Daily Inspiration Quote by John Chrysostom

A fourth-century preacher in a city stratified by imperial glamour and grinding poverty, John Chrysostom isn’t staging a blanket takedown of money. He’s doing something more surgically threatening: separating possession from posture. “Riches are not forbidden” is the velvet rope that lets the comfortable keep listening; “but the pride of them is” is the snap hidden inside the velvet. The line is crafted to disarm defensiveness while keeping the moral target squarely on the chest.

The intent is pastoral and political at once. Chrysostom knows wealth is structurally baked into his world; forbidding it outright would sound like fantasy or heresy to patrons who underwrote churches and charities. So he reframes the sin not as having, but as flaunting, hoarding, or treating abundance as proof of virtue. Pride is the tell: it’s the emotional glue that turns resources into hierarchy, and hierarchy into cruelty.

The subtext is a critique of status culture avant la lettre. Pride isn’t merely private vanity; it’s public theater. It makes the rich legible as a superior class and trains everyone else to accept their own lesser worth. By condemning pride rather than property, Chrysostom attacks the social meaning of wealth: its power to manufacture moral alibis and silence compassion.

Context matters: early Christianity was negotiating its relationship to empire, elites, and the practical needs of community life. This sentence offers a compromise that still bites. Keep your money, he implies, but surrender your entitlement. If you can’t, the wealth isn’t neutral anymore; it’s a spiritual weapon you’re choosing to wield.