After the Text

Byzantine Enquiries in Honour of Margaret Mullett

Liz James, Oliver Nicholson, Roger Scott, Liz James, Oliver Nicholson, Roger Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000468717
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

After the Text honours the work of renowned historian Margaret Mullett, who since the 1970s has transformed the study of Byzantine literature.

Her work has been influential in demonstrating the strength and variety of Byzantine texts. Byzantium is renowned for its achievements in architecture and the visual arts. Byzantium is renowned for its achievements in architecture and the visual arts. Professor Mullett's perceptive studies, produced over more than 40 years, have shown that the literature of the Byzantine Empire is of equal beauty and interest, ranging, as it does, from high-style poetry and rhetoric in the classical manner through letters to demotic writings such as fables and the lives of saints. The collection of essays in this volume draws further attention to the wealth and diversity of Byzantine texts, by exploring the Greek literature of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages in all its variety. These studies, by going, like Professor Mullett herself, beyond the texts, illustrate the value of Byzantine literature for interpreting Byzantine history and civilisation in all its richness.

This book is crucial reading for scholars and students of the Byzantine world, as well as for those interested in literary studies.

Chapter 16 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I Performance, narrative and text (i) Performance

1 The Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Hypapante) according to two Byzantine Hymnographers An encounter in liturgical time and space¹

Mary B. Cunningham

DOI: 10.4324/9781003021759-3

The celebration of liturgical feasts, which occurred with increasing regularity from the early 6th century onwards in major cities of the Eastern Roman Empire, was both instructive and dramatic. Congregations from Jerusalem to Constantinople would have participated in stational processions, homiletic performances, and, above all, in a festal liturgy on appropriate days. Their emotional, if not always intellectual, involvement in such settings was intense, as numerous recent studies have demonstrated.² Margaret Mullett has established the foundations for our understanding of the performative aspect of the Byzantine Church and empire; what we have learned above all from her various contributions to this subject is the importance of rhetoric, or carefully constructed verbal communication, as the ‘screenplay’ which this society followed.³

This chapter, which is indebted to Mullett’s work in this field, focuses on two liturgical texts that were composed for the celebration of Christ’s Presentation or ‘Meeting’ (or ‘Hypapante’) in the Temple, one by the 6th-century hymnographer Romanos the Melodist, and the other by the 8th-century monk, Kosmas. I intend to compare the structure and content of each work in relation to its particular liturgical setting: such analysis reveals the rhetorical techniques which each author adopted in order to capture the attention of his intended audience. Second, I will show how the performance of each hymn within the physical space of contemporary churches may have affected its structure and style. The performative nature of these works, which were both composed in response to a dramatic biblical encounter between the incarnate God and the rest of humanity, conveyed powerful theological messages to congregations in early Byzantine Palestine and Constantinople.

The feast of the Hypapante, or ‘Meeting’, of Christ with the elder Symeon in the Temple of Jerusalem, which is one of the most ancient celebrations in the Christian calendar, is based on a narrative that appears only in the Gospel of Luke.⁴ It originated in Jerusalem, where the 4th-century pilgrim Egeria participated in a eucharistic synaxis in honour of the feast in the church of the Anastasis; at this time it was celebrated on 14 February, 40 days after the commemoration of Christ’s Nativity on 6 January.⁵ Although the historians Theophanes and George Kedrenos disagreed about the date when the feast was introduced into the Constantinopolitan calendar (now on 2 February since Christmas had been moved back to 25 December), they both said that this took place during the first half of the 6th century, suggesting the years 527 (during the reign of Justin I) and 542 (that of Justinian I), respectively.⁶ The carrying of lighted candles in the ceremony, which was first mentioned by the 6th-century hagiographer, Cyril of Scythopolis, and which symbolizes the illumination of creation through Christ’s Incarnation, was practised not only in Jerusalem, but also later in Constantinople and Rome.⁷

The theological significance of the feast of the Hypapante, which is emphasized in the surviving hymns and homilies, is connected to that of Christ’s Nativity – or the feast of Epiphany, as it was called in the Early Church. Christ, the Son and Word of God, became incarnate; he entered creation as the light of salvation to all peoples (Is 42: 6 and 49: 6). The Lukan narrative, in which Mary and Joseph offered a sacrifice in accordance with the Law and met the elder Symeon as well as the prophetess Anna, was interpreted by patristic and Byzantine exegetes as the moment at which formal recognition of the Incarnation first occurred and when the old covenant between Jews and their God was replaced by the new. When Symeon had taken the child into his arms, blessed the Holy Family, and praised God, he famously uttered the Nunc Dimittis: ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word; for mine eyes have seen thy salvation…’⁸ One other important component in this episode was the purification of both Jesus and Mary in accordance with Jewish law; this, like the sacrifice of a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons, was recognized by Luke as belonging to the transition from the old dispensation to the new. Symeon also famously prophesied on this occasion that a sword would ‘pierce the soul’ of the Virgin Mary (Lk 2. 35). Christian exegetes from Origen onwards struggled to discern what this prediction meant, but usually related it (either positively or negatively) to Mary’s future suffering at her Son’s passion and death on the cross.⁹

Pauline Allen has listed and analysed a number of patristic and Byzantine homilies on the Hypapante in two recent articles.¹⁰ There is a plethora of them – even from before the 6th century – which testifies to the importance of the biblical pericope well before the feast began to be celebrated universally in the Christian liturgical calendar. The surviving works are attributed to 4th- and 5th-century preachers including Amphilochios of Ikonion, Cyril of Alexandria, Hesychios of Jerusalem, Theodotos of Ankyra and others.¹¹ Many of these works are dubious in their attributions and some are composite works that may have been cobbled together by later scribes. Allen traces the transition from purely Christological subject matter in the earlier works to greater Mariological emphasis from the 6th century onwards.¹² This development reflects growing devotion to the Virgin, with emphasis on her role as intercessor and defender of Constantinopolitan Christians, as well as on that of ‘Birth-Giver of God’. Preachers including, for example, Abramios of Ephesos and Sophronios of Jerusalem both praised the Mother of God and attempted to ‘sanitize’ (to use Allen’s term) the exegetical stumbling block of the ‘sword of uncertainty’ that would pierce her soul.¹³ The homily that expresses the highest Mariology in this period of development, however, is that by the 7th-century preacher, Leontios of Neapolis: according to Allen, this writer

imputes no great suffering to her and certainly no moral failing. She is an assured figure, who is even in charge theologically … she is accorded a place … that is more in keeping with the Mariological status which the feast of the Hypapante was to assume in Byzantium.¹⁴

Later homilies on this subject include one that is attributed to John of Damascus, a homily that is falsely attributed to Athanasios but which may have been written by George of Nicomedia, and one by Leo IV ‘The Wise’.¹⁵

From at least as early as the 6th century, liturgical writers composed hymns as well as homilies for the feast of the Hypapante. I have chosen to focus on Romanos the Melodist’s kontakion and Kosmas the Monk’s kanon because each work, having been composed for a separate liturgical setting, responds somewhat differently to the theological meaning of the feast.¹⁶ Whereas Romanos delivered his kontakion in the context of an all-night vigil,¹⁷ Kosmas probably composed his kanon for the early morning office of Matins.¹⁸ As Alexander Lingas has demonstrated, kontakia continued to be sung in their entirety in cathedral – not monastic – vigils until at least 1204, whereas kanons belonged to certain offices including (mainly) Matins, Compline, and a few others.¹⁹ Recent scholarship has shown that kanons, although traditionally viewed as a monastic form of hymnography, were in fact sung in cathedrals and parish churches as well.²⁰ According to Stig Frøyshov, the ‘Byzantine’ synthesis of the Palestinian and the Constantinopolitan rites, from about the 7th century onward, probably infiltrated the cathedral and parish churches of Constantinople and its environs in addition to the monastic ones.²¹ Nevertheless, the more ‘popular’ nature of the kontakion, with its lively and dramatic presentation of biblical narratives, as opposed to the more theological – and possibly meditative – aspect of the kanon to some extent holds true. To put this in the simplest terms, kontakia – and especially those of Romanos – offered a more homiletic or narrative style of teaching whereas kanons served as hymns of praise, invocation and theological reflection.

It is possible to compare Romanos the Melodist’s kontakion with Kosmas the Monk’s kanon on the feast of the Hypapante on the basis of both internal and external factors. I propose therefore to examine first the narratological settings of the hymns with a view to understanding their literary structure and dramatic purpose.²² If we think of both hymns as reenactments of a biblical scene, notwithstanding Andrew Walker’s recent question whether Byzantine liturgical rites can be called ‘dramatic’,²³ then it is worth thinking about the setting (in both spatial and chronological terms) for each work. We should also establish what the cast of characters is and how the hymnographers depict the interaction and development of these characters. After this, I propose to examine the physical or external setting of the two hymns. Here, instead of entering into the narrative framework of each work, we will look at their performance within churches or monasteries between about the middle of the 6th and the 12th centuries. It is worth asking, for example, who sang the hymns? Did the congregation (whether lay or monastic) join in their refrains? Where was the singer or the choir standing within the church building – or could they have been moving around in this space or even outdoors? The liturgical, literary and archaeological evidence concerning the performance of hymns in Byzantine churches and monasteries is patchy, which makes full analysis of such questions difficult. However, it is possible to draw some conclusions concerning the performance and reception of kontakia and kanons from the extant sources.²⁴ The underlying purpose of this article is to understand better the relationship between the literary content and performative nature of these important texts.

The narratological settings

If we turn first to the narratological setting that Romanos the Melodi...