The Virgin in Song. Thomas Arentzen
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It is true that a number of ecclesiastical authors reveal skepticism toward performers or the theater. Neither Tertullian (ca. 155–240) nor John Chrysostom (ca. 347–407) showed much appreciation for the stage.67 Romanos’s older contemporary Jacob of Serug (ca. 451–521) was deeply critical of theatrical performances. It was not the performances themselves that he opposed, however, it was their mythological, irreverent, or untrue content. The church, he says, has finer songs and truer dramas.68 In a homily in which he has described the resurrection of Lazarus, he goes on to compare this Christian spectacle with theatrical spectacles: “Tell me now, o discerning ones, at which spectacles dost thou marvel? At the dissolute dancing which is upon the stone [i.e., in the theater], or at the walking of the buried one? … Which sight amazes thee the more, and attracts the parties to marvel at it? The dead man who is alive and dances for joy, or the living man who mimics a dead man?”69 Jacob is basically saying: Our spectacles are as dramatic as theirs; the stories in the church are no less spectacular than those performed by mimes. Jacob knew, in other words, that he had to compete with actors for the people’s attention.
Critical remarks regarding the stage did not issue only from the ranks of the clergy; bias toward performers features in the writings of several highbrow authors.70 It is no coincidence, for instance, that when Procopius wanted to deride Empress Theodora (ca. 497–548), he chose to portray her as an actress and a prostitute.71 Actors, mimes, and harlots found themselves at the bottom end of the social hierarchy, and they formed an easy target for authors who felt a need to rail against moral degeneration. On the other hand, the elites depended on the performers for their official events and ceremonies.72 A Roman rhetorician like Quintilian (ca. 35–100) could express a significant unease with sending a young student of oratory to learn from a comic actor. The actor should be involved “only in so far as the future orator needs a knowledge of delivery,” Quintilian says, for “I do not want the boy we are educating for this purpose to have a weak and womanish voice or to quaver like an old man.”73 Quintilian’s warning reeks with the ambivalence that characterizes many a learned approach to actors. Even though encounters with stage performers involved dangers, Quintilian did not recommend avoiding them all together. One might learn from the actors, in other words, but their ways may also “infect the mind” of the young. Quintilian sensed that it was difficult to keep the worlds of the orator and the actor uncontaminated by one another.
We know that in the late ancient period orators and actors competed for audiences, and that people would leave a show halfway through to go and listen to an orator, or the other way around.74 Not only did the entertainment scene burst into colors during festivals; the festivities were also the occasions for which liturgical poets like Romanos wrote their hymns. While church singers might excel from the ambo with their tales of biblical heroes, actors would sing dramatic excerpts of heroes and divinities from classical tragedies. The various performers in the late ancient cities might ridicule or disdain one another, but they could not afford to forget about their competitors.
Mime actors were not the only jesters around. The Roman Empire in Romanos’s day represented a world in which Christianity, less tied up with external enemies, developed a diversity of heterogeneous voices. Some were “seeking the alternate ways to virtue,” as Leontius of Neapolis put it in the seventh century, that will “shake [the] soul from its sleep.”75 A jester-like folly can be observed in Leontius’s literary life of Symeon the Fool, a saint whose alleged sixth-century asceticism consisted of ridiculing people in the city of Emesa and acting like a fool: “The manner of his entry into the city was as follows: When the famous Symeon found a dead dog on a dunghill outside the city, he loosened the rope belt he was wearing, and tied it to the dog’s foot. He dragged the dog as he ran and entered the gate … On the next day, which was Sunday, he took nuts, and entering the church at the beginning of the liturgy, he threw the nuts and put out the candles. When they hurried to run after him, he went up to the ambo, and from there he pelted the women with nuts.”76 Like mimes, holy men committed themselves to extreme methods. In order to capture or awaken the minds, they would pursue dramatic effects. Another radical practice consisted of spending years on top of a pillar. The great Syrian stylites Symeon the Elder (ca. 389–459) and Symeon the Younger (ca. 521–92) drew vast crowds to their pillars as they themselves stood there loftily, colonizing the liminal space between heaven and earth. Constantinople had its own pillar saint, Daniel the Stylite (ca. 409–93), who allegedly spent more than thirty years on a pillar a few miles north of the city.
In a similar vein, hymnographers and preachers might turn unexpected or even shameful behavior into piety similar to that of Symeon the Fool.77 Jacob of Serug, for instance, examined the deeds of Leah, Rachel, and Ruth from the Old Testament and exclaimed: “When and how have women so run after men as these women…. It was because of [Christ] that they acted without restraint and schemed, putting on the outward guise of wanton women, despising female modesty and nobility, not being ashamed as they panted for men.”78 By doing the opposite of what virtuous women were expected to do, these women engage in a paradoxical piety. Romanos the Melodist has one heroine, a former prostitute, fall in love with Jesus and behave as if drunk in his company.79
Romanos developed basic stories that the congregation may have been familiar with into exciting tales or dramas. This insight does not imply that the hymns amount to nothing more than entertainment. Are Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantatas “only” beautiful music? No more than cantatas can kontakia be reduced to their mere aesthetic or amusement value. Romanos’s poetry is certainly theological, but the point here is that he speaks theology in a language which is not meditative. In his versions, he creates tension and suspense, and makes sure that the audience will always have something interesting to “look at”: The ironic Christ surprises the listener.80 Peter’s fear of a stammering little girl’s voice may arouse the audience’s Schadenfreude.81 Adam and Eve’s marriage seems rather unhappy; in On the Nativity II she resembles a merchant’s wife as she desperately tries to awaken her oversleeping husband in the gloomy underworld.82 Mary and Joseph do not enjoy an entirely balanced relationship either. “Where were you, wise man?” Mary asks a Joseph who was absent when he should have been present, and who clearly understands nothing of what is going on after Gabriel’s visit.83 Characters like Mary—often discreet and inconspicuous in gospel stories—can play a vivid and vital part in the kontakia.
The ridiculed Adam and the befuddled Joseph add humor to the stories—as does, perhaps, the Virgin’s use of Old Testament imagery to denote intercourse.84 In On Joseph II, the Egyptian woman’s sexual advances are so violent and vivid—and explicit in nature—that some commentators have found it difficult to accept that they were actually performed in a church.85 Paradoxical language serves not only to illustrate the Incarnation; calling a harlot a “wise woman” or letting the creator of milk suck at a human nipple may also induce a tickling sensation in the listener somewhere between shock and astonishment.
A few lines from On the Massacre of the Innocents exemplify Romanos’s inclination to employ striking visual effects. The stanza recounts the slaughter of innocent babies in Bethlehem. The children are quite literally stricken at their mothers’ breasts:
Some were cut in pieces;
others had their heads cut off at their mothers’ breasts
while pulling at them and drinking milk,
so that from the breasts hung, then,
the sacred heads of the infants
holding on to the nipples
by the teeth in their mouths. (III 14.3–9)
Another arresting example consists of a dialogue between Hades and Thanatos (Death), in which the latter is sick and tired of feeding the former with corpses.86 Hades struggles with a habit of overeating and is on the brink of vomiting. At that moment he observes, in a surreal vision, how Lazarus’s corpse recovers from putrefaction inside him:
—I see the limbs of Lazarus, those that corruption dissolved,
they are waiting to rise again;