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Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.

      In his Hymns of Divine Eros the Constantinopolitan monk Symeon the New Theologian (ca. 949–1022) directed his erotic love toward God. His hymns represent mystic longing rather than carnal sexuality, perhaps, but he is not prim. Without shying away from the corporeal, he explains that everything is known by Christ, “both my finger and my penis.” And he adds daringly—presumably to the reader, or maybe to himself: “Do you tremble or feel ashamed [by this]?”⁹ The poet is consciously provocative in this instance, placing the word he uses for penis (balanon) next to Christ in a rhyming homeoteleuton construction. Symeon represents a different era than Romanos, but these examples serve to warn us not to apply anachronistic assumptions about Byzantine theologians and poets to our readings of their texts. In Romanos’s day, we should remember, the Byzantines entered the baths naked.¹⁰

      Byzantine saints’ lives are another example of literary longing. These compositions often explore their characters’ desire.¹¹ A literary and thematic relationship between hagiography and the ancient novels is well established, and in various early Christian acts and legends, chastity and erotics interact and exchange positions. A florilegium transmitted under Maximus’s name includes a citation from two ancient Greek novels, Leucippe and Clitophon by Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus’s Aethiopica.¹² Whether or not Maximus actually had anything to do with it matters less than the fact that these narratives—driven by suspense and romantic yearning—are woven into an ecclesiastical text connected to his name.

      In Romanos erotics is not just as a spiritual desire to be near to God. It is a carnal-spiritual longing for the beauty of holiness, played out in the sacramental realm of human bodies. Romanos’s kontakia represent a poetic Christian corpus that engages eros, nudity, and sexuality in a strikingly liberal way.¹³ Desire does not always manifest itself carnally, but sexuality involves one form of desire, and one that Romanos employs frequently in his literary characterizations. Desire is fundamental to the way he imagines Christian faith.¹⁴ The lack of desire, the lack of yearning, would mean a lack of faith. According to his On the Nativity I, King Herod and the Pharisees ask and are told about the birth in Bethlehem, but the poet shows them to be faithless, for “as if they had not understood, they did not crave [ἐϖεθύμησαν] to see” him.¹⁵ They had, in other words, no intense desire for a sensorial and corporeal involvement with him.

      Someone who had an intense desire for corporeal involvement, according to Byzantine imagination, was the actress-prostitute (pornē) who anointed Christ in the house of the Pharisee (cf. Luke 7:36–50). Romanos’s On the Harlot tells the story of this figure, who was arguably the second most important biblical woman in Byzantium. His version describes the relation between the man (Christ) and the woman (the prostitute) in a sensual way, and a distinctly erotic tone marks his language.¹⁶ The critical issue of the hymn is toward whom one directs one’s desire; desire itself is not questioned, it is taken for granted.

      The hymn opens by acknowledging that we have all committed filthy deeds, and that the harlot should be read as a representative of the poetic “I,” and by implication the whole congregation. They have all committed fornication, but she has turned away from it.¹⁷

      One day the harlot notices the sweet-smelling fragrance of Christ, and she is seized by it;¹⁸ everything else suddenly seems repulsive to her—she wants this man. Through her desire, she becomes a model for the congregated church and is explicitly likened to the church;¹⁹ Romanos’s audience should respond to the same enticement as she did.²⁰

      The “harlot and chaste [ϖόρνην καὶ σώφρονα],”²¹ as Romanos calls her, yearns for him who shines in her:

      Jesus,

      the most beautiful [ὁ ὡραιότατος] and doer of beautiful deeds,

      for whose appearance [ἰδέαν] the prostitute longed [ἐϖόθησεν] before she could see [it]. (X 4.2–4)

      The harlot has not done away with her flirtatious lifestyle. On the contrary, she presents herself as practicing precisely the art of seduction. The fact that Romanos seems to assume, like so many others, the rather problematic idea that a prostitute has an overtly large libido is not the point here; the character simply typifies the openly sexual woman.²² The Greek word potheō means to long for, desire, or want.

      In one stanza the poet repeats it four times in different forms—and in certain manuscript variants even more. He lets the harlot exclaim:

      —for I want him so much [ϖάνυ ϖοθῶ] now;

      and for him to want [ϖοθοῦντα] me, I anoint with perfume and fawn [κολακεύω],

      I weep, I moan and I urge him rightly to want [ϖοθῆσαι] me;

      I am transformed by the desire of the desired [ϖόθον τοῦ ϖοθητοῦ],

      and as he wants to be kissed, I kiss my lover. (X 5.2–6)

      This “wise woman”²³ forsakes neither the trade of desire itself nor the language of desire. She keeps doing what she has done before, but now the object of her erotic desire is a different lover, the right lover. As she goes on reflecting on her situation, the harlot compares herself to the Old Testament harlot Rahab from Jericho, who “received” or “entertained” the spies.²⁴ She only does what Rahab did. And she describes how she takes hold of the virgin that she loves (i.e., Jesus) and holds him tight.²⁵

      The harlot abandons her former multitude of lovers;²⁶ she breaks with past lovers in order to please the new one, she says.²⁷ Her new-found life is a life of monogamy and faithfulness—the love is lived out justly²⁸—but it does not lack passion. As a fervent and eager customer, she cries to the perfume seller:

      —Give me, if you have, perfume worthy of my friend,

      who is rightly and purely kissed,

      who has set my limbs on fire. (X 9.4–6)

      The seller tries to calm her down, but she compares herself with Michal who was in love with David, and she continues saying how good looking Jesus is, and how exceedingly delightful.²⁹ He is the one who sets her body aflame, she says, the limbs being the loci of her passionate enthusiasm.

      The direction of desire is horizontal rather than vertical in this hymn, sensual rather than spiritual, passionate rather than contemplative. In On the Annunciation the erotics work very differently, but what the kontakia share, as we shall see, is precisely the erotic device in the storytelling. If to Augustine of Hippo (354–430) curiositas was a vice, Romanos delighted in it.³⁰ Erotic literature and imagery tantalize expectations, and it is exactly the same strategy Romanos employs.

      On the Annunciation negotiates between chastity and sexuality; it shifts the Marian emphasis toward marriage, sexuality, and procreation—without therefore abandoning the language of virginity.³¹ Instead of resisting the world through ascetic virginity, Romanos’s Mary embraces the world through erotic virginity. As one who is now potentially to be married, she becomes associated with sexual attraction and procreation. The poetry never loses sight of her virginity, but her virginity no longer coincides with notions of celibacy or renunciation. Virginity becomes the hallmark of her holiness, her exclusive rank, as she is loved by both the earthly and heavenly realm, yet wedded to neither of them.³²

      It has been said about Chariton’s (first–second century) attractive virgin Callirhoe that as her “beauty renders her an object of desire within the narrative, it simultaneously situates her as an object of the reader’s gaze.”³³ Can we observe a similar dynamic in Romanos’s presentation of the Annunciation, which displays Mary as an erotically appealing virgin, one toward whom desire may be extended?

      ANNUNCIATION

      The separate festival of the Annunciation

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