St. John Chrysostom: On Repentance and Almsgiving

St. John Chrysostom: On Repentance and Almsgiving. Translated by Gus George Christo. The Fathers of the Church, Vol. 96. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1998. xviii + 159 pp. $27.95 (cloth). There is no complete translation of Chrysostom in any language, but large portions of his writings have been rendered into English over the last century or so. The most extensive selection is to be found in the series, AnteNicene, Nicene, and Post-Nicene Fathers, edited by Philip Schaff and Alexander Roberts (1886-1900), Chrysostom occupying volumes IX-XIV of the first series of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. More recently, the Fathers of the Church Series, of which the present volume under review is volume 96, has taken the lead in providing significant translations of some of Chrysostom's writings, including all 88 Homilies on John (by Sister Thomas Aquinas Goggin, S.C.lH., in volumes 33 and 41); the De incomprehensibili Dei natura (by Paul Harkins in vol. 72); and the 67 Homilies on Genesis (by Robert Hill, in volumes 74, 82, and 87). In this brief consideration, two other translations deserve mention. Graham Neville's revision of T. A. Moxon's translation of Nairn's edition of the De sacerdotio, published originally by SPCK (1964) and subsequently by St.Vladimir's Seminary Press, has attained the status of a small classic. And Paul Harkins's extremely useful volume 31 in the Ancient Christian Writers series, St. John Chrysostom: Baptismal Instructions (Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, and London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1963), puts into the hands of the English-speaking reader the discovery of the Stavronikita MS and its consequences for the study of Chrysostom's text. The standard has therefore been set extremely high, not least by the Fathers of the Church Series. These translations ordinarily contain an extensive critical introduction as well as up-to-date bibliographies, and here we must begin with our first disappointment with Volume 96: Christo's comparatively brief (8-page) Introduction may be more accurately described as hagiographical than scholarly, and he does his subject a great disservice thereby. Christo's treatment of "Repentance: An Overview" (pp. xiii-xv) is not, for example, particularly satisfactory. Given the centrality in Chrysostom's thought of "the life well lived," this subject is of primary significance both in understanding Chrysostom and in making judgements about these texts. Christo mentions five Greek words that relate to repentance, nwtarnelonwi, metastrophe, metathesis, nwtamorphosis, and atetanoia, and here we could have used a thorough examination of a complicated subject. Instead there is no critical reflection, and none of his definitions contains references to these words or ideas as they are used by John himself. Even his biblical references are thin. For example, Christo remarks (p. xiii), quite correctly, that metamelomai probably carries with it a sense of remorse at Mt. 27:3. Yet he neglects to say that this verb can have a much less highly charged meaning, as it does a few chapters earlier in the same Gospel, where at Mt. 21:30 and 32 it means simply "change one's mind. " Nor is it clear what Christo means when he says that rnetastrophe "is a drastic and dynamic about-face from a previous despised way of life to a conscious decision to change" (p. …