Working With Chrysostom's Psalms Commentary
If you are looking at St John Chrysostom Spiritual Gems From The Of Psalms as a resource, you need to understand what you are actually dealing with before you try to use it. Chrysostom's coverage of the Psalms is not a single book. It is a collection of homilies he delivered in Antioch around 386-388 AD while he was still a presbyter, before he became Archbishop of Constantinople. These homilies number over three hundred and cover most of Psalm 1 through Psalm 150, though the coverage is uneven. Some psalms get extensive treatment and others barely anything. The easiest place to start is the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series, specifically Volume 8. That contains the homilies on the Psalms. The Penguin edition translated by Elizabeth A. Livingstone is cleaner and more readable than the older NPNF translation, which tends to be stiff and archaic. If you want the Greek original alongside the translation, the Patrologia Graeca volume 55 has everything, though it is brutal to navigate if you are not reading Koine Greek comfortably. There are also standalone compilations marketed as "Spiritual Gems" or "Selections from the Psalms Homilies." These are useful for casual reading but you should treat them with suspicion. Editors pick and choose passages that fit their own agenda, often stripping context from the surrounding homily. A gem without its setting is just a loose stone. I would recommend sticking to the complete homily collections whenever possible and reading the gems in their full homiletic context.
How Chrysostom Actually Reads the Psalms
Chrysostom approaches the Psalms as pastoral literature first and theology second. His primary concern is always how a passage functions in the life of a practicing Christian. This means his exegesis can feel repetitive if you read him straight through. He will loop back to the same moral point across multiple psalms because that was his method. He was preaching to people, not writing academic commentaries. One thing beginners consistently miss is that Chrysostom's allegorical readings are far more restrained than Augustine's or Origen's. He does use typology when the text pushes him toward it, but he almost always anchors his interpretation in the literal sense first. When he does allegorize, he signals it clearly. If you read him expecting layered mystical meanings everywhere, you will be frustrated. He is much more direct than that. Here is a practical problem I ran into recently that illustrates this. I was cross-referencing Chrysostom's treatment of Psalm 50 with a modern psychologist's work on guilt and shame. Chrysostom's homily on that psalm is extremely detailed about the psychological mechanics of repentance, and I wanted to quote a specific passage. The problem is that different editions divide the homilies differently. The NPNF splits one long homily into two sections with different numbering. The Greek PG has it as one continuous piece. The "Gems" compilations chop it into even smaller fragments. I spent about forty-five minutes tracking down the exact passage across three different editions before I could cite it properly. My workaround was to reference by incipit - the opening words of each homily - rather than by number, since the incipits stay consistent across editions. Look up "Psalm 50, beginning with the words 'Have mercy upon me, O God'" and you will find it in any translation.
What Makes Chrysostom's Approach Useful
His strength is in moral psychology. He reads the Psalms as a map of human interiority. When David says "I am afflicted and in pain," Chrysostom does not just say that is sad. He breaks down the exact mechanism by which suffering functions as a pedagogical tool from God. He distinguishes between punishment, correction, and training, and he maps them onto different types of suffering. This is surprisingly modern in its precision. His treatment of envy is another area where he is indispensable. Psalm 73 is essentially a treatise on envy and it gets extensive coverage. Chrysostom identifies envy as a disease of perception - the envious person sees the prosperity of others and interprets it as a personal injury. He does not treat it as mere jealousy. He treats it as a structural flaw in how the person perceives reality. This distinction matters because it changes the pastoral approach. You do not reason someone out of envy. You retrain their perception. There is a downside to reading Chrysostom this way. His moral focus can make him gloss over historical and literary context that modern scholarship considers essential. He does not have access to source criticism or ancient Near Eastern context. When he reads Psalm 137 - "By the rivers of Babylon" - he spends most of his time on the spiritual meaning of captivity and very little on the actual historical situation of the Babylonian exile. This is not a bug in Chrysostom. It is a feature of fourth-century hermeneutics. But if you are using him for academic work, you will need to supplement him with contemporary scholarship. He is not going to replace von Rad or Brueggemann.
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Practical Reading Strategy
Do not read the Psalms homilies cover to cover unless you have a lot of time. Pick a psalm that is relevant to what you are wrestling with and go straight to that homily. Read it slowly. Chrysostom's sentences are long and occasionally labyrinthine, but the logic is usually sound once you untangle the syntax. He tends to state his conclusion, demonstrate it from the text, then restate it in a slightly different form for emphasis. The repetition is deliberate. It is meant to stick. When you hit a passage that feels strained or overly allegorical, note it and move on. Chrysostom occasionally stretches a text to make a point, and it is better to recognize that than to pretend every interpretation is equally valid. Not everything he says carries the same weight. His strongest readings are the ones anchored in the grammatical and historical sense. His weaker ones are the ones that seem driven by a pastoral need rather than the text itself. The homilies on Psalms 1, 18, 31, 37, 50, 51, 73, and 119 are generally considered his finest work in the collection. Start there. They show his method most clearly and they contain the bulk of his most useful insights. The rest is valuable but more variable in quality.
