Love & Passion Quote by John Chrysostom

Power, here, is framed as pastoral burden rather than privilege - and that framing is doing a lot of political work. John Chrysostom doesn’t just bar women from presiding over the Church; he wraps exclusion in the language of awe. The “magnitude of the task” is so enormous, he argues, that “the whole female sex must retire,” and then, as if to soften the blow, he adds that “the majority of men also” fall short. It’s a rhetorical move that looks humble but consolidates hierarchy: the office is elevated to near-impossible holiness, which makes restriction feel like prudence instead of prejudice.

The subtext is a familiar late antique logic of gender and authority. Women aren’t excluded because they’re less intelligent or less devout (though those assumptions often sit nearby); they’re excluded because the role is imagined as a public, governing, spiritually perilous form of leadership. In Chrysostom’s world, that kind of authority is coded male, while women are coded as needing governance. By claiming most men are unfit too, he isn’t equalizing the sexes; he’s narrowing legitimacy to a tiny cadre of properly formed, disciplined male clerics.

Context matters: Chrysostom was a major architect of Christian moral seriousness in an empire where the Church was becoming a public institution with real social power. As ecclesiastical offices hardened into professional roles, arguments like this helped turn custom into doctrine. The line’s force lies in its piety-flavored gatekeeping: exclusion justified not as domination, but as safeguarding “souls” from the wrong kind of caretaker.