The Virgin in Song. Thomas Arentzen
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for the general to greet the empress,
but even for the lowly is it possible to see and salute her,
she whom all peoples call blessed as Mother of God and shout:
—Hail, inviolate one, hail, maiden divinely called! (XXXVI 1.2–6)
Although the regal scene in which this laudation is set depends on figural speech, one can hardly exclude a cultic reading. The urban we praise her on a daily basis, Romanos says, and they gather around to greet her and salute her as Mother and Nurse. On the Nativity II assumes a similar situation of communal Marian exaltation when the Virgin proclaims to her son:
I am pure, as you came forth from me;
…………………………
therefore the whole of creation dances together, crying to me:
“Graced One!” (II 1.8–11)
The people should celebrate the Virgin; she may prove invaluably helpful to them, as she reveals in a prayer to her son:
You have made me the mouth and the boast of my entire race,
and your world has me
as a powerful protection, a wall and foundation.
They look to me, those who were cast out
of the paradise of pleasure. (I 23.4–8)
The hymns place Mary in the center of the world, a location strikingly close to Constantinople.
In Romanos’s day, splendor and pompous rituals alternated with military campaigns on many fronts. Constantinople faced immense challenges. The disastrous Nika riots of 532, which spread from the hippodrome, and the subsequent fires in Constantinople turned large parts of the downtown area, including Hagia Sophia, into ruins, and tens of thousands lost their lives. The outbreak of a bubonic plague in 542 killed approximately half the city’s population. Other natural catastrophes, such as a series of devastating earthquakes, threatened the feeling of stability in this period. For many people, these were horrible years.
All this destruction also meant that Justinian’s reign became a period of reconstruction. The Mother of God took center stage on this rebuilt scene, according to Procopius’s description: “We must begin with the churches of Mary the Mother of God. For we know that this is the wish of the Emperor himself, and true reason manifestly demands that from God one must proceed to the Mother of God. The Emperor Justinian built many churches to the Mother of God in all parts of the Roman Empire, churches so magnificent and so huge and erected with such a lavish outlay of money, that if one should see one of them by itself, he would suppose that the Emperor had built this work only and had spent the whole time of his reign occupied with this alone.”138 Under Justinian’s reign the Pege Church of the Theotokos was built right outside the city walls of Constantinople, as was the outstanding Nea Church of the Theotokos in Jerusalem.139 Romanos got to see the Blachernae Church, which housed the famous relic of the Virgin’s robe, reerected. Emperor Justinian probably deposited the relic of Mary’s girdle in the Chalkoprateia Church.140 These churches amount to the most important Marian shrines in the capital. Archaeological evidence points to an upsurge in the depictions of the Virgin on jewelry and clothing in the second half of the century.141 Mary featured in several media.
Hellenic cities would nurture close relationships with specific gods or goddesses and accommodate civic cults. The city on the Bosporus had engaged divine protectresses before; it had invoked goddesses such as Rhea, “the mother of gods,” Tyche, or the fertility mother Cybele for protection and prosperity.142 Temples and pagan statues were still not extinct from the urban landscape of the city in late antiquity. A cultic model for venerating a civic protectress existed, and as the city was progressively Christianizing itself, it looked to the Mother of God for a new shelter. By the time of the Avar siege of 626, the Virgin Mary had appeared as the city’s defender, and in the centuries leading up to Iconoclasm, Constantinople developed a close relation with the Virgin Mary as she took over the role of protectress of Constantinople.143 Yet Romanos’s poetry suggests that Constantinopolitans had already started to wait for her protection in the sixth century. One of his kontakia conveys a prayer to God which shows that the powerful protectress may hit hard:
Have compassion even now on your people and your city,
with a powerful hand strike down those who are against us
by the intervention of the Theotokos. (LII Pre. 4–6)
The intercessions of the Theotokos approximate that of violent intervention on the city’s behalf.
As we shall see, Marian virginity plays an important part in Romanos’s works. He hardly misses a chance to underscore her virginity. How can this be? Why highlight virginity if the kontakia aims at evoking corporeal interaction and maternity? What does Marian virginity signify in the civic context—would monastics constitute his main audience after all? By investigating how the kontakia imagine Christian Constantinople to relate to the Mother of God, I will suggest what devotional bonds these texts have in mind.
Romanos’s kontakia make up the most important literary expression of Marian piety in sixth-century Constantinople.144 An important step in understanding conceptions of Mary in late ancient Constantinople relies on our assimilation of Romanos’s writings. And yet the image of Mary in his hymns has not attracted much scholarly attention since Paul Maas complained about how completely colorless Romanos’s Theotokos was from a dogmatic point of view, and C. Chevalier concluded that there is more of a Fra Angelico Madonna in Romanos than of a carnally opulent Raphael Madonna.145
Some scholars have proposed a redating of the evolving cult of the Virgin to the post-Iconoclastic period.146 With Romanos’s towering Theotokos figure, we should be able to say something about Marian cult in Constantinople. The question, of course, relies heavily on what one means by “cult.” What does it involve? How broad a phenomenon does a certain kind of veneration have to be in order to qualify as cult? One cannot, of course, confirm or refute the existence of social patterns or ritual forms just by reading the kontakia, but the songs can surely give us some perspectives. Although literary texts, like the hymns of Romanos, hardly provide us with anything definite—and we should be cautious about treating texts as if they were mere comments on the paratext—there are ways to address these issues.
I suggest asking what kind of Marian cult the kontakia themselves constitute. Let us simply take a definition of “cult” from the encyclopedia Religion Past and Present. It has the following basic description: “The major elements of a cult are rituals, often including sacrifice, together with prayers, mythological narrations or enactments, and other forms of religious expression such as music and dance. There is also the ‘tending’ of sacred images and other cult objects, as well as care of places of worship, especially the altar. Cultic observances are often linked to specific sacred sites and sacred times and seasons. Usually a cult exhibits its characteristic forms during feasts and festivals at certain intervals.”147 Devotional life in Constantinople was tied up with public life. In the age of Justinian and Theodora, its inhabitants celebrated Marian feasts, erected shrines, venerated her relics, and (perhaps in a small scale) painted her icons. The kontakia constituted a vital part of this evolving Mariocentricity. They were “mythological narratives or enactments” written for ritual occasions, “times and seasons … feasts and festivals.”
This book challenges the assumption that we may possibly exclude Marian cult or the notion of her motherhood from the pre-Iconoclastic period. Romanos contributed to the shaping and development of the Marian cult in Constantinople. His texts do not first and foremost reflect a cult that was played out in an external history somewhere else, but the kontakia themselves represent cultic activity. These texts performed add up to cult. In On the Nativity II the listener meets a couple who fall down in prayer and prostrate (“prayer”) themselves before the Virgin Mary.148 In On the Annunciation the crowds hail and acclaim the Theotokos.149 By blurring the distinction between the crowd in the text and the crowd of the audience, the poet turns