Etudes Epistémè (Feb 2021)
Qu’est-ce qui fait rire Jean Chrysostome ?L’usage du rire dans les Homélies sur l’Évangile de Jean
Abstract
While being the first to assert that Christ never laughed, John Chrysostom does not condemn laughter itself. Moreover, he does not hesitate to use laughter when he engages as a preacher in a theological controversy. An enquiry into the eighty-eight Homilies on the Gospel of John shows three functions of laughter in his preaching: first, laughter contributes to the moral condemnation of vices while showing what is indecent (aschèmôn), or relocating the latter to its proper place, even against social conventions; second, it allows the writer to truncate refutations which would otherwise be too long, while gathering the multiple positions of his adversaries into a single absurdity so that the audience concentrates on what unifies the community; and, conversely, laughter, presented as the adversary’s response to the Gospel, highlights his non-receptivity. We can explain Chrysostom’s use of reductionist laughter by the fact that he is very conscious of the fragility of his audience. In this sense, laughter is an aspect of the well-known “condescension” (synkatabasis) of John Chrysostom.
