Text Worlds and Imagination in Chrysostom’s Pedagogy

John Chrysostom in his preaching creates and develops a vast number of graphic scenarios featuring various objects and actors. His elevated rhetoric depicts everyday situations, social interactions, but often also biblical stories in such lively colours that the audience can almost watch them in imagination. Scholarship, largely inattentive to Chrysostom’s literary technique, has failed to recognise the textual creation of scenarios as a key tool in his ethical teaching within the setting of the church service. This chapter proposes that the approach of Text World Theory, an offspring of recent Cognitive Poetics, can open a new avenue for research into Chrysostom’s anthropology and pedagogy. The close analysis of the rhetorical techniques that build and develop textual worlds reveals how the preacher stimulates his audience to form mental representations of situations and actions, which are loaded with evaluations and require an ethical judgement. By doing so, Chrysostom invites his congregation to immerse themselves in the text worlds, and simulate feelings and sensations there in order to elicit from them a change in behaviour. Examining his homilies in terms of text worlds augments our knowledge of his skilful manipulation of the believers’ emotions for educational purposes. It also demonstrates the extent to which the regular church service is a social construct and a co-operative endeavour of both homilist and congregation.