The Virgin in Song. Thomas Arentzen
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evoke and enact the Mother of God, hallow and hail her.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
The Virgin in Song explores the characterization of the Virgin Mary in the corpus of Romanos. How does he develop her character in relation to her son, and how does he develop it in relation to other people? By “other people” I do not only mean other characters in the kontakia, but, more importantly, I explore how he establishes a relationship between her and his audience. To show how Romanos works with the Marian character I concentrate on the kontakia in which she plays an important role. Rather than picking out assorted lines or statements from various kontakia, I follow the narrative development of individual hymns. Otherwise one risks reducing the dynamics of storytelling and the elasticity of narrative sections in relation to the composition as a whole.
The study tracks three different ways of imagining the Virgin’s corporeal and relational presence in sixth-century Constantinople: with an erotic appeal, with nursing breasts, and with a speaking voice. These three categories generate a structure that loosely follows the chronology of the Virgin’s life:
Chapter 2 engages Mary as a young maiden, on the verge between a girl’s life and married life. She is subject to erotic gazes and implicated in sexually charged gender play. I deal with the tacit eroticism evoked by the secret encounter between a young maiden and a male messenger, as Romanos tells it for the feast of the Annunciation. The focus of the chapter is the kontakion On the Annunciation, a hymn in which scholars and translators have shown little interest. It is the oldest extant hymn for what emerged as the new spring festival of the Annunciation. Since English translations of this kontakion are difficult to get hold of, and since my argument partially rests on a wording that is suppressed in other translations, I have included a translation of the full hymn as Appendix 1.
Chapter 3 explores the representation of the young mother and how she breastfeeds in Romanos. Rejecting a mundane interpretation, I ask if her nursing does not involve an exaltation of her person. The discussion relates to Romanos’s most famous hymn, On the Nativity I, written for the Christmas festival. The hymn On the Nativity of the Virgin is also considered in this chapter.
Chapter 4 focuses on Mary’s voice, how the Mother speaks to the listeners, how her voice relates to death and suffering, and how it takes part in the generation of new life. The interpretation engages primarily On the Nativity II, which is a Christmas hymn with a paschal theme, and On Mary at the Cross, the oldest extant hymn to make Good Friday into a Marian event.
All three of these chapters pose a Virgin Mary at odds with what Romanos’s contemporaries would expect from a virgin. The antithetic tension of the almost untranslatable refrain line “chaire numphē anumpheute” (“Hail, unwedded bride!”)150 composes a common thread; it displays her as always already a bride, engaging yet not engaged, fruitful but never fecundated. The conclusion sums up how Romanos recasts Marian virginity in song.
CHAPTER 2
On the Verge of Virginity
I give warning and advice to everyone who is not yet free of the vexations of flesh and blood and who has not withdrawn from the desire for corporeal nature that he completely abstain from reading this book and what is said about it.
—Origen, Prologue to the Commentary on the Song of Songs
The kontakion On the Annunciation tells of a young and beautiful maiden who meets a flaming and resolute male in a private chamber. His name is Gabriel, and the attractive virgin whom he visits is none but Mary herself. When Joseph approaches her after the visitor has left, Mary exclaims accusingly: “Where were you, wise man? How could you not guard my virginity?” (Hymn XXXVI 12.4). The irony is palpable, but the situation was critical. A late antique girl would reach marriageable age somewhere between twelve and eighteen, and the transition from virginity to the married state was perhaps the most important in her life.1 Romanos shows Mary’s precious virginity unguarded; a male intruder challenged her sexual innocence. The young Mary was, according to a tradition going back at least to the Protevangelium of James, protected by the older man Joseph. Why did the guard not do his job?
The maiden’s virginity is threatened. Something has happened, something that endangered her maidenhood. She is now a bride, and yet she is not. The poet makes the Virgin linger in this liminal interval that defies her state—on the threshold of womanhood—face to face with a sexual embrace. As Romanos brings her to this verge, he brings the listener along, furnishing the audience with excitement. Risky stories fascinate—and fascinated the people of late ancient Constantinople. Symeon the Fool, who, as we have seen, threw nuts at women in church, attests to the attraction of the forbidden also in Christian storytelling. Nobody throws nuts at Mary, but she is hit by other surprises. And she is caught in a web of attractions whose threads I shall tug at.
EROS AND CHRISTIAN BODIES
Virginity precludes sexuality. That, at least, is our general assumption. Mary’s virginity excludes her from the realm of sex. But how dissociated is the Virgin from sexuality? And can we ever say “not sex” without thinking “sex”? It is in this paradox that we must look for the sixth-century Virgin Mary. The same century saw the creation of the mosaic of the Annunciation in the Euphrasian Basilica in Poreč in what is now Croatia (Figure 7). The picture portrays the Virgin as an elegant maiden who with blushing cheeks moves a finger toward her red lips; her big eyes present a mindful gaze. In an earlier text, the eighth book of the Sibylline Oracles,2 we learn that a “strong … person”—the angel Gabriel—came and greeted the young Virgin, who reacted in a manner similar to that of the Virgin in Poreč, but not as calmly. She was coy, and yet taken by the moment:
Fear and, at the same time, wonder seized her….
She stood trembling. Her mind fluttered
while her heart was shaken….
The maiden laughed and reddened her cheek,
rejoicing with joy and enchanted in her heart.3
A complex nexus of feelings overwhelmed her. To suggest a complete dissociation from the erotic would simply be reading too much prudishness into this text; there is unquestionably thrill and passion hiding behind the blushing cheeks. Even before Romanos, in other words, interpreters had filled the Annunciation scene with excitement.4
In Christian Byzantium the ideal of virginity, chastity, and celibacy existed side by side with, and certainly in contrast to, values of family life, procreation, and sexuality.5 Characterizations of the Virgin Mary tend to reflect this tension. Her virginity could serve to promote the ascetic virginity of the monastic movement. But it did not always. What happens if the representation of her virginity does not match the ideals of an ascetic life?
Late ancient people took desire seriously. The Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor (580–662) saw erotic attraction as fundamental to communal life: “Amongst [humanity as a whole] there is the law of affectionate attraction…. [I]t is from this erotic force that birds fly in flocks, such as swans, geese, cranes and crows and the like. And there are similar creatures on land, such as deer, cattle and the like. And there are marine creatures such as tunny and mullet and the like.”6 Desire was vital not only to created life but also to human experiences of the divine, and in certain instances sexuality might even constitute one such form of desire.7 George Capsanis, a modern-day archimandrite from the Byzantine monastic peninsula of Athos, points out that “the sexual urge is an expression of that natural yearning which is implanted within us by our creator, and leads us toward Him.”8
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