Notes

July 9, 2026 · excerpt

That the reading of Scripture belongs to laypeople even more than to monks

Chrysostom's startling claim, at the very door of Sixtus's New Testament annotations.

The first annotation of the sixth book of the Bibliotheca Sancta — the very first matter Sixtus judged worth marking in the interpreters of the New Testament — is not a disputed reading or a heresy, but a claim of Chrysostom’s about who needs the Scriptures most:

Chrysostom, homily 2 on Matthew — in which he expounds the beginning of this Gospel — not far from the end asserts that the reading and study of divine Scripture pertains more to secular [laypeople] than to monks, and is more necessary to the former than to the latter.

The monk in his cell, the reasoning runs, has his walls; the layman in the world stands under fire, and it is the soldier under fire who most needs his weapons. Whether that claim can stand unqualified — and what the Church’s discipline made of it — Sixtus weighs at length in Annotation 152, Whether anyone can attain salvation without the reading of the Divine Scriptures.

Read the annotation itself: Annotation I, Sacred reading.

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