The Virgin in Song. Thomas Arentzen
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(d. after 468), for instance, embraced the notion of church as theater or dramatic performance (theatron): “If someone said that the Church is a theatre [θέατρον] common to both angels and men, he would not be mistaken. It is a theatre in which Christ is praised both by invisible and visible nature, a theatre in which the Lord’s miracles are woven together for our ears as delightful hymns.”51 The stage and the nave both attempted to present marvelous or mythological stories in dramatic ways, through or accompanied by song.
Byzantines did not stage comedies and tragedies in a classical form. Their dramatic taste had changed. There was a tendency to pick out spectacular highlights from the classics and construct more vaudeville-like shows to please the crowds. The very word theatron gradually lost its specific meaning in late antiquity and was not restricted to signify a theater of an Athenian sort, or a play enacted on such a stage. It meant rather a place for public display or show, or a crowd gathered around to witness some dramatic performance.52
In Constantinople it was the hippodrome rather than a theater that made up the entertainment hub. The great horse race arena, with a length of almost four hundred feet, stretched out along the Great Palace and furnished the people with dramatic entertainment of different sorts. And the palace was not its only neighbor; some two hundred feet up the street from the hippodrome rose Hagia Sophia, the imperial church. These three locations all featured performances that were—each in its separate way—highly ritualized and dramatic. The court life of the palace followed its own ceremonial “liturgy.” The hippodrome thrilled its vast audiences with chariot races, and here mimes and other performers did their acts. And not least, it served as venue for the praise and celebration of the emperor. The same can be said about Hagia Sophia, however, where for instance the patriarchal crowning of a new emperor would take place in front of the massive crowd. In the hippodrome, the Blue and Green factions sponsored the arena games and organized the performers, and these powerful factions led the cheering and acclamations as a ritualized spectacle.53
While the performances in the hippodrome were officially sanctioned, they did not occur as frequently as the entertainment outside. Street-corner spectacles were less structured, but no less dramatic. Jugglers, mimes, and jesters entertained the public, as did erotic dancers and actors. Especially on festival days, the performers filled the city space—some on provisional stages, others simply in the streets. Some pre-Christian festivities continued to be popular throughout late antiquity, and new Christian festivals were added to the calendar, so the big cities like Constantinople did not lack occasions for festive entertainment. In the fourth century, the rhetorician Libanius of Antioch (ca. 314–93) pointed out that “people love festivals, because they release them from their labors and sweat, and offer opportunities to play and feast and live life as pleasantly as possible.”54 Similarly, the fifth-century archbishop Proclus of Constantinople exclaims: “Many different festivals brighten the life of mankind, altering the pains and toils of life through the cycles of festivities. Just as those who escape from a storm at sea delight in reaching the harbor as if it were the embrace of life, so too after various circumstances of life do people celebrate festivities and take delight in the festival as the mother of our freedom from care.”55 Mime acts, often performed on such religious feast days, included bawdy dialogues and daring songs.56 The populace loved this chaotic and sometimes violent amusement in the streets.
Theatrical displays and other forms of nonecclesiastical amusement provided a tempting alternative for many people. It also provided preachers and liturgical poets with a great challenge. “If hymns and homilies contained biblical portraits that were livelier, bolder, or even shocking in comparison with scholarly commentaries, we should not be surprised,” Susan Ashbrook Harvey remarks.57 Many preachers and poets strove to capture congregations with exciting tales and thrilling language, audacious heroes and awesome deeds.
Already the famed church father Gregory of Nazianzus (ca. 329–90) had expressed the insight that teaching becomes easier if you express your doctrine in a pleasing way: “Verse-making … is pleasant as a medicine for low spirits and, by sugaring the pill of instruction for young people as well, it makes sermonizing enjoyable.”58 With an increasingly hegemonic position in the empire, the Christian cult became more resourceful. Crowds of people, wealthy and poor, would attend the rituals. If hagiography can be called “the television of the Middle Ages” because of its mass appeal and its educational purpose,59 Romanos’s hymnographic corpus might campaign for the title “the movies of Late Antiquity.” Like Gregory, the Melodist understood well that in order to capture a whole city he had to fascinate the people and thrill them. He exploited the possibilities of sugared pills to the full. We may discover an important key to his popularity in the way he learned from mimes and matched the outward forms of entertainment in the Byzantine capital by saturating the religious language with drama, fascinating effects, and surprising scenes.
The repertoire of religious stories was, in other words, expanding in this period. Sexually charged stories surfaced in religious writings as well as in profane ones. We should not be tempted, therefore, to interpret any tension between theatrical performances and ecclesiastical performances as a direct conflict between pagan and Christian cultures. In the sixth century most actors probably belonged to the Christian faith, and the world of entertainment they represented formed an integral part of the Christian culture. Pagan festivals had formerly added color to civic life in Roman cities; now Christian festivals increasingly filled the urban spaces. Stational liturgies enlivened the streets, and the liturgies proper performed within church buildings exhibited majestic grandeur and splendid processions. Popular fairs and nightly festivities accompanied the celebrations of saints and sacred events.60
Mimes occupied the streets, but so did the church. Robert Taft has noted that “the sources in this epoch tell us almost nothing about Constantinopolitan liturgical services other than the eucharist and stational processions.”61 Stational processions involved large segments of the population; even the emperor and the patriarch would participate on certain occasions. On a day assigned to stational liturgy, people gathered in one of the large forums of the city, and after some prayers they began to move. Eventually, after a long walk and many hymns, the procession ended up in the church where the liturgy of the day was being celebrated.
As one scholar has observed recently, the city “functioned as the theatre for an elaborate and colorful ritual.”62 Modern churchgoers may be used to thinking of church services as something that happens within the church walls; in sixth-century Constantinople the ecclesiastical rituals were claiming the streets. Christianity was confidently turning the public thoroughfares into places of its own enactment as a civic religion.
Such processions contributed to the liturgification of the city space. As John Baldovin has pointed out, “churches, shrines, and the yearly calendar of feasts, fasts, and commemorations provided the raw material of the ritualized identity of … Constantinopolitan culture.”63 Christianity had become something tactilely perceptible in sixth-century Constantinople.64 It is not implausible that the people intoned a kontakion as they slowly moved through the thoroughfares of the city. Like other hymns they may well have filled the Constantinopolitan air during the outdoor processions.
The dramatic Christian consecration of time and space affected the everyday life of the Christian subject more than any church council. The city infrastructure was progressively integrated into an imperial Christian ceremonial, in which the populace participated actively. A massive Christianization marked the period, and sixth-century Constantinople was still a new city in the process of becoming. Churches were being built, the liturgical calendar of feasts was being developed, and the great city was about to find its sacred symbol.65 Emperor Justinian (ca. 482–565), who supported the erection of outstanding churches and pilgrimage sites, actively sponsored and enforced the Christian renewal. Relics, processions, church buildings, hymns, images, vestments, crosses, and healing water cluttered Justinian and Theodora’s capital. Romanos writes in the new kontakion genre, and his songs ring with the joy of novelty and youthfulness. Regeneration replaces degeneration. God existed from the beginning, of course, but to us, says the poet, “has been born a new [νέον] Child.”66 This phrase turns into the refrain of his On the Nativity I: “a new Child, God