St. John Chrysostom is the most quoted Father on wealth and poverty, and by a wide margin the least read. His name gets attached to fierce one line summaries that circulate forever. Some of them are genuine. Some are loose paraphrases. Some are not his at all.
So let us do what I told you to do in the previous article. Go to the actual homilies.
How much there actually is
Start with the sheer volume. In the commentary corpus on this site alone, searching Chrysostom's homilies for passages that deal with riches, wealth, the poor or almsgiving returns hundreds of separate passages.
Hundreds. This is not a theme he touched occasionally. Open his Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, his Homilies on the First Epistle to the Corinthians, his Homilies on the Epistle to the Romans, all of which are in the Fathers Library in full, and you cannot go far without running into it.
That fact alone should tell you something. If a preacher returns to a subject that many times in front of the same congregation, he is not making a theoretical point. He is dealing with a problem in the room.
He is preaching to rich people
This is the thing that reframes everything, and you only see it by reading whole homilies instead of extracts.
Chrysostom is not addressing a poor congregation about their patience. He is standing in front of wealthy Christians in Antioch and later in Constantinople, people with property and servants and social standing, and he is telling them, week after week, that what they have is not theirs.
And notice how he talks to them. Read the opening of his eleventh homily on John, where he asks his congregation for a favour before he even touches the text, and promises it is nothing heavy or burdensome. That is a man who knows these people, who has to keep them coming back, and who is going to say something difficult in a minute and wants them still listening when he does.
He is a pastor, not a pamphleteer. He is trying to save the rich man, not score on him.
The argument underneath
Read enough of it and the shape becomes clear, and it is not the shape either modern side wants.
It is not that money is evil. He does not teach that matter is bad. That is the Gnostic move, and the Fathers spent centuries killing it.
It is not that wealth is a sign of God's favour that you may enjoy with a clear conscience once you have given a percentage.
The argument is about ownership. What you hold, you hold as a steward. The surplus in your house is not yours in the way you think it is, and the poor man's claim on it is not charity but justice. Which, as it happens, is the point I made about δικαιοσύνη. The word covers both, and Chrysostom is standing exactly where the two meet.
And underneath even that is a claim about what money does to a soul. He is worried about the rich man. Genuinely worried. Not resentful of him. He thinks wealth is spiritually dangerous the way a physician thinks a tumour is dangerous, and he is trying to get it out before it kills the patient.
Why the slogans fail
Both of the usual camps mine him and both of them lose the thing that makes him worth reading.
Quote him as a proto revolutionary and you drop the fact that his remedy is personal repentance and personal almsgiving, addressed to individual souls he is trying to get into heaven, not a programme he is proposing to the state.
Quote him as a comfortable moralist and you have to ignore how genuinely severe he is. He is not gentle about this. He does not soften it to keep his patrons happy, and it cost him. This is a man who ended his life in exile.
The real Chrysostom does not fit on a graphic.
Read it properly
Here is how to actually do this, and it will take you a few evenings rather than a few minutes.
- Pick one series. His Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew is the natural place to start, and it is in the Fathers Library in full.
- Read consecutive homilies, in order, not the ones that come up in a search. The argument builds.
- Watch for where he is answering an objection. Somebody in that congregation pushed back during the week and you can often feel him responding to it.
- Open the Gospel passage alongside it in the reader and read what he is preaching on before you read what he says about it.
Then the hard part
You already know what I am going to say.
Fr. John Parker told us about catechumens standing around at coffee hour working through complex theology while an old woman behind them struggled to carry out the trash. That story has never left me, and it is the exact failure Chrysostom is preaching against.
You can read three hundred passages on almsgiving and give nothing. There are no paper exams in this class. There are physical exams, and the exam is the live application of the Gospel.
So read the homilies. Then go open your wallet, or your hands, or your door. That is the only reading Chrysostom would recognise as reading.