Greek Christian Poetry and Hymnography (2):

Poetry and Hymnography (2): The Greek World Poetry and Hymnography (2): The Greek World John A. McGuckin The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies Edited by Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter Print Publication Date: Sep 2008 Subject: Religion, Christianity, Literary and Textual Studies, Ancient Religions Online Publication Date: Sep 2009 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199271566.003.0032 Abstract and Keywords Greek Christian hymns are a massive part of the surviving literary record of the early church, but have rarely attracted the level of scholarly attention that they deserve. This article discusses Greek hymnody; the classical origins of the Greek Christian hymns; the Bible and the ancient liturgy; stages of Syrian influence on Byzantine hymnography; hymns of the heterodox–orthodox Struggles; littérateur poets in Greek late antiquity; and the flowering of Byzantine hymnography in the sixth to eleventh Centuries. In Greek hymnody, one can see creed, antiphon, poem, prayer, song, and sacrament welded to form a seamless unity: here Byzantine theology, mysticism, and liturgical chant merge into a profound symbiosis in a programme that already consciously understood itself to be a the­ ology of beauty and of culture. The ancient hymn is thus a potent symbol, still awaiting its full articulation. Keywords: Greek hymnody, Greek Christian hymns, Bible, ancient liturgy, Byzantine hymnography, liturgical chant 31.1 Greek Hymnody—A Neglected Domain GREEK Christian hymns are a massive part of the surviving literary record of the early church, but have rarely attracted the level of scholarly attention that they deserve. One of the reasons for this is surely the manner in which the genre of hymn had, by the post‐Ref­ ormation era, been firmly established in the life of the various churches, as one of the most popular levels of common devotion and liturgical ‘involvement’, and familiarity in this case bred contempt. In Europe, after the eighteenth century, there was a veritable explosion of interest in hymnody, one which was given further impetus by the Oxford High Church movement under such scholars as Keble, Newman, and J. M. Neale (1862), who did much to bring the lyrics of ancient Greek Christian hymns back to a higher level of popular awareness. Page 1 of 16 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 September 2019 Poetry and Hymnography (2): The Greek World It was, however, the very notion of the ‘popularity’ of the hymn that led many to continue to be its ‘cultured despisers’. Victorian writers such as F. W. Faber were responsible for bequeathing much sentimental slush to the hymn books, and it became a kind of supposi­ tion among the scholars that ‘real theology’ ought to be looked for elsewhere; the hymn being merely the levelling down of significant (p. 642) Christian thought into a form of low‐level catechesis. This was a mistaken attitude; how mistaken became clearer only af­ ter the late nineteenth century when Christ and Paranikas (1871) brought out what is still the leading collection of ancient Greek hymnal texts. The editio princeps of Greek hymns by La Rovière (1614) had marked a milestone in the scholarship, but had no immediate take‐up. Joseph Bingham, that pan‐epistemic eighteenth‐century writer on the early church, had also devoted a chapter of his monumental Origines Ecclesiasticae (1845) to hymnody, but of the seven pages he offered there, almost all were concerned with Latin hymnody. It was to fall to the Victorians to breathe life into hymnographic study. In 1867 the French Cardinal Jean Baptiste Pitra issued a critical study of the Greek hymns at Paris and Rome (Pitra 1867). A few years later, the classical scholar and Anglican priest Allen Chatfield (1876) combined his theological and linguistic skills in the first serious publication of Greek hymns in English. A little beforehand he had written an entire prayer book (Litany) in Greek verse that won the critical acclaim of university critics, and now he rendered the Greek hymns into English verse. The scholarly attention led to a slow but sure revival of interest in the following decades. In 1890 E. W. Benson, the archbishop of Canterbury, passed the so‐called Lincoln Judge­ ment that allowed the use of hymn singing in Church of England Sunday services, and ac­ tivity flourished after that point, among Anglicans and Catholics, whose hymnography had a special concern for reviving ancient patterns. In 1892 another learned Anglican priest, John Julian, brought together a team of the leading hymnographic scholars of Eu­ rope and North America to issue the very detailed Dictionary of Hymnology. It was a most important reference review of the field from antiquity to the contemporary scene, and went through several editions into the Eighties of the twentieth century. The article in that dictionary dealing with Greek hymnology is a monument of precision, and still one of the clearest expositions of the varieties of Byzantine liturgical ‘types’ of hymns such as troparia, kontakia, idiomela, hirmoi, katavasia, and canons. Chatfield's and Julian's inter­ ests were very much in the early period, but the revival in hymnographic studies over which they presided soon turned its main attention to contemporary composing of new hymns for parochial usage; and the study of the ancient hymns continued only slowly, in­ crementally through to the present.1 In most cases the vast corpus of Greek hymnody is only slowly receiving its first serious English renditions. Those that have been rendered before were usually set in Victorian‐ style verse settings that too often appear insipid to modern taste; indeed, most of the at­ tempts to render the ancient texts in the Victorian anthologies were so paraphrastic that, reviewing them, J. M. Neale once said, caustically, they hardly merited the description of ‘translation’ (though his own best versions take large liberties with the originals). A gen­ eration ago, Trypanis (1971) brought out a very useful (and massively select) bilingual collection of all Greek poetry from Homer to Seferis in a popular Penguin edition, and in Page 2 of 16 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 September 2019 Poetry and Hymnography (2): The Greek World it the Christian Greek hymns from the early church as well as from Byzantium received a very honourable showing. More (p. 643) recently, Church and Mulry (1988) composed an anthology of the earliest Christian hymns that also gives a good flavour of the early cor­ pus. Greek hymns rarely received as much attention as their Latin cousins. This was due in the main to the profound neglect of Byzantine studies in western academies, a state of affairs that only began to receive redress in the present generation (Grosdidier de Matons 1977). Nevertheless, some of the early pioneers in Byzantine musical and liturgical study had an eye on the importance of the hymnic genre, and Wellesz (1961) as well as Skeris (1976) and Conomos (1984) put the study of Greek hymns on a new basis with their analysis of Byzantine music and chant. My own book (McGuckin 1997) tried to present some of the interesting examples of early Greek and Latin hymnody, accurately rendered, along with an apologia for the importance of their renewed study. Modern New Testament scholars had, perhaps, done the most for breaking the reluctance of the ‘cultured despisers’ by alerting readers to the fact that the hymnic elements of the New Testament were the ear­ liest strata of material after the logia themselves. Soon significant books were appearing, dedicated entirely to the New Testament Greek hymns (Sanders 1971; Liderbach 1998). Specialist studies of Byzantine hymn‐writers fol­ lowed suit, and though today there are useful studies (and translations) of some of the leading Greek hymn‐writers, such as Gregory of Nazianzus (McGuckin 2005a), Romanos the Melodist (Carpenter 1970–3; Schork 1995; Lash 1995), and Symeon the New Theolo­ gian (Maloney 1976; McGuckin 2005b), there are still major gaps in the scholarly litera­ ture. There is, for example, no collected edition and English translation of the hymns of such fundamentally important writers as Andrew of Crete or John of Damascus. An impor­ tant collection of the Greek liturgical hymns was made available by the collaborative ef­ forts of Bishop Kallistos Ware and Mother Mary of Whitby (1969; see also Ware 1987). To­ gether they issued volumes devoted to the Akathistos Hymn (one of the great Marian hymns of the Byzantine tradition, fifth century) and the whole Festal Menaion, the church order book for the great feasts of Orthodoxy. The latter is an important introductory re­ source for Byzantine hymnody up to the thirteenth century, although the material is orga­ nized according to the liturgical calendar, not historically or grouped by author, and has no historical commentary. 31.2 Classical Origins of the Greek Christian Hymns Today, therefore, more and more scholars admit the hymn to be a very significant window into Christian antiquity. This might well have been suspected, of course, (p. 644) when one considers that hymnic worship was the bedrock of ancient Greek religion. The earliest surviving collection is the magnificent poetry from the seventh century BCE known as The Homeric Hymns, which are dedicated to a number of the Olympian gods. Pindar and Bac­ chylides later set out the genres of two major types of Greek hymnography: paeans and Page 3 of 16 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 September 2019 Poetry and Hymnography (2): The Greek World prosodies. The first were acclamations to the gods sung on religious occasions, while prosodia were processional songs, meant for recitation during the sacrifices. The Orphic Hymns, of circa second century CE, consisting of eighty‐seven Asia Minor temple songs, are the largest extant collection of pre‐Christian Greek hymnography. The early establish­ ment of the major forms for hymnal composition by Greek littérateurs had an important impact on Christian writers. Modern scholars have marked the distinction by separating hymns that were congregationally designed for liturgical or devotional singing from the finely crafted rhetorical ‘poetry’ that comes from the hands of some of the leading patris­ tic rhetors and that prefers classical metres. It is unlikely that any of these high‐literary hymns were ever conceived for public chanting, though congregational singing seems to have been a practice that was established before the Constantinian peace. 31.3 The Bible and the Ancient Liturgy Greek Christians did not need extensive tutoring in the art of hymnody as integral to reli­ gious devotion, but hymns that were distinctively Christian took some time, about two centuries, to accumulate their own tradition. Nevertheless, from the very beginning, hymns can be traced in the Christian records. When Pliny the Younger undertook an in­ vestigation of the Christian cult, placidly torturing a deaconess to get the story, he was able to report to the emperor Trajan that it was essentially harmless, a meeting on Sun­ days when devotees ‘sang a hymn to Christ as if to a god’ (Pliny, Ep. 96. 7). The Psalms and Odes of Israel were massively influential on this process of development. Most Christ­ ian Greek hymnody, in fact, can be understood as a careful mixing of the ancient literary traditions, with a new ‘biblicist’ sense of how poetry could be put to service in paraphras­ ing and retelling scriptural events, and building up extensive church services around a skeleton of Psalms. Apart from the 150 Psalms (which constituted hymns at the Last Supper itself, according to Mk 14: 26), there were many other hymnic forms within the Old Testament (Ex 15: 1– 18; Judg 5: 3–5; Job 5: 9–16; 12: 13–25; Isa 42: 10–12; 52: 9–10; Sir 39: 14–35; 42: 15–43: 33), some of which the Christians designated as ‘The Odes’. From Ephesians 5: 19–20, it is clear that hymnody had an established place in Christian prayer; and in Colossians 3: 16, the writer has already identified the three classical forms that should be used: psalms, hymns, and odes. Acts 16: 25 presents Paul (p. 645) himself as a great ‘singer’. Fragments and quotations from the earliest Christian hymnody are found in several places within the New Testament (Jn 1: 1–18; Col 1: 15–20; 15: 3–4; 19: 1–8). One famous example is a pre‐Pauline hymn which the apostle quotes back to the local church to demonstrate their belief (Phil 2: 5–11). Many of these earliest fragments are Christologi­ cal in character, and several of them (e.g. 1 Tim 3: 16) are clearly ‘credal’ in form, thus beginning a very long tradition, for what we today recognize as the great baptismal creeds that began life as catechumenate hymns of faith. Several of Luke's New Testament hymns are rightly famous. They sit on the borderline between hymn and poetic prose, indebted to the Old Testament, consciously aware of the Page 4 of 16 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 September 2019 Poetry and Hymnography (2): The Greek World wider Greek tradition, and rising out of both to become significant works in their own right. One thinks of the Magnificat (Lk 1: 46–55), the Benedictus (Lk 1: 68–79), and the Nunc Dimittis (Lk 2: 29–32). The fact that one can so readily identify them by titles shows how extensively these sections have been used in Christian worship throughout history. The cardinal points of the day, sunset (the beginning of a new day in ancient thought) and sunrise, became focal points around which many Christian hymns would accumulate. One of the earliest (still sung in the Orthodox vespers rite) was the early third‐century Phōs Hilaron (Christ and Paranikas 1871: 40; trans. McGuckin 1997: 19). The Phōs Hilaron is like several other third‐ and early fourth‐century hymns in being essentially non‐metrical prose, though there are other equally early examples (Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 15. 1786; Amherst Papyrus 1.2) that show a more generally recognizable anapaestic form (metrical ‘feet’ comprised of two short stresses and one long). It was not a far step to take from the poetic Aramaisms of Jesus to the rolling rhythmic phrases of the Greek New Testament. Even in translation, the Beatitudes cannot be mistaken for mere prose (Mt 5: 2–10; Lk 6: 20–6). 31.4 Stages of Syrian Influence on Byzantine Hymnography Syrian Christian literature always retained this intimate union of poetry and prose, and in four discrete waves it washed over the entire Greek tradition, shaping it profoundly. The first was in the earliest writers such as Melito of Sardis and his second‐century prose‐po­ em homily On the Pasch. This text is much indebted to Semitic forms. The preferred modality of poetic prose applied to most of the earliest Greek Christian preaching. It can be witnessed in the roughly contemporary Epistle to Diognetus and 1 Clement 59–61. The second wave was the fuller articulation of this Syrian poetic tradition in the fourth centu­ ry, and especially in the person of Ephrem, a figure who would have massive impact on the fourth wave, which we (p. 646) shall note subsequently. Ephrem set a tone that consti­ tuted a norm for Byzantine hymnology in ways comparable to Ambrose's influence in the West. The third wave was the coalescing of fixed liturgical forms. Again, this was largely cen­ tred in the creative cauldron of Antioch, with deep Syrian resonances, but fashioned when Syria was at the height of its Hellenistic sensibility, able to marry Syrian styles with the purest Greek semantic. After this point, all Byzantine liturgical development retained the poetic vision bequeathed to it from its Syro‐Antiochene heritage, and in its turn the Byzantine liturgy dominated poetic composition, and gave occasion for most of further hymnic development. Major Greek liturgical songs, known as troparia, such as the ‘Only begotten Son’ (Monogenēs Huios), traditionally ascribed to Justinian, and the ‘Cherubic Hymn’ (cherubikon), exemplify this. The first is a summary of the Nicene Creed, in the light of the Monophysite crisis that was causing problems in the sixth century. It reflects much of the theology of Cyril of Alexandria (the ‘Theopaschite’ settlement that would be promulgated at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553), insisting on the ‘selfsame­ Page 5 of 16 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 September 2019 Poetry and Hymnography (2): The Greek World ness’ of the heavenly Lord and the Christ who suffered on earth. It is now sung as the second antiphon at the beginning of the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom in Orthodox churches. The cherubikon was sung just before the solemn entrance into the cathedral of Hagia Sophia, with the prepared eucharistic gifts (the Great Entrance). It was, in the hey­ day of Byzantium, chanted by the choir of imperial eunuchs, a massed castrati rendering that was reported to be very eerie and atmospheric. The few lines, based around Isaiah 6: 1, when the prophet saw the angels singing the thrice holy, are to this day sung at a high moment of liturgical drama in the eastern liturgy, as the holy gifts are carried into the sanctuary for the consecration. The fourth and last wave of the Syrian formative influence might be described as the for­ mation of a classical Byzantine poetic canon, after the time of Romanos the Melodist in the sixth century. As conscious heirs to Ephrem and the earlier fathers, such as Gregory of Nazianzus, the liturgical poets of the later Byzantine period were active in adapting, extending, and renovating the hymnic tradition, up until the end of the first millennium, when the vast size of the service books began to signal an end to liturgical creativity and a need for pruning. 31.5 Hymns of the Heterodox‐Orthodox Strug­ gles The second and third centuries that were so formative an era for the development of the Christian hymn were also periods of great flux, an era when common themes of sophic re­ ligiosity in the Greek world (also known as ‘Gnostic’ tendencies) encouraged innovation in forms of worship. It is no surprise to discover that the hymnic (p. 647) genre much inter­ ested the Christian teachers Marcion, Valentinus, Bardesanes (Bar Daysan), and his son Harmonius. Only fragments of Christian Gnostic hymns have survived in Greek; but larg­ er elements of the Syriac corpus are extant, such as elements in the Odes of Solomon and the two very beautiful hymns in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas: namely, the Hymn of the Pearl (Klijn 1962: 120–5), which is thought by some to be a surviving piece by Bardesanes himself, and the similarly magnificent Hymn of the Bride (sometimes known as the ‘Wed­ ding Song of Wisdom’), which comes shortly after it (Acts of Thomas, 1. 6–7), with its ini­ tia: ‘Maiden, Daughter of Light’. One of the few Greek examples, coming from the cusp of ‘orthodox Gnosis’, is the hymn Christ the Shepherd, quoted, or perhaps composed, by Clement of Alexandria. It is a hymn of initiates chanting to their heavenly Pedagogue, as if in a mystery cult, and celebrating Christ's redemptive guidance (Christ and Paranikas 1871: 37–8; trans. McGuckin 1997: 15). The early involvement by writers of hymns that later church tradition would look at askance for heterodoxy has sometimes been taken as evidence that the hymn represented ‘popular’ religion, while the liturgy represented the clerical elite. The trend has even been carried further into the Nicene era, and the example of the Arian party using hymns and poems to transmit their doctrine is sometimes cited as evidence of why hymns had a bad reputation and only in the fifth century started to develop in the liturgy more obvi­ Page 6 of 16 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 September 2019 Poetry and Hymnography (2): The Greek World ously. The thesis is exaggerated and uncertain. The concept of the hymn as ‘popular’ reli­ gion is belied by the fact that, in the main, they show highly developed rhetorical powers. Linguistic simplicity is, after all, a sign of great rhetorical skill, not evidence of composi­ tion by rustics. Throughout Christian antiquity, the influence of the popular (or secular) song, with its well rehearsed themes of love, or valour, were certainly adapted by church hymnographers (Ephrem's Hymns on Virginity, for example, show many signs of refer­ ence to contemporary Erōtikai, as do the hymns of Symeon the New Theologian, much lat­ er). The traffic, surely, was two‐way. Hymns, in fact, did not belong to any section, hetero­ dox or orthodox. If Arius had recourse to poetic form in his apologetic Thalia, and Athana­ sius steered away from hymnic form, not too much can be deduced from this, given that in the second generation of Arianism, in the late fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus was a prolific poet and hymn writer, whereas his neo‐Arian opponents Aetius and Eu­ nomius show no interest in verse whatsoever. 31.6 Littérateur Poets in Greek Late Antiquity Gregory of Nazianzus (329–90) and Synesios of Cyrene (370–413) are two examples of a rising phenomenon in the ranks of late fourth‐century church leaders: the (p. 648) pres­ ence of highly educated rhetoricians and literary stylists in the episcopate. The lists could be expanded significantly, including men such as John Chrysostom (c. 347–407), whose fluid prose rhythms were outstanding, and who was known to have encouraged hymn singing in the cathedrals where he served (Antioch and Constantinople); or Proclus of Constantinople, an equally gifted rhetor (d. 447), who wrote the first memorable Marian hymns, describing Mary as the new Penelope who ‘wove the flesh of Christ’ on the loom of her own life. Mary was a magnet who constantly attracted great attention from the Greek hymn writers (Woodward 1919). Gregory of Nazianzus could rightly be described as the most learned man of his generation. In later life he composed a vast body of poetry in almost all the existing Greek metres. Gregory was very conscious of the manner in which Plato had left unresolved a classical debate between Philosophy and Poetry for the right to carry the palm of Greek letters (McGuckin 2005a), and his numerous poems in which he invokes the Spirit of God (he was to be one of the chief architects of the doc­ trine of the consubstantiality of the divine Spirit) show that he deliberately set out to ad­ vance a body of Christian literature wherein divine inspiration was closely married to the notion of ‘inspired text’ (poiēsis). In his Theological Orations (ch. 27) Gregory set out an important principle for all Greek theology that followed him: that refinement of mind was necessary for the perception of the truth, and that this was produced by careful study as much as by careful living. Gregory was the most quoted of all Christian writers in Byzan­ tium: his poetry stimulated countless others to emulate it, and his theology of aesthetics was never to be challenged in Byzantium. Synesios was an example of a less consciously ‘ecclesiasticized’ writer than the ascetical bishop Gregory. When he was elected by Egyptian townsfolk to be their bishop in Pen­ tapolis, the learned aristocrat was less than sure that he wanted the honour. He negotiat­ ed with the archbishop of Alexandria, Theophilus, and while agreeing (reluctantly) to Page 7 of 16 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 September 2019 Poetry and Hymnography (2): The Greek World leave aside his hunting with hounds, he refused to separate from his wife, or adapt ele­ ments of his Neoplatonist philosophy to the strictures of current orthodoxy. He has left behind a corpus of Nine Hymns. The tenth in the manuscript collection is not by him. It is the well‐known hymn ‘Lord Jesus, think on me’, and is the product of the tenth‐century monk George Hamartolos. The Nine Hymns are a strange fusion of Neoplatonism, Chris­ tianity, and classical culture. They never caught on in any sense (one presumes) as liturgi­ cal pieces, and thus represent the hymn as pure literary construct. Synesios's passion is to evoke the supreme transcendence of God; a popularized form of Neoplatonic dis­ course. Christ appears in the guise of a divine hero, rising through the spheres, to show the way to immortality to his initiates. The harrowing of hell is told as an account of Christ as the new Hercules who sends Cerberus (Hades) cringing back into his lair. The result is a strikingly beautiful conceit, but better suited, perhaps, to a symposium in the bishop's apartments than to a typical Christian small town synaxis. (p. 649) Gregory of Nazianzus and Synesios, the elite of Christian rhetoricians in the patristic era, had both attempted to write in quantitative Greek metre. They gained few later disciples in this respect. Most subsequent Greek Christian hymnody stayed with accentual metre as its preferred form: an easier genre in which to compose. Much of Byzantine hymnogra­ phy also adopts a popular style of language, rather than the self‐conscious classicism of the rhetors, who loved to use rare forms and archaisms. 31.7 The Flowering of Byzantine Hymnography: Sixth to Eleventh Centuries It is in the age after Justinian that we see Byzantine hymnography come into its maturity. It comprises a large body of literature that for centuries has remained largely unknown outside the domain of the Orthodox Church, which still uses these hymns in the fabric of its offices of prayer (especially matins and vespers). Even today much remains untranslat­ ed, or is available only in poor versions. Some of the great masters, such as the sixth‐cen­ tury Romanos the Melodist, are now available in English; but for others, equally signifi­ cant, such as Joseph the Hymnographer, Kosmas of Maiouma, and John Damascene, there is still no collected edition to allow popular access. A substantial volume of Byzantine reli­ gious poetry in translation is thus urgently needed. The forms of Byzantine hymnography underwent a rapid development in this period. The first stage was that of single‐stanza troparion. The high Byzantine age saw this begin­ ning to be extended significantly in size and scope. This was the birth of the kontakion. As we have noted, this was probably a result of the extensive Syrian influence that was prevalent in the great city in this period. From composers such as Ephrem, who had be­ come ‘classical’ by the sixth century, the Byzantines saw the potential in drawing out long biblical paraphrases of the readings of the offices. The notion of a ‘sung sermon’ has been used to describe this development, and it fits the case well. The hymns weave in and out Page 8 of 16 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 September 2019 Poetry and Hymnography (2): The Greek World of the biblical passage, taking up small details and amplifying them, supplying a psycho­ logical explanation, making their hearers ‘enter into’ the events being sung about. The kontakion bears the same role to the biblical text as midrash did in Jewish circles. At first these much longer hymns were sung in the interstices between the various of­ fices, especially in the all‐night services led by the monks (the pannychis or agrypnia), which basically fused together vespers and matins; but soon they (p. 650) grew to become integral to those same offices. An outstanding example of one of the earliest of them, which has unusually remained outside the liturgical vortex (eventually attracting its own special service), was the Akathist Hymn (Limberis 1994; Peltomaa 2001). This means ‘not sitting down’; in other words, it was a processional. It celebrates the Virgin as the protec­ tor of the race of Christians. Once attributed to Romanos, it is now thought to pre‐date him, probably from the time of Proclus, and added to (a proimion at least) by Patriarch Sergius I (d. 638). Almost all Marian icons in eastern Orthodoxy draw from the Akathist's rich fund of images that retell the story of salvation from Mary's perspective. At later times, when the reading of the scriptures fell out of the vigil services, or were drastically cut back, the hymnic paraphrases of the chanters were left behind to give witness to what was once being proclaimed by the lectors and commented on by the preachers. The word kontakion derives from the term for a ‘roll’ of parchment, something that was still retained as a deliberate archaism in the Byzantine rite, even though the Church had long gone over to the codex. Kontakia were ‘songs on a roll’, therefore, though the word soon came to designate simply a liturgical hymn. The kontakion is begun with a preface (proimion) sometimes called a ‘little hood’ (koukoulion, after the monastic habit). This states the purpose and theme of the hymn in nuce, and ends with what will become the refrain. The refrain occurs throughout the remaining stanzas, sung either by the whole congregation, which would thus have to memorize only one tune for a few lines, or else (in a large cathedral) by the ‘Second Choir’, led by the lampadarios. The ‘First Choir’, led by the prōtopsaltēs, took the melodic line, with the second chorus responding and adding depth through ‘sympathetic’ notes. In contemporary Byzantine chant the practice sur­ vives in what is known as the iso‐tone, a strong first cantor taking the lead with a com­ plex melody, while the larger group gives bass resonance by lingering on key notes, and stretching out key words, mirroring the music that is in flight above them. Romanos the Melodist (fl. 540) was one of the greatest composers of kontakia. He intro­ duces his compositions with the proimion, and then binds together a long series of stro­ phes in the same metre (called oikoi) with initial letters of the line making up an acrostic when read vertically. The favoured device of Romanos is ‘Of the Humble Romanos’. It was a clever habit that prefigured copyright laws, for the watermark of attribution was impos­ sible to hide. It was also a good technique to assist in the correct memorization of the kontakion, for any forgotten lines would glaringly emerge in the text when the acrostic no longer worked. There were traditions that Romanos himself was a Jewish convert. He was most likely a Syrian by birth. Eighty kontakia have come down under his name, though not all are genuine. Some of them are rightly considered literary masterpieces. His kon­ Page 9 of 16 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 September 2019 Poetry and Hymnography (2): The Greek World takia On the Birth of Christ, On the Lamentation of the Virgin for her Dead Son, and On the Resurrection are in this inner circle (Krueger 2004). (p. 651) In the Kontakion on the Nativity Romanos sets the whole piece around the worried mus­ ings of the Virgin Mary, who has just given birth and wishes to protect her baby from all the disruption that seems to be coming in from outside: magi, shepherds, and the like. She is the central character ‘pondering these things in her heart’, and so serving in the role of a guide (psychopompos) for the less initiated, as to the essential meanings of these various mysteries. In his Kontakion on the Resurrection, the Cross is set up on Golgotha, and its foot pierces the rocky ceiling of Hades. Hearing the noise of the intrusion, Satan and Death (personified) have an alarmed dialogue with each other. Death complains that he feels (mortally) sick, and Satan is bewildered as to why his age‐old rights have been trampled in such a way that escapes his comprehension. In the Kontakion on the Death of Christ, which is still part of the Great Friday Passion services in Orthodoxy (just as the Kontakion on the Nativity forms a large part of Christmas services), the Virgin is depicted as a bleating ewe. The mother sheep runs around the field crying out inconsolably for its lost lamb. The image is more difficult for moderns to empathize with, but was widely tak­ en in antiquity as a moment filled with pathos, and one that must have been very familiar even to city‐dwellers in paschal springtime, when the lambs were culled from the flock. The imagery, which occurs in both Latin and Greek Great Friday services derives from Romanos's hymns: My people, what have I done to you, how have I offended you? I hung the stars upon the frame of heaven, but you hung me upon a cross Another of his significant devices is to juxtapose strong contrasts and paradoxes. The refrain in the Nativity kontakion is typical of this: ‘A newborn child who is God before the ages’. After the seventh century the kontakion was radically cut back in liturgical reforms, and often remains in the Orthodox offices as a tiny remnant of the considerable size it once had. In its place the new genre of the canon (kanōn) was jostling for room. This moment in Byzantine history corresponds to a certain shrinking of all the old cities of the late an­ tique Empire. Inflation and military weakness had radically altered the face of what con­ stituted the ‘Empire of the Romans’. We are now in the more domestic world of the Mid­ dle Ages, not classical antiquity. Architecture starts to become smaller and poorer, less monumental. At this period in Byzantine life, the number of truly great urban centres dwindled considerably. Islam was making rapid advances and taking its own territory from the antique heartlands of East Rome and Persia. Rome itself, Constantinople, and Thessaloniki alone could claim to be continuing centres of cultural activity. But to com­ pensate, as it were, monasticism was more and more securely established as the bearer and preserver of ecclesiastical culture. The monks were mobile, and their international subculture was woven together in complex ways, aware of what was happening in other parts of the Christian world from the Euphrates to Ethiopia. After the loss of Pales­ (p. 652) Page 10 of 16 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 September 2019 Poetry and Hymnography (2): The Greek World tine to the Byzantine Empire, the shock made for long‐lasting changes to Greek worship, and introduced new elements into hymnography. Jerusalem had to be ceded to the Islamic caliph in 614. After that, the clergy of the Anas­ tasis Church (Holy Sepulchre), which for centuries had been a world‐renowned centre of liturgical development and innovation, tended to fall back onto the nearest bastion of free Christianity, which was the fortress monastery of Mar Saba, near Bethlehem. This had re­ tained its independence by negotiation, and indeed still survives like an isolated outpost of Orthodoxy. The monks of Mar Saba initiated a strong cross‐referencing of liturgical practices from the cathedral church and their own community. Formerly, the pattern of liturgy in the eastern Church had been largely based around the civic complex. It has of­ ten been called ‘cathedral rite’. Now monastic practices, such as were more common in isolated houses of ascetics, began to predominate. To make a complicated story simple: less stress was placed on processional and ceremoni­ al ritual, and more emphasis was given to psalmody (lots of it), as well as hymns and chants. Offices grew longer, and less importance was assigned to hymnography as a di­ dactic tool (for explaining the faith to large city congregations), while more attention was given to the desire of monks to have texts that would illuminate mysteries and reflections that they were already versed in. In the ranks of these chief Byzantine poets we should note Andrew of Jerusalem (or Andrew of Crete, c. 660–740), John of Damascus (c. 655– 750), his kinsman Cosmas of Maiouma (c. 675–751), and Joseph the Hymnographer (c. 810–86). Theodore the Studite (759–826) and Theophanes (800–50) are also noted hymn‐ writers who have left a mark in the Greek service‐books. Christian women were leading sponsors of the writing of hymns. The large collection of Hymns on Virginity by Ephrem was sponsored by the community of Syrian virgins for whom he wrote and who (presum­ ably) sang these compositions in their prayer services. Christian women, however, did not have such ready access to the processes of manuscript copying throughout history, and thus manuscript transmission, and so their compositional efforts were always more vul­ nerable than those of the male, clerical monastics. This is why it is predominantly the compositions of men which feature in the liturgy. Nevertheless, there are some notable exceptions. Chief among them is the ninth‐century female Byzantine aristocrat and monastic Kassia (also known in the manuscripts as Eika­ sia and Kassiane) (Tripolitis 1992; Topping 1997). Her works passed through the manu­ script tradition with great vitality and were highly treasured. Of the forty‐nine attributed hymns, at least twenty‐three are certainly genuine. In the twelfth century the critic Theodore Prodromos noted that Kassia had originally authored the four‐ode Canon for Holy Saturday, but that it was reattributed to Cosmas of Maiouma, on the grounds that it was thought to be unseemly to sing the (p. 653) song of a woman on such a holy day! One of her most powerful compositions, a sticheron turning around the figure of the lamenta­ tion of the sinful woman in the Gospel (Lk 7: 36–50), features in the matins of Wednesday of Holy Week. Whereas Romanos (who deals with the same episode in his own poetry) makes much of this woman's ‘shame’ as a prostitute, Kassia sees the point of the Gospel symbolism, and identifies with the passion of the woman's repentance and the deep love Page 11 of 16 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 September 2019 Poetry and Hymnography (2): The Greek World for Christ it exemplifies, which the Lord himself exalts as a model of discipleship. Another canon of her composition (252 verses on the theme of the burial of the dead) is the only piece of Kassia's that did not make its way into the service‐books. In the fourteenth centu­ ry, when Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos drew up a list of Byzantine hymn‐writers, Kassia was entered as the only female poetess of note. Modern scholarship has also drawn attention to several others, though most of them are now known only by name, such as Theodosia, Thecla, and Palaiologina (Topping 1987). Already by the late ninth century, the golden age of Byzantine hymn writing was passing away, with notable excep­ tions such as the eleventh‐century Symeon the New Theologian, whose Hymns of Divine Eros surely count among the world classics of mystical literature, yet are more or less en­ tirely unknown (McGuckin 2005b). The Greek Christian hymns have reached the stage, perhaps, where their topography has now been sufficiently sketched out. They still require, from future generations, a sus­ tained theological and literary analysis, which has not yet been accomplished. Their pref­ erence for the abstract contemplation of divine action in the world and their (general) avoidance of an easy appeal to the emotions give them a character very different from Latin hymns in the main. They comprise a wonderful body of literature that remains to be worked to the full by future scholars, who will (perhaps) be more attuned to a theology of art than were those of the past. One of the great difficulties, always, is that so many skills are concurrently necessary: those of the historian, the poet, the literary analyst, and the theologian. But those who choose to work here will find the challenge most rewarding, and certainly greatly illuminating of the soul of the Christian movement. In Greek hymnody we can see creed, antiphon, poem, prayer, song, and sacrament welded to form a seamless unity: here Byzantine theology, mysticism, and liturgical chant merge into a profound symbiosis in a programme that already consciously understood itself to be a the­ ology of beauty and of culture. The ancient hymn is thus a potent symbol, still a waiting its full articulation. Suggested Reading Suggested Reading Opportunities for further reading in Greek Christian hymnography abound for those who are interested, especially in relation to the primary materials, though the secondary stud­ ies may lag behind somewhat, to the extent that it is still more common to find precise and sharply focused works of scholarship on individual authors than it is to find broader introductions to, or commentaries on, the Greek hymns generically. The earliest materials from the Syrian church—for example, the complete texts of the Hymn of the Pearl and the Hymn of the Bride—are available on the website of the Gnostic Society: <http:// www.webcom.com/gnosis/library/hymnpearl.htm>. The poetic works of Ephrem and Gregory of Nazianzus are available in good, purchasable modern editions, in the translations ofMcVey (1989),White (1996), and Gilbert (2001). The poems of Romanos are beautifully rendered in a model translation (that is, one that Page 12 of 16 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 September 2019 Poetry and Hymnography (2): The Greek World works poetically and is also accurate textually) by Archimandrite Ephrem Lash (1995). The Hymns of Divine Love by Symeon the New Theologian are in a more difficult‐to‐find translation by G.Maloney (1976). Antonia Tripolitis's (1992) book on Kassia gives the main works from the greatest of the women hymnographers and sets them in an excellent context. The currently out‐of‐print collection by Trypanis in the Penguin Book of Greek Verse (1971) is a marvellous mix of Greek poetry, with English prose translations at the foot of each page, ranging from Homer to George Seferis. The early Christian and Byzan­ tine representations in this volume are quite respectable. The translation of the Festal Menaion by Mother Mary and Bishop Kallistos Ware (1969) opens out in one handy vol­ ume a treasury of good versions of the major liturgical poetry of the Orthodox Church. The volume by Church and Mulry (1988) can also be highly commended for the early Christian materials. The collection of poetry and hymnography by John Mason Neale (1862) is an important and pioneering work, but, like the versions of Marian hymns as­ sembled byWoodward (1919), the form of English used often gets in the way of contempo­ rary appreciation. In terms of secondary studies the scholarly discussion by Eva Topping (1997) is a fine place to begin an acquaintance with Byzantine hymnography, and the work of Dimitri Conomos (1984) is also an excellent general introduction to (unfortunately) a still arcane subject. The internet continues to grow in quality, as well as in extent, and ‘searches’ for the writings of individual authors more and more can render some surprisingly qualita­ tive results (along with much dross). The Ancient and Medieval Web resources gathered by Professor Paul Halsall at Fordham University is only one example of the rich fund of materials that are freely offered by scholars who clearly love their subject, and delight in making it more widely available. His web page at <http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/> also contains links to numerous other relevant sites. Bibliography BINGHAM, J. (1845), Origines Ecclesiasticae: The Antiquities of the Christian Church (1 edn. 1708–22; repr. London: Bohn & Co.). CARPENTER, M. (1970–3), Kontakia of Romanos, Byzantine Melodist, Eng. trans. and commentary by M. Carpenter, 2 vols. (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press). CHATFIELD, A. W. (1876) (trans.), Songs and Hymns of the Earliest Greek Christ­ ian Poets, Bishops, and Others (London: Rivington Ltd.). (p. 655) Christ, W., and Paranikas, M. (1871) (eds.), Anthologia Graeca Carminum Christianorum (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner). CHURCH, F. F., and MULRY, T. J. (1988) (trans.), The Macmillan Book of Earliest Christ­ ian Hymns (New York: Macmillan). CONOMOS, D. E. (1984), Byzantine Hymnography and Byzantine Chant (Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Press). Page 13 of 16 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 September 2019 Poetry and Hymnography (2): The Greek World GILBERT, P. (2001), On God and Man: The Theological Poetry of St. Gregory of Nazianzus (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press). GROSDIDIER DE MATONS, J. (1977), Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance (Paris: Beauchesne). JULIAN, J. (1892), A Dictionary of Hymnology (London: J. Murray; repr. London, 1907, and Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel Press, 1985). KLIJN, A. E. J. (1962), The Acts of Thomas (Leiden: E. J. Brill). KRUEGER, D. (2004), Writing and Holiness (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). See esp. ch. 8: ‘Textuality and Redemption, the Hymns of Romanos the Melodist’. LA ROVIÈRE, P. (1614), Poetae graeci veteres (Geneva: Typis Petri de la Rouière). LASH, E. (1995) (trans.), St. Romanos The Melodist: Kontakia on the Life of Christ (San Francisco: HarperCollins). LIDERBACH, D. (1998), Christ in the Early Christian Hymns (New York: Paulist Press). LIMBERIS, V. (1994), Divine Heiress: The Virgin Mary and the Creation of Christian Con­ stantinople (New York: Routledge). LINGAS, A. (2000), ‘Hymnography’, in G. Speake (ed), The Encyclopedia of Greece and the Hellenic Tradition (Chicago: Fitzroy‐Dearborn), i. 786–7. MCGUCKIN, J. A. (1986) (trans.), St. Gregory of Nazianzus: Selected Poems (Oxford: Ox­ ford University Press). —— (1997), At the Lighting of the Lamps: Hymns of the Ancient Church (Harrisburg, Pa.: Morehouse Press). —— (2005a), ‘Gregory of Nazianzus: The Rhetorician as Poet’, in J. Børtnes and T. Hägg (eds.), Gregory of Nazianzus: Images and Reflections (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press), 193–212. —— (2005b), ‘A Neglected Masterpiece of the Christian Mystical Tradition: The Hymns of Divine Eros by the Byzantine Poet Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022)’, Spiritus, 5/2: 182–202. MCKINNON, J. (1987), Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press). MCVEY, K. (1989), Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns (New York: Paulist Press). MALONEY, G. (1976), Symeon the New Theologian: Hymns of Divine Love (Denville, NJ: Dimension Books). Page 14 of 16 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 September 2019 Poetry and Hymnography (2): The Greek World NEALE, J. M. (1862), Hymns of the Ancient Eastern Church (London; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1971). PELTOMAA, L. M. (2001), The Image of the Virgin Mary in the Akathist (Leiden: E. J. Brill). PITRA, J. B. (1867), Hymnographie de l'église grecque (Rome). QUASTEN, J. (1983), Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity (Washington D.C.: National Association of Pastoral Musicians). SANDERS, J. T. (1971), The New Testament Christological Hymns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). (p. 656) SCHORK, R. J. (1995), Sacred Song from the Byzantine Pulpit (Gainesville, Fla.: Universi­ ty Press of Florida). SKERIS, R. A. (1977), Chroma Theou: On the Origins and Theological Interpretation of the Musical Imagery Used by the Ecclesiastical Writers of the First Three Centuries, with Special Reference to the Image of Orpheus (Altotting: A. Coppenrath & Co.). STRUNK, O. (1977), Essays on Music in the Byzantine World (New York: Norton). TAFT, R. (1992), The Byzantine Rite: A Short History (Collegeville Minn.: Liturgical Press). TOPPING, E. Catafygiotou (1987), ‘Theodosia, Melodos and Monastria’, Diptycha, 4: 384–405. —— (1997), Sacred Songs: Studies in Byzantine Hymnography (Minneapolis: Light and Life Publications). TRIPOLITIS, A. (1992), Kassia: The Legend, the Woman, and her Work (New York: Gar­ land Press). Trypanis, C. (1971) (ed. and trans.), The Penguin Book of Greek Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Ware, K., and Mother Maria (1969) (trans.), The Festal Menaion (London: Faber & Co.). WELLESZ, E. (1961), A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press). WHITE, C. (1996), Gregory of Nazianzus: Autobiographical Poems, Cambridge Medieval Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). WOODWARD, G. E. (1919), The Most Holy Mother of God in the Songs of the Eastern Church (London: Faith Press). Page 15 of 16 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 September 2019 Poetry and Hymnography (2): The Greek World Notes: (1.) See e.g. Lingas (2000); McGuckin (1997); McKinnon (1987); Quasten (1983); Strunk (1977). John A. McGuckin John McGuckin is Professor of Early Church History, Union Theological Seminary, and Professor of Byzantine Christian Studies, Columbia University. Page 16 of 16 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 16 September 2019