct dispensers of spiritual and other benefits had not yet been taken. The feeling of the Church of Smyrna towards their beloved martyr and bishop Polycarp, as expressed in A.D. 160 to the Church of Philomelium, still represented the general state of feeling in the Church.337 The Jews and other malignants had suggested, when the remains of Polycarp had been earnestly asked for, that the Christians intended to worship him; and “this they said, being ignorant that we should never be able to desert Christ, or worship any other Being. For Him, being the Son of God, we adore, but the martyrs, as the disciples and imitators of the Lord, we love with a deserved affection; desiring to become partners and fellow-disciples with them.” The language of St. Augustine and St. Chrysostom thoroughly corresponds to that in the passage just cited. “Our religion,” says Augustine, “consists not in the worship of dead men; because if they lived piously they are not considered likely to desire that kind of honour; but would wish Him to be worshipped by us through whose illumination they rejoice to have us partners with them in their merit. They are therefore to be honoured for the sake of imitation, not to be worshipped as a religious act.”338 And in another place: “Christian people celebrate the memory of martyrs with religious solemnity, to stimulate imitation, to become partners in their merits, and to be assisted by their prayers; but in doing this we never offer sacrifice to a martyr, but only to Him who is the God of martyrs.”339 A multitude of passages might be cited from Chrysostom’s homilies on Saints’ Festivals, in which he passionately exhorts to the imitation and emulation of their noble lives and glorious deaths, and dwells on the great advantages to the Church arising from these solemn commemorations. The very memory of the martyrs wrought upon the minds of men in confirming them against the assaults of wicked spirits, and delivering them from impure and unseemly thoughts; ... the death of the martyrs was the exhortation of the faithful, the confidence of Churches, the confirmation of Christianity, ... the reproach of devils, the condemnation of Satan, a consolation in affliction, a motive to patience, encouragement to fortitude, the root, fountain, mother of all which is good.340

But if no inculcations to direct worship of saints are to be found in Chrysostom, it is evident that no small virtue was ascribed by popular faith (and, in his opinion, justly) to their remains.341 Miracles of healing were wrought, or supposed to be wrought, at their tombs; demons were expelled by the application of their ashes to the persons possessed. It is obvious that, where such a belief has taken possession of the popular mind, prayer will very soon be addressed to the saint for the direct bestowal of those advantages which are supposed to be derivable from his reliques. Pilgrimages were fashionable in all parts of Christendom. Prefects and generals, when they visited Rome, hastened to pay their devotion at the tombs of the tentmaker and fisherman; journeys were made into Arabia to visit the supposed site of Job’s dunghill.342

Two different causes seem to have led on the mind of the Church to an increasing veneration of martyrs. First, the Church owed to them a real debt; the heroic steadfastness of their deaths contributed much to promote and establish Christianity. Chrysostom observes how the sight of the aged Ignatius going to die at Rome for his faith—going not only with calmness, but even with alacrity—mightily confirmed the souls of the disciples in the several cities through which he passed.343 “As irrigation made gardens fruitful, so the blood of martyrs gave drink to the Churches.”344 Honour, affection, veneration, easily pass into actual adoration.

Secondly, there is a natural desire to bridge over the chasm which divides the human nature from the Divine, and earth from heaven, by enlisting the agency of some intermediate being. In its earliest conflicts with heresy, theology was chiefly engaged in zealously defending the pure divinity of Christ—his co-equal, co-eternal power and majesty with the Father. The more He was withdrawn into a less accessible region of exalted deity, the more this need of the half-deified human interpositor was felt, and worked itself out at last into a distinct article of faith.

Some of those abuses of saints’ days, which we are apt to associate more especially with medieval times, were far from uncommon in the days of Chrysostom. The day which had begun in fasting, and was preceded by a vigil, too often terminated in a very carnal kind of revelry. “Ye have turned night into day by your holy vigils: do not turn day into night by drunkenness, surfeiting, and lascivious songs; let not any one see you misbehaving in an inn on your return home.”345 A custom prevailed of holding a “love-feast,” at or near the tomb of the saint, which was furnished by the oblations of the wealthier devotees. Chrysostom on one occasion urges his congregation to attend such a sacred banquet when they dispersed after service, instead of hurrying off to the diabolical entertainments at Daphne. The sight of the martyrs, standing as it were near their table, would prevent their pleasure from running to excess.346 But there is abundant evidence in other contemporary writers that these meetings too often did degenerate into scenes of mere conviviality and intemperance. St. Augustine speaks of those who “made themselves drunk at the commemoration of martyrs.”347 St. Ambrose prohibited all such feasts in the churches of Milan; and St. Augustine cited his example to obtain a similar prohibition from Aurelius, the Primate of Carthage.348 St. Basil reprobates a growing custom of trading near the martyries on festival days, under pretence of making a better provision for the feasts, to which we may fairly, perhaps, attribute the universal custom in Christendom of holding fairs on saints’ days.349 As they were in medieval times, so in Roman Catholic countries at the present day, the booths of the fair are in close contiguity with the walls of the church, and they who attend mass in the morning, as well as those who do not attend it at all, may disgrace themselves by drunkenness and all kinds of folly in the evening. Such abuses are an inevitable consequence of keeping up the observance of days after the real enthusiasm for the person or cause which they commemorate has begun to grow, or has altogether grown, cold. Little may ever have been really known about the saint whose memory is celebrated, and that little ceases to speak with any meaning to the minds of later generations. The service, which was once a living reality, becomes a cold and empty form, or the place of religious enthusiasm is supplied by some form of sensual excitement. Crowds of peasants will not fail to be attracted to a church which blazes with thousands of candles arranged in fantastic patterns, and which rings with noisy sensational music: they probably place a superstitious faith in the tutelary power of their patron: but how different is all this from the hearty, genuine, reasonable devotion of more enlightened worshippers to the Lord Himself, and the less strong but more real respect and honour paid by such to His day! It is surely one among many proofs of the deep and lasting hold of Christ’s character upon the mind of men, of the applicability of its influence to all times and places, and of its Divine superiority to that of all His followers, however exalted, that abuses which have accompanied the commemorations of saints have never extended in the same degree to His day.350

As already remarked, Chrysostom was prevented this year by illness from attending the festivals of saints and martyrs, which fell very thickly between Easter and Whitsun Day. He commences his homily preached on the Sunday before Ascension Day with an allusion to his recent sickness, and tells his congregation that, though absent in body from their sacred festivities, he had been present and rejoiced with them in spirit; and now, though he had not fully recovered his health, he could not refrain from meeting his beloved and much-longed-for flock again. He was the more anxious also to occupy his accustomed place on that day, because large numbers of the rustic population from the neighbouring country had flocked into the city and attended the services of the church. They spoke a different dialect, but they were one with the Christian inhabitants of the town in the soundness of their faith; and their habits of simple piety, pure morality, and honourable industry, put to shame the dissolute manners and indolence which prevailed in the city. Their peasant clergy were a noble race of men; they might be seen, one while yoking their oxen to the plough, and marking out furrows in the soil, another while mounting the pulpit and ploughing the hearts of their flock; now cutting away thorns from the ground with a sickle, now cleansing men’s minds from sin by their discourse: for they were not ashamed of hard work, like the people of the city, but of idleness, knowing that it was idleness which taught men vice, and had been from the beginning to those who loved it the schoolmaster of all iniquity. Though little skilled, by training, in reasoning or rhetoric, they proved more than a match for those counterfeit philosophers who paraded themselves about the streets with their professional cloak, staff, and beard, but who could not give any satisfactory information on the subjects upon which they expended such a heap of words,—as the immortality of the soul, the creation of the world, Divine Providence, a future world and judgment. The rustic pastor, being simply and firmly persuaded of the truth of these things, could instruct men with clearness and decision about them; he could give solid matter, the others only polished language, like a man who should have a sword with a silver ornamented hilt, but a weak blade. Their wives were not luxurious creatures, covering themselves with unguents, paints, and dyes, but simple, sober, quiet matrons; which increased the influence of the pastor over the people committed to his charge, and caused the precept of St. Paul, “having food and raiment, let us be therewith content,” to be strictly observed351 among them.