Justice & Law Quote by John Chrysostom

Chrysostom isn’t just barring women from “this ministry”; he’s building a theological alibi for a social boundary already under pressure. “The divine law indeed has excluded women” front-loads the argument with inevitability. It’s a classic clerical move: relocate a contested human arrangement into the realm of cosmic fact, so disagreement becomes not dissent but impiety. The real heat sits in the next clause: “but they endeavour to thrust themselves into it.” That verb turns aspiration into aggression. Women aren’t responding to a calling; they’re violating a perimeter.

Then comes the sharper maneuver: “since they can effect nothing of themselves, they do all through the agency of others.” Chrysostom frames female influence as inherently parasitic, an unauthorized power that must be smuggled through men. It’s a preemptive delegitimization. If women have any effect in church life, it’s recast as manipulation; if they have none, the exclusion is justified. Either way, the institution stays clean. Subtext: the ministry’s credibility depends on controlling not only who speaks, but who gets credit for making things happen.

The context is an early church negotiating authority, orthodoxy, and public respectability in a Roman world that policed gendered roles. Chrysostom, a master rhetorician and disciplinarian bishop, is trying to stabilize a hierarchy by treating women’s religious agency as disorder. The line reads less like calm doctrine than like management: an anxious warning about influence that refuses to stay in its assigned lane.