“Strengthening the Holy Athlete: Lay Ascesis and Athletics in the Works of John Chrysostom” 

Roston, Stephanie R.. 2026. “Strengthening the Holy Athlete: Lay Ascesis and Athletics in the Works of John Chrysostom.” Effervescence: Yale Divinity School’s Student Journal of Religion 1, (1). https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/effervescence/vol1/iss1/2

Abstract 

Contemporary fitness influencers often compel their audiences by appealing to the felt connection between physical and moral-spiritual conditioning, but this was also true for John Chrysostom and his attending congregations in late antiquity. Chrysostom believed that body and soul might be brought into healthy​,​ transparent alignment through the cultivation of embodied training grounds for virtue, and he repeatedly utilized athletic imagery in his homilies and baptismal liturgy to emphasize that the cognitive attention necessary for such work is strengthened over time through repeated physical regimens such as fasting and vigils. Warning against hypocrisy, he looked to athletes and ascetics for examples of coordinated internal and external transformation toward an eschatological goal which defies conventional models of success and contrasts with his antagonistic attitude toward theatrical performers. While today’s self-commodified athletes define success in terms of material wealth and physical attractiveness, Chrysostom’s vision of transcendent glory exemplified by athletes is prefigured in the lifestyle of the city’s relatively impoverished and is attainable through acts of charity and lay asceticism embedded in an urban context. All of this is read against a backdrop of pastoral care, or philanthrōpia, as Chrysostom’s concern for his congregations in Antioch and Constantinople includes their holistic health in the present moment and extends to the state of their souls throughout eternity.