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Popular Patristics Series #56

Letters of St. Chrysostom to Olympias

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This book contains 5 of the 17 letters from John Chrysostom to his friend Olympias, a deaconness in the church of Constantinople. At times the letters resemble sermons, at times they are accounts of his health and spirit under exile. These documents reveal, partially, the existence of one of the most important women of the early church, and of the friendship she beheld with one Christendom's most cherished orators and church fathers.

41 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 407

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John Chrysostom

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John Chrysostom (c. 347–407, Greek: Ἰωάννης ὁ Χρυσόστομος), Archbishop of Constantinople, was an important Early Church Father. He is known for his eloquence in preaching and public speaking, his denunciation of abuse of authority by both ecclesiastical and political leaders, the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, and his ascetic sensibilities. After his death in 407 (or, according to some sources, during his life) he was given the Greek epithet chrysostomos, meaning "golden mouthed", in English and Anglicized to Chrysostom.

The Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches honor him as a saint and count him among the Three Holy Hierarchs, together with Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzus. He is recognized by the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church as a saint and as a Doctor of the Church. Churches of the Western tradition, including the Roman Catholic Church, some Anglican provinces, and parts of the Lutheran Church, commemorate him on 13 September. Some Lutheran and many Anglican provinces commemorate him on the traditional Eastern feast day of 27 January. The Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria also recognizes John Chrysostom as a saint (with feast days on 16 Thout and 17 Hathor).

John is known in Christianity chiefly as a preacher, theologian and liturgist. Among his homilies, eight directed against Judaizing Christians remain controversial for their impact on the development of Christian antisemitism.

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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
Profile Image for Mikal Lambdin.
78 reviews7 followers
June 26, 2024
I've read many saint books, but never a saint's letters to a dear friend. St. John was so real - comforting, dramatic, sincere, direct, funny, and occasionally annoyed. St. Olympia suffered from severe depression, and his letters are mostly his effort to cheer her up. He changes his tactics over time, but never stops writing, even though her despondancy stubbornly hung on. I was especially struck by his ardent love and respect for her, not in spite of, but because of her struggles.

Everyone should read this book.
Profile Image for Scriptor Ignotus.
595 reviews272 followers
July 9, 2024
John Chrysostom could be severe and uncompromising in manner; and the liberality with which he employed his stinging eloquence to denounce the vanities of the rich and powerful, including those upon whom his fortunes depended, formed the context of the feuds and controversies that typified his life of preaching; most notorious among them the infamous spat with the Empress Eudoxia which led to his final exile from Constantinople (404-407). Yet during this latter period, when Chrysostom was at his lowest and most vulnerable, he penned these seventeen letters to Saint Olympia—perhaps his only true friend and confidant from his time at the imperial capital—which reveal both the tenderheartedness of the deposed archbishop and the intensity of his admiration for the holy woman to whom they were addressed.

While Chrysostom assumes the role of a spiritual father giving guidance to a struggling pupil during a time of great mutual adversity, it seems clear to me, especially in the early letters, that he needed the consolation of Olympia’s voice and example at least as much as she needed his. Though none of Olympia’s writings survive, she exerted throughout her extraordinarily life a palpable presence during one of the most spiritually and intellectually fruitful periods in the Church’s history; and many of its leading lights—Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzus, as well as Chrysostom—were taken with her generosity and discipline. Gregory of Nyssa dedicated his homilies on the Song of Songs to her, while Nazianzus composed a congratulatory poem in honor of her short-lived marriage. If these men hold a place of high honor in Orthodox and Catholic tradition, and if saintliness is defined less by prolixity than by Christlikeness and purity of heart, how great must be the stature of the woman for whom Chrysostom offered such effusive praise. From Letter 8:

“I know well the nobility of your thoughts, I know the strength of your soul that is filled with piety, I know the greatness of your intelligence, and the power of your Christian way of thinking [philosophia] which alone is sufficient to command the madness of your despair to be cast into the sea, making everything calm. . . . I have given you counsel which has not been fitting for you. For me, and for those who have been swamped with sins against me, this word is necessary . . . But you, who are adorned with such great virtue and have already touched the vault of heaven, do not need to be spurred on in this way.”

“Putting aside consideration of how someone has sinned and how another has transgressed, think about your continual struggles, borne through your endurance, your patience, your fasting, your prayers, your sacred all-night vigils, your self-control, your almsgiving, your hospitality, your manifold trials, grievous and frequent. Consider how from your earliest youth to the present day you have not stopped nourishing Christ when he hungered, giving him drink when he thirsted, clothing him when he was naked, bringing him in when he was a stranger, taking care of him when he was sick, going to him when he was a prisoner. Ponder upon the ocean of your love, which you have opened up to the very ends of the earth, spreading it with great alacrity. For it is not only your own house which you have opened to everyone coming to it; but everywhere, on earth and sea, many have enjoyed this honor, bestowed through your hospitality. Gathering all these reflections, revel and rejoice in the hope of the crowns and the rewards for these things.”


Olympia was born in 362 in Constantinople to one of the wealthiest and most politically-connected families in the empire. Her paternal grandfather Ablabius was a senator and consul during the reign of Constantine. Though her parents were pagans—her father was a friend and ally of the Emperor Julian “the Apostate”—she was orphaned at a young age and raised by her Christian uncle Procopius and a governess named Theodosia. She was married around the age of twenty, but became a widow after less than two years, inheriting a vast array of wealth and property. Rather than remarry, Olympia vowed a life of celibacy, determining to use her wealth for the benefit of the poor, the sick, and the institutional church. The Emperor Theodosius pressed her to renounce her new form of life, arranging a marriage with his kinsman Elpidius; and when she refused to comply, he ordered the seizure of her properties. Palladius’s Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom records her disarming reply to the emperor’s machinations:

“You have demonstrated toward my lowly person a kindness most becoming an emperor and commendable in a bishop when you entrusted this great burden, which has been my worry, to proper administration. You will do much better should you order it to be distributed to the poor and the churches. I have been praying for quite a while that I be set free from the embarrassment of vainglory, which would be mine if I distributed it to charity. Let me not be so seduced by earthly things as to lose the soul’s true riches.”


Theodosius yielded and returned the estates, apparently impressed by her panache.

Olympia established a monastery on one of her properties in Constantinople, near the city’s great cathedral. She lived there with around fifty former servants, whom she freed from their indentures, and over time the community grew to include some 250 female ascetics. Exercising great personal piety and ascetical discipline, she was also both one of the great philanthropists of her time—building hospitals and orphanages—and a major patroness of the church itself. She was ordained a deaconess: a women’s vocation which was not at all uncommon during that period, but which sadly fell by the wayside over the following centuries; and the prospective revival of which in the Orthodox Church, despite its ancient pedigree, has been met with dispiriting hostility, which to my mind demonstrates that so-called “traditionalism” is often little more than juvenile misogyny. But I digress.

When John Chrysostom became Archbishop of Constantinople in 398, the erstwhile desert monk and rabble-rousing preacher formed a closer bond with the heiress-turned-ascetic than with anyone else in the city; a fact which was used against Chrysostom by his enemies at the farcical Synod of the Oak in 403, in which they charged him, among other things, with eating alone with women. When John was permanently exiled in 404, the “Johnites” of Constantinople came under persecution by the new ecclesial regime. While Chrysostom faced the hardships and dangers of exile—cold weather, illness, marauding Isaurians, “hordes” of angry monks (seriously)—Olympia faced ostracism for her loyalty to him. She was even accused, quite preposterously, of having set fire to the cathedral after John’s ouster; and though she was cleared of suspicion, she shortly thereafter relocated to Nicomedia in Asia Minor. Chrysostom died in 407 during a forced march even further into exile, and Olympia died the following year.

Though he avoided writing to Olympia in the midst of his most intense suffering, Chrysostom was candid about the bleakness of his life in exile. In Letter 7, he paints an evocative metaphorical picture of his gloominess and disorientation.

“I behold a sea in fury everywhere, forced open to the depths of the abyss, revealing corpses floating on the waves, others submerged beneath them; the bridges of the ships destroyed, the sails in shreds, the masts shattered, the oars fallen out of the hands of the oarsmen, the pilots seated upon the decks in front of the tillers, with their hands crossed over their knees, and in the face of their impotence before these events, they are groaning, crying out in anguish, lamenting, wailing; with nothing clearly visible, neither the sky nor the sea, but with everything plunged into deep darkness, with such obscurity and gloom that upon turning around it’s impossible to recognize one’s neighbor; and with the sailors everywhere beset by crashing waves, and by monsters of the sea.”


But he counters his circumstances by trusting in the existence of a Providence which holds power over all vagaries, and which often remedies evils at the moment when the situation seems most hopeless.

“However, even when I see such things, I do not give up an even firmer hope, as I consider the Pilot governing everything, who prevails over storms, who calms the raging gale, not through skill and artfulness, but with a single nod. It is not at their beginning—not immediately, when they first arise—that he customarily obliterates evils, but when they increase, when they come to their furthest point [telos], when most men fall into despair, then he does wondrous things beyond all expectation, demonstrating his own power, and training the patience of those who have fallen.”


He reaches a conclusion shared by spiritual seekers the world over: that there is a higher order of reality, in which the core of our identity as spiritual beings, as incarnations of God, is rooted; and we are only perturbed and injured insofar as we identify ourselves with the transient, visible conditions of this life.

“Therefore, do not be cast down, I beseech you. For there is only one thing, Olympia, to fear, only one real temptation, and that is sin. This is the refrain that I keep chanting to you ceaselessly. For everything else is ultimately a fable—whether you speak of plots, or enmities, or deceptions, or slanders, or abuses, or accusations, or confiscations, or banishments, or sharpened swords, or high seas, or war engulfing the entire world. Whichever of these you point to, they are transitory and perishable, and they only affect mortal bodies; they cannot in any way injure the watchful soul. This is why, wishing to express the paltriness of both the good and the bad things of this present life, the blessed Paul stated the matter in one phrase, saying, ‘For the things that are seen are transient.’”


He opines in several places that the patient endurance of suffering is just as important for the spiritual life as the practice of virtue, citing the example of several biblical figures—Joseph, Job, Lazarus (from the parable in Luke), and Christ—who were rewarded as much for the circumstances they endured as for the deeds they performed. From Letter 10:

On Job:
“So, on the one side were all his virtues, and on the other side all his sufferings. But these latter declared him to be more illustrious than those. For this was the most bitter part of the battle, requiring the greater courage, the more well-stretched soul, the more philosophic mind, and having greater love for God. . . . Thus despondency is more burdensome than everything else; and as it is more burdensome, its recompense will be greater.”


On Lazarus, the Publican, and Peter:
“Lazarus, for his infirmity alone, partook of the same end as the patriarch [Abraham]; and the publican, by the invective of the Pharisee, acquired righteousness that far surpassed that of the Pharisee; and the chief of the apostles [Peter], by his tears, received healing from the wound caused by the grievous sin.”


“For nothing, nothing makes someone so brilliant, so worthy of emulation, so filled with a myriad of good things, as an abundance of trials and dangers and pains and sadness, and being plotted against continually—for those who, having no other expectations, bear everything meekly.”


Chrysostom warns against despondency, the most pernicious and corrosive of spiritual states. Letter 10:

“For despondency is for souls a grievous torture chamber, unspeakably painful, more fierce and bitter than every ferocity and torment. It imitates the poisonous worm that attacks not only the body but also the soul, and not only the bones but also the mind. It is a continual executioner that not only tears in pieces one’s torso but also mutilates the strength of one’s soul. It is a continuous night, darkness with no light, a tempest, a gale, an unseen fever burning more powerfully than any flame, a war having no relief, a disease which casts a shadow over nearly everything visible. For even the sun and the air seem to be oppressive to those who are suffering from these things, and midday seems to be as darkest night.”


Though it appears to be rooted in our external circumstances, Chrysostom, echoing the Stoics, views one’s state of mind—whether joy or despair—as something in which one chooses to participate. Externals can lure and tempt us, but they cannot dictate to us. He admonishes Olympia in Letter 9 for inflicting inner turmoil upon herself:

“Why do you lament? Why do you smite yourself, afflicting yourself with pains which even your enemies do not have the power to inflict upon you, as you give your soul over to the tyranny of despair? For the letters which you have sent to us through Patrikios have revealed the wounds of your heart and mind. Therefore I also am suffering great pain and distress, since when you must make every exertion and make it your business to shake off the despondency of your soul, you surround yourself with grievous thoughts, even inventing things which do not exist (as you have said), lacerating yourself in vain, for no purpose whatsoever, with great harm to yourself.”


Above all, one must keep one’s mind on God.

“Glory to God for all things—and I have not ceased repeating these words in the midst of everything that is happening to me.” (Letter 4)



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Profile Image for mRizk.
23 reviews2 followers
October 27, 2019
Just like in “On Repentance and Defeating Despair”, St John is so comforting in this set of letters. Not only so, but it is amazing to see how dedicated he is to helping St Olympia while he’s in exile and going through the worst time of his life.
Profile Image for Rita.
26 reviews
June 21, 2025
Written before a time of denominations this book is for all Christians. Especially those who know mental struggle, which feels like all of us these days. It’s best to keep in mind this was written for a woman in early 400s when reading to get to St. Chrysostom’s meaning. I wish I had this book in my teen years! It puts the Christian life in a perspective often lost in our modern world. I will be re-reading this book forever.
Profile Image for James.
9 reviews2 followers
August 19, 2020
A fascinating portrait of a great saint's struggle to console his spiritual daughter through physical ills, mental anguish, despair, and despondency. Chrysostom changes his tack over time, and following his attempts to adapt and respond to Olympia's cries is instructive. The ethical teaching is simple and remains consistent throughout. It's the shift in rhetoric that's worth noting and tracking. Almost like an ancient transcription of a therapy session.
122 reviews5 followers
February 28, 2020
I love this. This is going on a reread shelf.

Letter 7 and Letter 8 especially are superb. among the greatest pieces of text, I have ever read.

Although it is a little bit dense and confusing for somebody who is not well versed in the scriptures, If you have this, It all becomes very clear. Two especially interesting parts of the collection of letters (found in letter 8) are the brief commentary on the clothing of women and on virginity.

The powerful parallels are drawn between the biblical figures and St Olympia, especially of Joseph and Job, were sufficient to bring me out of the despondency and desolation I found myself in at the beginning of this book. I cannot imagine how much consolation they provided to St Olympia.

And, to contradict another review on here, is why I think she may have asked for more. I think, especially in the later time of St John's exile, they really did have a positive effect on her. If they can have such an effect in English to a man 1600 years later, how much on her? How much would she have desired to continue receiving these consolations?

To conclude, If you have a reasonable working knowledge of scripture, this is well worth your time. If you haven't, then you may want to go through, at the very least, Genesis and The New Testament, focusing especially on the Epistles Of St Paul.


I will be doing a podcast in the near future on this with a friend, and try to distill the points for secular people so they can receive the same consolation St Olympia and I received from these letters.
183 reviews
September 24, 2025
St. John was an elegant preacher, but his letters usually lack the enthusiasm of some of his homilies, except where the letter itself becomes a homily. Even here, the material repeats what he has said on other occasions. I love St. John and his proses at its finest; it's just not here.

That said, there are certain minor merits to this work. St. John does not divulge many details of his exile, but those he discloses show how painful it was and how he was even in peril for his life from barbarian raiders at time. It is therefore even more stunning that his famous last words, "Glory to God for all Things" became an everyday phrase from the very beginning of his exile.

Also, he shared an interesting perspective that St. Basil apparently shared with him. Either St. John or St. Basil (I forget which at this point) said, "Even though I do not know a woman, I am not a virgin." I take this to mean that virginity is a state of celibacy alone but one of a disposition toward God that even he, a saint, did not aspire to.
870 reviews51 followers
February 8, 2017
In general I appreciate the writings of St. John Chrysostom. This collection of his letters from exile to his friend and disciple Olympia is to a large extent his letters of encouragement to her. She lost her friend when Chrysostom was sent into exile, and probably being in a circle of people in disfavor with the government and society, she suffered great depression, loss of face and even some threats. His letters admonish her to accept suffering as the normal way for God's people and to accept that there will be heavenly rewards for those who endure suffering with graciousness. There will be no reward for those who suffer but complain. The letters seem very repetitive and one can only guess that Olympia was not in fact comforted by his words.
Profile Image for Susanne.
99 reviews1 follower
March 21, 2023
There's no gaslighting here, no 'it's all in your head', just sincere and loving (and sometimes firm) letters from a pastor to one of his own who is struggling with despondency and despair. We don't have the letters from Saint Olympia, but it's encouraging to know that she felt she could keep writing letters to Saint John Chrysostom even when her condition doesn't seem to improve.

This was my first pass through - I will definitely read again and with a pencil for note-taking the next time!
101 reviews
February 28, 2020
Beautiful translation by Dr. David Ford of St. Tikhon's Russian Orthodox Monastery.
The book contains 17 letters from St. John Chrysostom, written from exile to the Abbess St. Olympia who was suffering from despondency. Some of the letters have not been previously translated.

"...it is certainly not in the nature of things, but in the will of man that our happiness naturally resides." (pg 98 10:1C)
821 reviews2 followers
April 2, 2021
An encouraging book of letters written at the beginning of the 5th century by St John Chrysostom in exile to a young lady in Constantinople, who was enduring many trials. His reputation as “the golden mouth” shines forth in these eloquent letters, encouraging her to persevere, while he himself was suffering also.
Profile Image for Joshua Windle.
230 reviews3 followers
December 20, 2022
Really challenging discourse from over 1500 years ago about the self-centeredness of despondency.
Profile Image for Josh McBride.
129 reviews
June 12, 2025
Great translation. The letters are intimate and insightful. Great, practical advice for anyone struggling or wanting a clearer picture of St. Chrysostom and his writing.
1,639 reviews19 followers
June 13, 2023
Gal complains to Chrysostom about being sick, and he starts not believing it, but then for some reason, things get better
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