This is the first book-length study of John Chrysostom’s views on almsgiving to be published since Otto Plassman’s Das Almosen bei Johannes Chrysostomus (Münster: Aschendorff, 1961). Unlike Plassman’s survey, Walker historicizes Chrysostom’s views and presents a central argument: this preacher made unique claims both in Antioch and Constantinople about almsgiving’s ability to forgive any sin, including capital sins of apostasy, murder, and adultery.

After introducing her themes and prior scholarship, Walker summarizes how Chrysostom discusses the practice of almsgiving in his homilies and treatises (when? where? how much?, etc.). She then identifies five of his claims about almsgiving that differed from those of his predecessors and contemporaries: namely, that it cleanses and counterbalances every sin, that it heals every wound (viz., of sin), that it is superior to virginity as a virtuous practice, that it mimics the Eucharist (since Chrysostom equates the alms recipient with the sacrifice of Christ on the altar), and that it delivers givers from both temporal and eternal death. In the rest of the book Walker explains why Chrysostom made such “expansive and audacious” (p. 77) claims. She starts by surveying other benefits he associated with almsgiving: its ability to give an undying reputation, to make God indebted in this life and the next, to give power to prayers, to make donors like God, and to bring people together by helping givers and receivers alike. Next, she turns to the apparent discontinuation of the ancient Christian practice of public penance in the church of Constantinople (and perhaps elsewhere) at the end of the fourth century, and to Chrysostom’s own ideas about penance and repentance; Walker argues that he promoted almsgiving as a method of atoning for every sin partly because he knew alternative methods of atonement had fallen into abeyance. After treating these rationales for his distinctive emphasis on almsgiving, Walker proceeds to identify “unspoken” rationales (p. 125). Pointing out that Chrysostom wanted all Christians – not just “the rich,” but poor people and monks – to give alms, Walker notes that he believed this would promote a unity of souls within the community. She concludes by stressing the competitive religious and civic environment of the late fourth century, arguing that Chrysostom was induced to vigorously promote almsgiving in order to increase his own authority at a time when pagan, Jewish, non-Nicene, and monastic benefactors were active.

Much of this follows Richard Finn’s Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Nonetheless, it is refreshing to have a study dedicated to demonstrating precisely how and why Chrysostom differed from other Church Fathers in his understanding and promotion of Christian almsgiving. Given Chrysostom’s later influence on Orthodox tradition, Walker’s study helps elucidate a distinctively different Eastern Christian charitable culture, which is familiar to westerners mainly through the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

For this reviewer, the strongest part of Walker’s book is her attempt to explain Chrysostom’s claims that almsgiving could expiate every sin by contextualizing it with the demise of public penance in the late Roman East. To my knowledge, this historical argument is novel, and it certainly makes sense: as Walker notes, in the West, where public penance continued for a time later, authorities like Augustine and Leo were unwilling to go so far as to credit almsgiving with the capacity to atone for capital sins. However, it must be said that Walker’s thesis rests on inference; Chrysostom himself never goes so far as to claim that almsgiving could atone for murder and tantamount sins – he just makes it sound as if the practice could fix anything.

This problem is familiar to scholars of Chrysostom: he starts an argument (or repeatedly makes similar points in different contexts) but rarely sustains it, certainly not in any systematic way. It is therefore much easier to survey his views than pin him down on specifics. Walker’s book likewise often seems like a survey, without going in-depth or making tight connections. Her concluding section on competition relies on conjecture and is irrelevant to her earlier arguments about Chrysostomic distinctiveness. It is important that she identifies a number of ways in which Chrysostom’s preaching was distinctive. But she barely alludes to that way in which, in my view, he was the most distinctive: namely, in his insistence that people give directly themselves, not through a mediator such as the church. I have highlighted this in The Rich and the Pure: Philanthropy and the Making of Christian Society in Early Byzantium (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021), 76–82. From this premise follows much that is distinctive not only about Chrysostom’s teachings but also about later Orthodox tradition on attaining compassion and redemption.