The Virgin in Song. Thomas Arentzen
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written about these in a so much more disordered way as I have tried to maintain their order.”37 Orosius expresses the sense that history is simply too complicated to fit into a neat and tidy narrative. Related is the awareness of writers that the world appears too complex to grasp. What has been called a “theology of limited and partial understanding of events” in Byzantine literature ruled out any quest for exhaustiveness and defied calls for complete comprehension from the reader.38 The compositional approach to narratives favored associative links and juxtapositions, episodic variety, and multiplicity. In his texts Romanos actually undermines his own omniscience as an author; only God can understand the world in its totality and the causal relation between occurrences in its complexity.39 Consequently, the integrity of the kontakia’s thought world yields not so much to a pursuit for univocity throughout the corpus as to readings acknowledging that individual kontakia represent particular occasions, and that within each hymn persists a play of equivocal elements. The changing cycle of the Christian year renders a God who is sometimes dead and sometimes alive.
Paradoxes and tensions were in other words deeply embedded in the poetics of the day.40 Byzantine authors often arranged clauses paratactically or asyndetically; complementary or even contrasting images were juxtaposed in ways that bring to mind the aesthetics of shimmering mosaics—dissimilar pieces side by side come together and make up a more complex whole. Romanos worked with contradictions and frictions—as does a modern-day moviemaker by the technique of crosscutting. The kontakia create a magic lantern of ever-moving imagery. Swarms of images cluster together in a single kontakion—or even in a single strophe. After the Archangel Gabriel has visited the Virgin and she has been transformed by the Annunciation event, Joseph meets her and exclaims puzzled: “Who is she?”
—Terrible and sweet appears the one who’s with me, who paralyzes me;
I gaze at burning heat and snowstorm, a paradise and a furnace,
a smoking mountain, a divine flower sprouting,
an awesome throne, a lowly footstool. (XXXVI 13.4–7)
If our first question to this text is “What does the snowstorm symbolize?” or “Where has the poet taken ‘smoking mountain’ from?” we miss a much more acute point. It was part of a late ancient Marian poet’s task to be able to integrate Old Testament imagery into the ecclesiastical poetry that he or she wrote, but that does not mean that it ends there, nor that our interpretation should end there. To a listener this passage does not primarily present a complex web of secret Marian symbols; no less does it represent allegorical or typological Old Testament interpretation. Such readings do not take the hymn’s narrative into consideration; they forget that people first and foremost heard kontakia rather than studied them.41 If we attend to how the passage evokes Joseph’s impressions or emotions in the story—which is what the story itself explicitly describes—we discover the image of an overwhelmed Joseph who does not understand Mary. She simultaneously attracts him and scares him; she has a perplexing effect on him, and he does not know how to behave. To someone like him she has become entirely inexplicable. The stanza tells us a great deal about whom the Virgin and Joseph are turning into on this occasion, and about their relationship. On the other hand, it tells us very little about Isaiah 46:1, Psalm 103:32 or 143:5, or other scriptural passages.42
Romanos worked to indicate the Virgin’s immediacy. Poetical and rhetorical strategies of late antiquity served to blur the distinction between the world of the audience and the story world. Writers would lead the listener to “sense” literary creations.43 With their use of ekphrasis (descriptive language), they compelled the shaping of images in the minds of the audience; through the employment of enargeia they sought to make vivid imaginary and sensual experiences out of spoken words, transforming “hearers into spectators.”44 Late ancient schoolbooks (progymnasmata) would teach the students to compose their texts in such a way—with pictorial, colorful, and brilliant descriptions—that the listeners could not help but see the very scenes before their eyes. Although aware of the performative and even fictive nature of the text, the audience should become involved in the dialogue or the action, seeing what the characters saw, hearing what they heard. When hymn writers adapted such methods, they placed the congregation in the middle of the sacred, mythic drama. Devotees turned into active participants in the scene that was being played out in front of them. Hence the Virgin Mary was able to emerge as a personal presence, a desirable body, and a voiced authority.
In general, the Romanos corpus exposes an orientation toward the sensual details of mythic life.45 Things visual, touchable, or imaginable take precedence over anything metaphysical. When the apostles have to say farewell to Jesus, the man with whom they have shared so much, it is as if they cannot perceive divinity beyond his corporeality. He is about to ascend to heaven, and they exclaim:
—We have been wounded, enchained by your most sweet appearance;
there is no god but you. (XXXII 4.9–10)
There is no god but the corporeal Christ; the whole Godhead comes together in the Son here on earth, the one who can be touched and seen. The transcendent collapses into the palpable. This theology of the palpable can be observed in other contexts too. Romanos does not shy away from calling Christ “the father,” while the impalpable Holy Spirit is sometimes completely blotted out from the story.46 A horizontal perspective dominates and renders a very earthly version of the Trinity. As the God of Romanos has so definitely taken on flesh, the Mother’s role becomes all the more vital.
BETWEEN CHURCH AND THEATER
Mary gave Romanos a scroll, which turned him into a singer. Yet Romanos was not the only performer who interacted with the Virgin. John Moschus (ca. 550–619/634) relates another story from the sixth century. A mime by the name of Gaianas performed a show in a theater in Heliopolis. He was ridiculing the Mother of God before the crowds. Unfortunately for him, the Theotokos herself appeared and begged him to stop. He chose, nonetheless, to blaspheme her again. Mary kept returning with her demand. This continued for a while, but when she showed herself to him the fourth time, she did not say a word; she merely touched his body parts with her finger. When she left, the mime found his body crippled: He “lay there like a tree-trunk.”47
The story shows us a dramatic clash between Mary and mime in a sixth-century cityscape, as a contemporary writer might imagine it. The Virgin was enacted in the theater, vividly represented as an object of scorn, and, by implication, an object of interest. Consequently, she herself entered the theatrical world, concerned about what happened there, and she interfered. Her intervention resulted in permanent marks on the actor’s body; she destroyed his instrument, the mimetic tool. The Virgin had to protect her reputation from smears.
What connects these two stories is not only their characters’ proximity in time and place and the presence of the Virgin. More emphatically, both stories show Mary to be concerned about her public appearance; it matters how the urban community construes her. As a contested figure, she ultimately decides to intervene, physically and palpably. The stories present a Theotokos as worried about what happens outside the nave as inside; she takes control over voices portraying her voice and bodies mimicking her gestures. Years later “all the trees … bent to the ground and venerated her,”48 but in the sixth century and early seventh century, things were undecided, and the Virgin had to struggle for her standing.
We may think of theatrical entertainment and ecclesiastical cult as two entirely separate worlds, but the truth is that they often came uncomfortably close to each other in late ancient Constantinople. The entertainers could not escape the influence of religious stories, and religious stories could not escape the influence of the entertainers. Just as Mary might call in on popular amusement every now and then, actors did not avoid performances in the churches. Another story from John Moschus tells of mimes who go to church, and there is no reason to think that other performers did not enter through the church doors as well.49 After all, liturgical services in Constantinople themselves amounted to important performances. The liturgical historian Robert Taft suggests that “liturgy was a major part of public entertainment in the Christian metropolises of Byzantium.”50 As a matter of fact, the Byzantines consciously used