John Chrysostom was born around 347 in Antioch, in the Roman province of Syria, to a family of some social standing. Trained in rhetoric under the pagan orator Libanius, he seemed destined for a career in law or public life before turning wholly toward the church. He spent several years in ascetic study and solitary desert living, an experience that damaged his health but formed the contemplative depth that would mark everything he later wrote and said.
He was ordained a priest in Antioch in 386 and quickly became the city's most celebrated preacher, delivering the extended homily series on Matthew, John, and the Pauline letters that remain among the most substantial works of biblical exposition to survive from antiquity. In 398 he was appointed Archbishop of Constantinople against his own wishes, elevated by imperial favor into a role that placed him at the center of both ecclesiastical politics and court intrigue. He proved an uncomfortable figure in that setting — selling off luxury furnishings from the episcopal residence, reducing the lavish entertainments of his predecessors, and redirecting funds toward hospitals and care for the city's poor.
His directness made enemies. Empress Eudoxia took personal offense at his preaching, and a rival synod engineered his first exile in 403 and his permanent banishment in 404. He died in 407 at Comana in Pontus, exhausted by a forced march undertaken in winter by guards who wished to hasten his end. His last recorded words, according to his biographer Palladius, were "Glory be to God for all things" — a phrase his letters show he returned to throughout his life and not only at its close.
His liturgy still bears his name in Eastern Christianity, and his homilies on wealth, poverty, and the image of God in the poor have found readers in every subsequent century who recognized in them something that could not be easily softened or set aside.