The Virgin in Song. Thomas Arentzen
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the first who wrote a hymn for the new feast, some time after 530.35 His On the Annunciation is the oldest extant hymn written for this particular celebration.36 In line with a general tendency among modern theologians to turn everything Marian into Christology, scholars have assumed that the feast was originally Christocentric in character rather than Mariocentric, and that it only became Marian later.37 Judging from Romanos, this assumption is hard to maintain, for his focus is highly Mariocentric.
As Romanos recounts it elsewhere, the Virgin was born miraculously to her parents, Anna and Joachim. Early in her life they gave her to the temple, where angels fed her. Later she was betrothed to Joseph. These stories from the kontakion On the Nativity of the Virgin follow the Protevangelium of James, but they subject her to the same kind of scripted childhood as a Constantinopolitan girl would experience: Early in life her parents would pledge her to a husband or a convent. We do not need to think of this background when we read about the encounter in the Annunciation, for Romanos did not write a continuous story of Mary’s life from cradle to grave, yet On the Annunciation does presuppose that she was betrothed by Joseph, whose task was to guard her.
On the Annunciation is transmitted only in the Patmos manuscript. The Greek text of the whole hymn and an English translation can be found in Appendix 1, but the narrative structure of the hymn may be described thus:
Prelude: Appeal to Christ
Stanza 1: Acclamations to Mary
Stanza 2: Gabriel arrives in Nazareth
Stanzas 3–4: Gabriel’s greeting, and dialogue between Mary and Gabriel
Stanza 5: Mary deliberates in an inner monologue
Stanza 6: Mary questions the message and messenger
Stanzas 7–8: Gabriel deliberates in an inner monologue and answers Mary with OT reference
Stanza 9: Mary questions the validity of the OT parallel
Stanza 10: Gabriel answers
Stanza 11: Mary accepts the message and the messenger
Stanza 12: Gabriel’s exit. Mary summons Joseph and questions him
Stanzas 13–15: Joseph is awestruck and asks Mary not to consume him
Stanzas 16–17a: Mary tells Joseph what has happened
Stanzas 17b–18: Joseph promises to be her guard, but sends her away
In this hymn, as in Luke 1:26–38, we first meet the Virgin when Gabriel enters her house. Virginal conception takes place underneath the cover of a dialogue, a dialogue between a young virgin and an angel in the shape of a man. Both of them constitute ambivalent characters as far as gender and sexuality is concerned: An angel is sexless and bodiless, but Gabriel comes in the form of a man. A virgin stands outside the realm of gendered sexuality, which would otherwise be the prerequisite for conception. With indirectness and imagery the dialogue describes a union that is conceived of and anticipated, yet never actually exposed. Just as veiling is a means to both hiding and showing, the poet works with revealing by concealing in this hymn. It plays with the ambiguous role of the messenger just as it plays with that of the new mother. She is a virgin but not a virgin, bride but not a bride; he is an agent but not an agent, a man but not a man. Such play is no mere game, but an eroticization.
The Virgin and the Spirit
In the Annunciation an angel visits Mary, and in most versions of the story, an angel visits Joseph too (see esp. Matt. 1:20–21). Not so in Romanos. Here Joseph functions merely as a bewildered witness and a chaperone. Even the latter task he does not perform very well, for when the encounter with Gabriel takes place, he is not present at the scene. The Joseph character acts out human befuddlement in the face of holiness and divinity. He ends up sending her off—apparently fearing what people will say and do.
The omission of Joseph’s angel, however, is less striking than Romanos’s treatment of the Holy Spirit in the Annunciation. In the Lucan version of the Annunciation, Mary asks how the pregnancy can come about when she has not been with a man. The angel answers clearly and explicitly that the Holy Spirit will come upon her, the Power of the Highest overshadow her (Luke 1:34–35). In the sixth-century kontakion, on the other hand, the angel does not know how to answer the question. He is frustrated and dumbfounded as he sighs to himself:
—I am not believed here either,
…………………….
yet I cannot, I dare not be frank,
I am not able to fetter her voice. (XXXVI 7.3, 6–7)
Why does he not say anything?
In the Gospel, Mary is identified as “a virgin” (parthenos, Luke 1:27), but her virginity itself is not discussed in detail, except that she wonders how she can become pregnant when she has not been with a man.38 The point that the Mother has not known a man indicates that the origin of her offspring is not human but divine. Apart from this there is little interest in the details of her virginity. Luke does not make the lack of human intercourse per se a prerequisite for this form of motherhood; virginity is not so much a criterion for the conception but a sign of God’s involvement instead of a man’s. Mary plays a relatively passive role, conceiving without having known; her body is a vessel of God.
In the strictly dyophysite language of the Tome of Leo, a document sanctioned by the Council of Chalcedon (451), “The birth of flesh reveals human nature; birth from a virgin is a proof of divine power.”39 It is as simple as that! A Marian preacher of the fifth century, Proclus of Constantinople, asserts in his famous Theotokian Homily 1 that “If the mother had not remained a virgin, then the child born would have been a mere man and the birth no miracle. But if she remained a virgin even after birth, then indeed he was wondrously born who also entered unhindered ‘when the doors were sealed,’ whose union of natures was proclaimed by Thomas.”40 To Proclus, Marian virginity, or more precisely postnatal virginity, is in itself a topic; her virginity is intrinsic to the miracle of divine incarnation. The homily goes further than Luke in its explicit insistence on virginity as a token of the union of natures (ἡ συζυγία τῶν φύσεων). Virginity does not simply form a sign and a miracle (Matt. 1:22–23; cf. Isa. 7:14); there is a prevailing awareness that the womb that gives birth to the Son of God must be a holy one, a virginal one. The Virgin has become integrated in a more profound way into the mystery of incarnation—not only as a servant but as a womb constituting carnal translation of the Word. Nevertheless, Proclus asserted that “by the Holy Spirit she conceived”;41 incarnation is not an act of a virgin first and foremost, but the work of the Holy Spirit.
Another text from the fifth century, the homily ascribed to Basil of Seleucia as his Homily XXXIX, declares that “conception will not take place with the mediation of a man, but with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. It will be the power of the Most High that will overshadow you, and will accomplish this event…. If this power did not overshadow You, You would not contain the One who is uncontainable.”42 The Spirit, in other words, takes the place of the man. Similarly Severus of Antioch, writing not much earlier than Romanos, could assert that Christ’s birth “was not preceded by marital intercourse but only by the descent of the holy Spirit.”43
The Akathistos, another text that deals with the Annunciation narrative,44 emphasizes the transformative capacity of the womb. This organ—rather than Mary’s face, mouth, or breasts—represent the whole, in a pars pro toto logic. Mary functions as a place of transformation. Yet the Akathistos is, again, quite explicit about what one may call the pneumatic aspect of virginal conception. Just as in Luke, divine “overshadowing” brings about new life on earth. According to stanza 4, “the Power of the Most High overshadowed the unwedded [maiden] for conception.”45 Even though the role of the virgin in divine economy is thoroughly developed and explicated compared to that of the Lucan text, the unknown author left no question about the origin of the divine Child. The active