Origen and Chrysostom on the Theophany of Genesis 18
Reading Scripture is like hosting a divine visitor. Patristic reflections on Abraham’s welcome of the three visitors by the oak of Mamre remind us that when we interpret the Scriptures, we are in the position of Abraham: we are called to show hospitality to God as he graciously comes to us through the pages of the Bible. Hospitality, offered first by Abraham to the three strangers and then in the next chapter by Lot to the two angels when they require accommodation for the night, is central to the narrative. By looking at patristic treatments of it— particularly those of Origen (ca. 185-ca. 254) and John Chrysostom (ca. 349-407)—we will investigate what they have to say about the hospitality offered by Abraham as well as by Lot. We will also see what this hospitable response to God’s appearing by the oak of Mamre has to teach us about how we may appropriately respond to God when he appears to us today in the Scriptures. That is to say, we will look at how Abraham’s and Lot’s hospitality connects with ours in biblical interpretation as we respond to God’s visitation to us in divine revelation.
Human hospitality intertwines with divine hospitality.1 Abraham’s and Lot’s actions are predicated on God first appearing to both of them. Genesis 18 begins with the statement “God was seen by him [i.e., Abraham] near the oak of Mamre while he was sitting at the door of his tent during midday.”2 Similarly, the next chapter starts off with the words “The two angels came to Sodom at evening. Lot was seated beside the gate of Sodom.” The famous theophany—the “appearing of God,” literally—near the oak of Mamre makes clear that human hospitality is based on divine initiative. When God manifests himself—or, as Genesis 18:1 puts it, when he “is seen” (ophthe)—he comes in the form of strangers visiting (“three men [treis andres] had come and stood above him,” the text tells us); the biblical author tells of his coming in the form of words derived from human
experience, words that we recognize because we use them in the humdrum of our everyday lives: “Let water now be taken, and wash your feet, and rest under the tree. And I will take bread, and you will eat” (18:4-5). Perhaps most striking about the event is the ordinariness of it all—human form and human words, to whom and to which it is easy to relate.
The paradox strikes us with the first verse of the passage: “God was seen by him near the oak of Mamre while he was sitting at the door of his tent during midday.” We are taken aback by the theophany—precisely because it happens in the only way that God can be seen by human beings, namely, in the particularity of time (“during midday”) and place (“near the oak of Mamre while he was sitting at the door of his tent”). Saint Thomas Aquinas insists on this particularity in the Summa Theologiae: “But the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower.”3 Eugene Peterson does so as well, paraphrasing in The Message: “The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14). With these last words, of course, we have moved from theophany to incarnation, and we should perhaps remind ourselves that the two are by no means to be treated as equivocal, as Saint Augustine reminds us in On the Trinity: “The Word in flesh is one thing, the Word being flesh is another; which means the Word in a man is one thing, the Word being man another.”4 All the same, whether God appears in the form of a theophany at Mamre, in the form of a servant in the incarnation, or in the form of words and sentences in Scripture, in each case he graciously condescends to us, extending his hospitality to us in the only way possible, namely, by stooping down to our creaturely realities of time and place. Human hospitality is grounded in divine hospitality. Or, as Saint John puts it, “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
It is only in an analogous fashion that we can speak of divine hospitality as “hospitality.” God’s hospitality is rather unlike human hospitality. The Greek fathers marked this infinite difference between our hospitality to God and his hospitality to us by means of the distinction between philoxenia (hospitality) and synkatabasis (condescension). The term philoxenia—a word that is derived from philos (friend) and xenos (stranger)—describes the stranger turning into a friend. As the opposite of xenophobia (fear of foreigners), philoxenia is a virtue that counters our isolationist inclinations, which regularly coincide with nationalistic chauvinism and racial bigotry and feed into a hoarding mentality that neglects the poor and disadvantaged and so undermines the social fabric of society. Philoxenia enables us to open up our space to those who are different from ourselves so we can taste each other’s foods, learn each other’s languages, get to know each other’s histories, and come to appreciate each other’s customs. At a fairly obvious level, philoxenia, turning strangers into friends, is what we see
described in the narratives of Genesis 18 and 19. Abraham extends hospitality to three men visiting him by the oak of Mamre; by means of a shared meal, he turns these strangers into friends. His nephew, Lot, extends hospitality to two angels (angeloi in 19:1) alone in dangerous city streets, thereby turning strangers into friends.
As we will see, both Origen and Chrysostom have a great deal to say about philoxenia; but they also use the term synkatabasis, which is a conglomeration of the elements syn (together), kata (down), and basis (going). Synkatabasis, then, literally means a “going down together”—or, to put it in the Latinized word we have already met, “condescension.”5 Contemporary patristics scholarship commonly objects to translating synkatabasis as “condescension,” on the grounds that to call someone “condescending” is not exactly a compliment. To be condescending is the same as being patronizing, snobbish, or pretentious. Some therefore prefer to render synkatabasis instead as “accommodation,”6 “considerateness,”7 or “adaptation.”8 I want to go to bat, however, for the old word “condescension,” taking my cue from Isaac Watts’s early eighteenth-century hymn “Christ’s Dying Love; Or, Our Pardon Bought at a Dear Price”:
How condescending and how kind Was God’s eternal Son!
Our misery reach’d his heavenly mind,
And pity brought him down.
“Condescension” is a helpful term not only because it quite straightforwardly renders the Greek synkatabasis into English but also because, unlike any of its alternatives, it retains the notion of divine descent, a spatial metaphor that reminds us that God voluntarily and graciously stoops down from his divine position to accept the limitations and weaknesses of human frailty and sin.9 No alternative to “condescension” does quite the same thing.10
It’s understandable, then, that synkatabasis should become the object of patristic praise. Synkatabasis, for Origen, Saint John Chrysostom, and other early fathers, is not just a matter of ordinary philoxenia, as though we would know precisely what God’s hospitality is like by comparing his to ours. We could say that synkatabasis is the principle by which God reaches out and adapts to human creatureliness and weakness; it is the way in which divine transcendence relates to the limitations of human existence and to the weaknesses of human sin. This means that our hospitality toward God (philoxenia) is predicated on his synkatabasis—his condescension—to us. The notion of synkatabasis is key to understanding the patristic approach to the divine-human relationship. Synkatabasis, writes David Rylaarsdam, “is central to
Chrysostom’s theological understanding of the way in which the incomprehensible God relates to humanity, whether in theophanies, Scripture, Christ, or the process of salvation.”11
In what follows, then, I will deal with the theophany by the oak of Mamre as it is discussed by the third-century theologian Origen and by the fourth-century preacher John Chrysostom. Both recognized the importance of divine condescension in trying to grasp something of the mystery of the Mamre theophany. This is not to ignore the obvious differences between the two theologians’ approaches to the biblical text: they take note of different aspects of the narrative, and there are striking disparities between their respective treatments of the text. Much of this has to do with differences between the two interpretive traditions that they represent: although we cannot neatly categorize them into two separate schools of thought, there are undeniable differences between Alexandrian and Antiochene modes of interpretation.
An important lesson to draw from our comparison of Origen and Chrysostom is that the divine condescension at work in God’s visit to Abraham, in the inspiration of Holy Scripture, and ultimately in the incarnation itself gives rise to a variety of approaches with regard to how we interpret the Scriptures. That is to say, when God steps down into the lives of human beings, drawing on their differing gifts, experiences, cultural circumstances, and ecclesial contexts, the particularity of the interpreters’ situations contributes to the way in which they welcome God’s grace into their lives. Saint Thomas’s insight that “the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower” has something to say about the way we treat the art of biblical interpretation. By no means am I suggesting that we reduce biblical interpretation to the subjectivity of the reader’s response, and it is important to safeguard against a free-for-all interpretive pluralism. Still, if it is true that God condescends to us in the Scriptures much like he did in the Mamre theophany, then we may expect our responses to be varied—though a fitting response to divine synkatabasis will invariably take the shape of appropriate hospitality. A congruous, Abrahamic approach to interpretation bakes the mystical bread and prepares the good and tender calf in such a way that it does justice to the gracious character of the ultimate divine descent in Jesus Christ.12
Origen and Chrysostom emphasized different aspects of the paradox of divine descent, and we will see that their divergent approaches resulted in two rather different understandings of what the human response of hospitality should look like: Origen’s vertical approach to hospitality goes hand in hand with allegorical interpretation, while Chrysostom’s horizontal view of hospitality corresponds to greater interest in a literal reading of the text. Origen wants us to recognize that
the condescension of the transcendent God enables us to see him; Chrysostom draws our attention to the fact that God’s condescension renders him immanent to the interpersonal relationships where we can meet him. I will argue that the two approaches are not mutually exclusive but that instead a sacramental approach to interpretation recognizes the validity of both. Origen’s focus on the reality (res) of the sacrament means that he discerns in Abraham’s hospitality to God a face-to-face encounter with the transcendent Lord; Chrysostom’s attention to the outward sacrament (sacramentum) means that he observes in Abraham’s hospitality to the stranger a generosity rendered to the God who becomes immanent in time and space. Both approaches give expression to a basic truth of the incarnation: Origen bowing to the divinity of our Lord, Chrysostom praising his humanity; the two are complementary expressions of the mystery of God’s ultimate synkatabasis in Jesus Christ.
Reading Scripture, then, is like hosting a divine visitor; it is a practice in which we engage in the art of hospitality, responding to God’s hospitable condescension (synkatabasis) to us in the divine Scriptures. Despite the many exegetical differences between Origen and Chrysostom—and between the Alexandrian and Antiochene traditions more broadly—the two theologians are united in their conviction that the interpretation of Scripture is a hospitable response to the theophanic appearance of God in Christ, which takes place under the oak of Mamre.
Origen, the early third-century theologian from Alexandria, devotes two homilies to the passage in question: Homilies 4 and 5 of his Homilies on Genesis. Origen doesn’t reflect at length on who the three visitors are. The preacher from Alexandria more or less seems to take for granted that one of the three men is the pre-incarnate Son of God—the “Lord,” Origen simply calls him —who along with two of his angels stands before Abraham. While the two angels will later depart by themselves in the direction of Sodom in order to destroy the city, Abraham, explains Origen, “received both him who saves and those who destroy,” that is to say, both the Lord and his two angels.13 In line with this identification of the three visitors, Origen observes that although Abraham ran up to all three men to welcome them (Gen. 18:2), “he adores one, and speaks to the one saying ‘Turn aside to your servant and refresh yourself under the tree.’”14
As he discusses the end of the visit, with the Lord commenting on the pending doom for Sodom and Gomorrah—“After going down, therefore, I will see if they are perpetrating according to their crying that is coming to me” (Gen. 18:21)— Origen notes the difference between the verbs of verses 2 and 21. At the outset of the narrative, when the three men visit “righteous Abraham,” the text says that they “stood” (heistekeisan) before him; but when the Lord is about to visit the evil cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, he comments that he is “going down” or “descending” (katabas) to them. Origen warns his hearers against taking the spatial metaphors literally. The reason Scripture depicts the Lord as “descending” to Sodom and Gomorrah is that he is going to visit them in response to human sin—something that, in Origen’s view, obviously does not apply to Abraham, whom he repeatedly calls “the wise man.” Origen takes the opportunity to reflect on the Lord “going down” in the incarnation:
Therefore, God is said to descend (descendere) when he deigns to have concern for human frailty. This should be discerned especially of our Lord and savior who “thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant” [Phil. 2:6-7]. Therefore he descended (descendit). For, “No other has ascended (ascendit) into heaven, but he that descended (descendit) from heaven, the Son of man who is in heaven” [John 3:13]. For the Lord descended (descendit) not only to care for us, but also to bear what things are ours. “For he took the form of a servant,” and although he himself is invisible in nature, inasmuch as he is equal to the Father, nevertheless he took a visible appearance, “and was found in appearance as a man” [Phil. 2:7].15
Origen does not simply equate the Lord “descending” to Sodom and Gomorrah with his later descent in the incarnation for the sins of humanity: the Alexandrian preacher distinguishes the two events, treating the former as a prefiguration of the latter. Nonetheless, in both events the same divine subject (God or the Lord) “descends,” and in both events the Lord takes on human form. Origen’s appeal to the famous Philippian hymn draws attention to God’s synkatabasis, his condescension, which is necessary for him to be able to appear to sinful human beings. Descent, or katabasis, implies God taking on a “visible appearance,” the form of a servant.
The sermon contrasts this “visible appearance” of the form of a servant with the Lord being “invisible in nature, inasmuch as he is equal to the Father.” Though we can’t be sure, it is quite possible that we’re dealing here with an editorial gloss from Origen’s fourth-century Latin translator, Rufinus of Aquileia.16 The statement touches on a controversial point: Origen (or Rufinus) states explicitly that in his divine nature the Son is invisible, which makes him equal to the Father. The synkatabasis of the Son of God therefore implies that the eternal Logos becomes visible in the incarnation, whereas he is not so in his own nature.
The notion that the Son is “equal to the Father” and as such invisible in his own nature is significant inasmuch as it modifies the earlier theophany tradition. Around the middle of the second century, Justin Martyr had engaged in vigorous debate with his Jewish interlocutor, Trypho, over exactly this same passage.17 The debate had centered on the divine Son of God, who according to Justin had to be distinguished from the Father and had become incarnate in Jesus Christ.18 Trypho had maintained that there were actually two theophanies in the first two verses of Genesis 18: in the first one God himself appeared (“God was seen by him near the oak of Mamre” [18:1]); while in the second, three angels visited Abraham (“three men had come and stood above him” [18:2]). On Trypho’s understanding, it was not God himself, therefore, but one of the three angels who told Sarah the good news that within a year she would have a son (18:14) and who then left, while the other two angels went on to visit Sodom (19:1).-Justin had disagreed. He maintained that there is only one theophany in chapter 18 and that the “God” of verse 1 is one of the “three men” of verse 2: the same one whom Abraham straightaway addresses as “Lord” in verse 3 and who promises Sarah a son in verse 14. Justin pointed out to Trypho that this “Lord” is referred to as “God” three chapters later, when Sarah gives birth to her son (21:2).- Justin also explained that when the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is recounted, Scripture uses the term “Lord” twice in one sentence. Genesis 19:24 states that “the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven.”21 The twofold use of the word kyrios (Lord) makes clear, insisted Justin, that we must distinguish between the creator as “Lord” (who orders the judgment) and another God, who is also called “Lord” (who executes the judgment).22 According to Justin, therefore, one of the three figures appearing to Abraham is not an angel but the pre-incarnate Logos, here appearing in human form.23 This Lord is “another God,” a subordinate God, who is commissioned by the Father, the creator God, to punish Sodom.24 So the Father remains invisible; he “has never been seen by any man.”25 By contrast, the figure appearing in the Mamre theophany is “another God and Lord under the Creator of all things.”26 Maria Doerfler summarizes Justin’s position by explaining that the duality of lordship “reflects the existence of two gods. . . . One of these, the Father and Maker of all things, remains in heaven invisible and thus inaccessible to creation. The other, identified by Justin as Son and Logos, ministers to the Father in all things as his earthly representative.”27
The sharp distinction between the invisible creator God and the visible God who appears in the Mamre theophany allows Justin to read the text christologically—though of course it is hard to avoid the impression that he sees the pre-incarnate Lord as occupying a lower rank than the creator God himself.
Not surprisingly, this would become a bone of contention in the Arian controversies. Pro-Nicene theologians increasingly abandoned the christological reading of the Mamre theophany out of fear that it might support the Arian cause, substituting for it a trinitarian reading, with Augustine famously arguing for a trinitarian identification of the three visitors.28
Origen makes several comments on the identity of the three visitors that indicate that he follows the interpretive tradition of Justin Martyr—one that was widely accepted also by others in the pre-Nicene Christian tradition.29 Origen’s homily differs from Justin’s approach, however, in the comment that although the Lord “himself is invisible in nature, inasmuch as he is equal to the Father, nevertheless he took a visible appearance.”30 Origen (or his translator) is keen to point out the equality of the Father and the Son, something that fits with various other allusions to the Trinity in the homily.31 So while Origen’s homily retains the christological reading of the received tradition, the sermon clarifies the Father-Son relationship by insisting that by nature the Son is invisible just as the Father is invisible. In other words, Origen’s sermon aims to prevent people from drawing subordinationist conclusions from seeing Christ in the Mamre theophany, and so Origen (or Rufinus) explains that the synkatabasis of the Word in the incarnation is genuinely a descent, one that renders the invisible visible.
I have devoted a fair bit of space to Origen’s christological reading of the passage. However, Origen himself doesn’t dwell at any length on the identity of the visitors. It is Abraham’s hospitality that is central to Origen’s overall approach to the passage. The Alexandrian interpreter bookends the two homilies —the beginning of Homily 4 and the end of Homily 5—by drawing attention to Abraham’s superior hospitality in comparison with that of Lot. Numerous elements in the biblical text make clear that Lot was “far inferior”32 to Abraham. Whereas three men visit Abraham, only two come to see Lot. The visitors stand “before” Abraham (Gen. 18:2), but Lot meets them “in the street” (19:1). The visitors arrive at Abraham’s tent at midday (18:1), whereas they come to Lot’s place in the evening (19:1). (“Lot could not receive the magnitude of midday light; but Abraham was capable of receiving the full brightness of the light.”33) The patriarch’s eagerness to entertain his guests is clear from the great haste that he and his household demonstrate in preparing for their guests (18:2, 6-7). (“He himself runs, his wife hastens, the servant makes haste. No one is slow in the
house of a wise man.”34) Abraham serves bread made from fine wheat flour, as well as a good and tender calf (18:6-7), whereas Lot merely serves “ground corn” (19:3).-
This is not to say that Lot is altogether lacking in hospitality. Origen makes clear that Abraham’s nephew escapes Sodom’s conflagration because of the hospitality he shows to the angels: “Angels entered the hospitable house; fire entered the houses closed to strangers.”36 Nonetheless, when the angels tell him to escape from the valley of Sodom and run up the mountain (19:17), Lot is unable to do this: “For it belongs to the perfect to say: ‘I have lifted up my eyes to the mountains, whence help shall come to me’ [Ps. 120 (121): 1]. He [i.e., Lot], therefore, was neither such that he should perish among the inhabitants of Sodom, nor was he so great that he could dwell with Abraham in the heights.”37 It is only after having lived in Zoar for some time that Lot gains enough strength to ascend the mountain and live there (19:3ο).38 By contrast, Abraham has dwelled all along “in the heights” by the oak of Mamre, a name that Origen, following Philo, deciphers etymologically as meaning “vision” or “sharpness of sight.”39 “Do you see what kind of place it is where the Lord can have a meal?” exclaims Origen. “Abraham’s vision and sharpness of sight pleased him. For he was pure in heart so that he could see God” (cf. Matt. 5:8).- Abraham’s hospitality is such that he is pure of heart, which gives him the ability to see God in the Mamre theophany.
Origen’s exegesis focuses on Abraham’s hospitality, and one might think that, in line with this, he would turn Abraham into a model for how to care for strangers and the poor. But Origen consistently declines to do so. Despite his emphasis on hospitality, nowhere does he allude to Hebrews 13:2 (“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares”). Terms such as “example,” “imitation,” and the like are almost entirely absent from both homilies.41 To be sure, in some sense Abraham does function as an example: it is hard to listen to the two sermons and not be awed by the stellar attitude of this perfectly wise character. Abraham’s perfection is such that the Lord doesn’t need to “descend” to come and visit him. The three men simply “stand” in front of him. After all, it is sin that would make one dwell in the valley and that would necessitate the Lord’s synkatabasis. Abraham is a mountain dweller; he lives “in the heights.”42 As such, he is a model for a life lived “in the heights,” in the presence of God. But Origen does not use the perfection of Abraham’s hospitality to encourage his listeners to reach out to others around them.
This raises the question of what kind of hospitality it is that Origen discerns in Abraham in the Mamre theophany. A look back to the previous homily, on
Genesis 17, may help us here. This homily makes clear that Abraham was not always as perfect as he appears in chapter 18. On Origen’s understanding, Abraham was the recipient of God’s gracious condescension or synkatabasis in chapter 17, where he receives the name change from Abram to Abraham and also undergoes circumcision.43 Origen explains in Homily 3 how Abraham along with others in his household was circumcised, describing in turn his circumcision of the ears, of the lips, of the flesh, and of the heart. Origen treats each of these expressions as allegorical descriptions of people who live pure lives. Regarding circumcision of the heart, Origen comments that it describes someone “who guards the pure faith in sincerity of conscience, about whom it can be said, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’” (Matt. 5:8).-So Abraham encountered God’s gracious synkatabasis back in chapter 17. By the time we arrive at the Mamre theophany, Abraham has reached such perfection that he is now able to see God: “God was seen by him near the oak of Mamre while he was sitting at the door of his tent during midday” (Gen. 18:1).
In Origen’s telling of the story, Abraham’s vision of God is the outcome of divine synkatabasis, which was accompanied by a name change and circumcision. Abraham’s act of hospitality at the oak of Mamre, therefore, is hospitality extended to God as a fitting response to God’s gracious condescension in entering into a covenant relationship with Abraham in the previous chapter. None of this has anything to do with caring for the poor.
In this light, it is hardly surprising that Abraham is fully aware of his visitors’ identity from the start: “The wise man is not ignorant of whom he has received. He runs to three men and adores one, and speaks to the one saying ‘Turn aside to your servant and refresh yourself under the tree.’”45 Abraham deliberately adores only one of the three visitors; there is no entertaining of angels unawares. Origen sees the divine-human interplay of God’s synkatabasis and Abraham’s hospitality at work in the text; horizontal, interpersonal practices of hospitality are out of the picture. We should, therefore, not mistake Origen’s encomium on hospitality as a moral admonition to reach out to strangers. The two sermons are mystical reflections on the intimate engagement between Abraham and the Lord. Living in the heights, near the oak of Mamre, pure of heart—Abraham sees God. This is human hospitality of so exalted a character that divine condescension has become an outmoded style of interaction, something restricted to an earlier, inferior phase in the divine-human relationship. Origen, in effect, has allegorized Abraham’s hospitality: it no longer speaks of welcome at a horizontal level from one person to another; instead, it refers to one’s openness to and readiness for a face-to-face relationship with God.
Within this overall context of allegorized hospitality, Origen also feels at liberty to allegorize the details of the narrative. “Everything [Abraham] does is mystical, everything is filled with mystery,” claims Origen.46 The bread that Abraham asks Sarah to bake (18:6) is called enkryphias, which, Origen explains, refers to secret, hidden, or mystical bread—seeing as it is derived from the Greek verb enkrypto (to hide or conceal).47 Although Origen reads the theophany as the Lord appearing to Abraham accompanied by two angels, he nonetheless also sees a mystical allusion to the Trinity: because the three men—or God—are said to stand “before him,” Abraham mixes the bread “with three measures of fine wheat flour”—a “mystical” reference, according to Origen.48 The “good and tender” calf must be a reference to the incarnation: “What is so tender, what so good as that one who ‘humbled himself’ for us ‘to death’ and ‘laid down his life’ ‘for his friends’? He is the ‘fatted calf’ which the father slaughtered to receive his repentant son.”49 The washing of the Lord’s feet (18:4) was necessary because Abraham knew that the “mysteries of the Lord” would involve Christ washing his disciples’ feet (John 13:5).- Furthermore, Sarah’s presence behind the door of her tent (Gen. 18:9-10) can be read at three different levels: it is an example for wives to follow their husbands, it tells us that the flesh should follow the rational sense, and it teaches “something mystical” since in the exodus the Israelites followed God in the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud (Exod. 13:21).- Finally, Origen allegorizes the Lord’s apparent lack of knowledge of Sodom’s sin (Gen. 18:21) by explaining that the Lord knows those who are his (2 Tim. 2:19) but not the wicked and the impious, saying to them that he doesn’t know them (Matt. 7:23; 1 Cor. 14:38).-
With Saint John Chrysostom’s Homilies on Genesis, we enter a rather different exegetical world from that of Origen. Chrysostom had grown up in Antioch, where he had studied under the famous pagan rhetorician Libanius, as well as under Diodore of Tarsus, the founder of a catechetical school near Antioch. It is probably while still serving as a deacon in Antioch that Saint John preached his sixty-seven homilies on Genesis, the first half before and during Lent and the rest after Pentecost, of the year 385, the year before he was ordained as a priest.53 Chrysostom would go on to become the bishop of Constantinople (398), where his straightforward preaching against wealth and extravagance drew the ire of Empress Eudoxia, who saw her luxurious ways targeted by John’s preaching.54
The political intrigue that followed led to his condemnation by the Synod of the Oak (403) and to repeated exiles from that time onward until his death four years later. John’s forceful and eloquent sermons earned him the moniker Chrysostom, meaning “Golden Mouth,” and the Homilies on Genesis that deal with the Mamre theophany and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Homilies 4143) make clear that the nickname was well deserved.
Chrysostom, as a student of Diodore of Tarsus, was perhaps the most famous preacher that the Antiochene exegetical tradition produced, while the Alexandrian exegetes typically looked to Origen as their main source of inspiration. John’s preaching avoided allegorizing and was down to earth, often focusing on themes of poverty and stewardship, and it tended to use straightforward exposition, with careful attention to details. This is not to suggest that Origen failed to pay attention to the details of the text: as we have seen, he loved analyzing the linguistic particularities of the text. But Origen was happy to move quickly from the surface meaning of the text to its higher, allegorical meaning. By contrast, Chrysostom warned against excessive allegorizing, which he believed ran the danger of imposing the reader’s own notions onto the biblical text.55 John followed his teacher, Diodore, who had tried to steer a middle path between what he regarded as unwarranted literalism and radical allegorizing: “This method neither sets aside history nor repudiates theoria. Rather, as a realistic, middle-of-the-road approach which takes into account both history and theoria, it frees us, on the one hand, from a Hellenism which says one thing for another and introduces foreign subject matter; on the other hand, it does not yield to Judaism and choke us by forcing us to treat the literal reading of the text as the only one worthy of attention and honor, while not allowing the exploration of a higher sense beyond the letter also.”56 John’s Antiochene exegesis took seriously the divine synkatabasis into the vagaries of human history, and for Chrysostom this meant treating the human form (as well as the historical meaning) of the biblical text with due care and attention.
“Let us examine each of the words with precision,” John suggests as he begins his exposition in Homily 41, “open up the treasure and disclose all the wealth concealed there.”57 The exegete’s “precision”—akribeia in Greek—was for Saint John the corollary of the “precision” that characterized the biblical text itself, in which every word was a treasure that had to be dug up. As Robert Hill puts it: “For [Chrysostom] precision marks the narrative and description to be found in the Scriptures, demanding a like precision or care on our part by way of appropriate response to God speaking.”58 Following with precision the details of the biblical text was, for Chrysostom, a matter of proper responsibility on the part of the exegete.59
In one of his later sermons on Genesis, as he deals with Jacob’s wrestling with God at the Jabbok River (Gen. 32:22-32), the Antiochene preacher returns briefly to the Mamre theophany and links it explicitly with God’s gracious condescension to human weakness:
Don’t be surprised, dearly beloved, at the extent of his considerateness (synkatabaseos); rather, remember that with the patriarch as well, when he was sitting by the oak tree, he came in human form (anthrOpou schemati) as the good man’s guest in the company of the angels, giving us a premonition from on high at the beginning that he would one day take human form to liberate all human nature (anthropinen morphen) by this means from the tyranny of the devil and lead us to salvation. At that time, however, since it was the very early stages, he appeared to each of them in the guise of an apparition (schemati phantasias), as he says himself through the inspired author, “I multiplied visions and took various likenesses in the works of the inspired authors” [Hosea 12:10]. But when he deigned to take on the form of a slave (ten tou doulou morphen) and receive our first fruits, he donned our flesh, not in appearance (phantasia) or in seeming, but in reality (aletheia)M
God’s appearance to Abraham was condescension (synkatabasis) to the weakness of the patriarch’s human condition.61 This divine condescension means that God took the form (schema) of Abraham’s humanity, albeit in a vision (phantasia). On John’s understanding, this shows God’s care, as he slowly but surely prepared humanity for the incarnation itself, when he would appear not in the form of a vision but in reality (aletheia). In short, for Chrysostom, God’s gracious condescension or synkatabasis takes into account human weakness (astheneia) as he steps down to the limitations of human beings—at first in the human form of the Mamre theophany, and then climactically in the incarnation itself.
What is more, for Chrysostom the biblical narrative, as it takes the form of human words, participates in this same synkatabasis of God. Ashish Naidu draws attention to this analogy between incarnation and inscripturation in Chrysostom’s thought: “As in the incarnation of the Word, so in the Bible the glory of God is veiled in the flesh of the text—human language and thought. It is by the careful reading and study of the Scriptures that one encounters its true Subject: Jesus Christ. The historical incarnation therefore is viewed as a paradigm for the nature of the Scriptures: God’s message is inextricably fused in the human message of the text. God accommodates himself to the reader in the interpretive encounter, thus providing a divine pedagogy for the reader’s edification and spiritual life.”62 Divine synkatabasis characterizes all of God’s dealings with humanity, according to Chrysostom. The result is a profound sense that the human form matters, whenever and wherever God meets up with human beings.
This divine condescension, both to Abraham and to the reader of Scripture, comes to the fore particularly, according to Chrysostom, when Abraham leads
the Lord and the two angels away from the oak of Mamre toward the city of Sodom and pleads with the Lord to spare the city. Chrysostom uses the noun synkatabasis no fewer than six times in Homily 42. “Wonderful is God’s considerateness (synkatabasis) and his regard for the good man surpassing all reckoning,” writes Chrysostom. “I mean, see how he converses with him, man to man, so to say, showing us how much regard the virtuous are accorded by God.”63 God’s condescension to Abraham is clear from the back-and-forth dialogue between the two.
God shows a similar kind of condescension also to the biblical reader, when he says that he is “going down to see if their deeds correspond to the outcry reaching me, so as to know if it is true or not” (Gen. 18:21).- Chrysostom writes: “What is meant by the considerateness (synkatabasis) of the expression,
‘I am going down to see’? I mean, does the God of all move from place to place? No indeed! It doesn’t mean this; instead, as I have often remarked, he wants to teach (paideusai) us by the concreteness of the expression that there is need to apply precision (akribeia), and that sinners are not condemned on hearsay nor is sentence pronounced without proof.”65 Divine pedagogy, Chrysostom intimates, means that God graciously comes down to our level in the process of synkatabasis. The reader, in turn, must treat the text with precision (akribeia), so as to discern properly what it is that God conveys by means of this condescension. In this case, the point behind the concrete expression of God “going down” to find out the true state of affairs in Sodom is to make clear that sin is not condemned on the basis of hearsay.66
Chrysostom sees God’s synkatabasis coming to the fore particularly when Abraham begins to negotiate with God, gradually lowering his estimate of the number of righteous people in Sodom from fifty to forty-five, to forty, to thirty, to twenty, and finally to merely ten: “I mean, which of us living in the midst of countless evils could ever choose to exercise such wonderful considerateness (synkatabasei) and loving kindness in executing a sentence against our peers?”67 For Chrysostom, God’s condescension consists not just in his accommodation to the feebleness of human existence but also, and particularly, in his long-suffering, gracious attitude toward the sinfulness of human beings, as he is willing to spare the city even in the face of the inhabitants’ overwhelming collusion with evil.