(b Antioch, c347 ce; d Komana, Pontus, 14 Sept 407 ce). Saint, churchman and preacher. He was born to a wealthy Christian family at Antioch where he was thoroughly schooled in rhetoric. After a period of severe asceticism, living as a hermit in the wilderness, he returned to Antioch to take up an ecclesiastical career. In 386 he was ordained a priest and assigned to preach in the cathedral; during the following years he preached most of the eloquent homilies that earned him the sobriquet Chrysostom, meaning ‘golden mouth’. In 398 ce he reluctantly agreed to be patriarch of Constantinople. In that position his outspoken moralism was a reproach to both clergy and court; he was exiled in 404 to Cucusus in Armenia and again in 407 to the remote Pontus on the Black Sea, where he died from the rigours of the journey.
The richly anecdotal style of his many surviving sermons offers a wealth of musical reference. On numerous occasions he voiced vivid denunciations of the musical excesses of secular society, most notably the musical instruments, dancing and lewd songs observed at weddings. On the other hand, in his commentary on Psalm xli he wrote a long and enthusiastic encomium of Christian psalmody. Of greatest value perhaps are his remarks about the liturgy and ecclesiastical song of his time, which make it possible to reconstruct the broad outlines of the eucharistic pro-anaphora and the ‘cathedral’ and monastic Offices of late 4th-century Antioch; they tell, moreover, of the singing of numerous specific psalms and hymns at these services.
The so-called Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, the most widely used eucharistic liturgy of the Eastern churches (see Divine liturgy (byzantine)), is for the most part spurious, dating to a period long after John's time.
See also Christian Church, music of the early, §II.
J. Quasten: Musik und Gesang in den Kulten der heidnischen Antike und christlichen Frühzeit (Münster, 1930, 2/1973; Eng. trans. 1983, as Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity)
A. Raes: ‘L'authenticité de la liturgie de S. Jean Chrysostome’, Orientalia christiana periodica, xxiv (1958), 5–16
J. Quasten: Patrology, iii: The Golden Age of Greek Patristic Literature (Utrecht, 1960/R), 472–3
J. Mateos: ‘ La psalmodie dans le rite byzantine’, Proche-Orient chrétien, xv (1965), 477–85
F. van de Paverd: Zur Geschichte der Messliturgie in Antiocheia und Konstantinopel gegen Ende des vierten Jahrhunderts (Rome, 1970)
R. Kaczynski: Das Wort Gottes in Liturgie und Alltag der Gemeinden des Johannes Chrysostomus (Freiburg, 1974)
R. Taft: The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West (Collegeville, MN, 1986)
J. McKinnon: Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge, 1987)
JAMES W. McKINNON