What did it mean for ordinary believers to live a Christian life in late antiquity? In Christians at Home, Blake Leyerle explores this question through the writings, teachings, and reception of John Chrysostom-a priest of Antioch who went on to become the bishop of Constantinople in 397 AD. Through elaborate spatial and ritual recommendations, Chrysostom advised listeners to turn their houses into churches. He preached that prayer and chant, scripture and hospitality, and even layout and furnishings would create an immersive environment with a transformational effect on a home's inhabitants. But as Leyerle shows, the actual practices and beliefs of Chrysostom's lay listeners diverged from his intentions. Unlike their preacher, the laity-who saw time as cyclical rather than linear-were neither interested in moral transformation nor concerned about the afterlife, and they were more motivated by tangible goods than by a life of monasticism. Yet they were committed to Christianity and demonstrated this by modifying Chrysostom's advice to meet their everyday experiences, often citing precedents from scripture to defend their actions. By reading these two perspectives on early Christian life through each other, Leyerle shows the clash of beliefs between Chrysostom and his lay listeners and, at the same time, highlights the shared understandings that bound them together. For both the preacher and his congregations, lived religion was necessarily rooted in practice, within which the household was a vital ritual arena, independent of clerical control. Elegantly written and convincingly argued, this study will appeal to scholars of theology, classics, and the history of Christianity in particular.
Blake Leyerle is Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of The Narrative Shape of Emotion in the Preaching of John Chrysostom and Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives: John Chrysostom's Attack on Spiritual Marriage.
"It is not very often that one has the privilege to read a work such as this-so well argued, so beautifully written, and making such a crucial contribution to scholarship. This book beautifully presents and critically analyzes the apparent tension between John Chrysostom and his audience regarding his expectations for their domestic religious devotion." -Chris L. de Wet,author of Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity "In beautiful prose and with brilliant insights, Blake Leyerle lays open the domestic world of an ancient urban Christianity as it struggled to accept or resist John Chrysostom's strange teachings." -David Frankfurter,author of Christianizing Egypt: Syncretism and Local Worlds in Late Antiquity
