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2. J. N. D. Kelly, Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom: Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1995), pp. vii + 310, cloth, $47.50, ISBN 0-8014-3189-11.
Saint John Chrysostom occupies a prominent place in the Church's patristic canon. His voluminous writings-letters, sermons, tractates, and Biblical commentaries-take up volumes forty-seven to sixty-four of the Patrologia Greca, eighteen volumes (and counting) in Sources Chretiennes, and, in English, six volumes of the Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers (first series). Still, I would hazard, he is not exactly a familiar saint in the West. This unfamiliarity should be eased now with J. N. D. Kelly's impressive biography of the bishop of Constantinople, the first in English in over a century.
A reader of a Life of Chrysostom is like a seasoned theater-goer attending a new production of Hamlet: he or she knows the terrible conclusion and even much of the plot, but still there is fascination in watching the tragic events unfold. As bishop of Constantinople, the "imperial see" of the late antique Roman world, Chrysostom managed to alienate just about everybody: the rich, the imperial couple (Arkadios and Eudoxia), the monks, neighboring bishops, his own clergy-just about everybody,...