Archbishop of Constantinople (c. 347-407), the greatest preacher of the early Church and perhaps of all Christian history. Chrysostomos means "golden-mouthed" — a nickname awarded posthumously for the eloquence and power of his sermons. Born in Antioch, he spent six years as an ascetic in the Syrian desert before returning to Antioch as presbyter (386), where his preaching on the Statues (when a riot defaced imperial statues and the city feared imperial vengeance) became famous. Summoned reluctantly to Constantinople as archbishop in 397, his sermons against luxury, the corrupt imperial court, and Empress Eudoxia earned him banishment and, finally, death in exile in 407.
Chrysostom's legacy is a corpus of some 700+ surviving sermons — primarily verse-by-verse expositions of Genesis, the Psalms, Matthew, John, Acts, and all of Paul's letters. He is the patristic gold standard for expository preaching: disciplined walking through the biblical text, pastoral application to his congregation's actual lives, and fearless confrontation of sin high and low. His homilies on the statues, on wealth and poverty, and on Matthew's beatitudes shaped Christian social ethics for a thousand years. He is one of the "Three Holy Hierarchs" in Eastern Orthodoxy (with Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus) and his liturgy — the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom — is the primary Eucharistic liturgy of the Orthodox Church to this day. His last words, uttered while being marched further into exile through a rainstorm: "Glory to God for all things." Preachers who want to learn their craft should read Chrysostom. He is the teacher of preachers.