The Virgin in Song - Thomas Arentzen Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion

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where he was ordained a deacon. Such a childhood and youth may have meant acquaintance with Syriac as well as Greek verse; long before he arrived in Emperor Anastasius I’s (491–518) Constantinople, church services had presumably exposed him to liturgical poetry in both these languages. The Byzantine Empire was a multilingual realm, and urban people often mastered more than one tongue.

      It was Christmas and most probably freezing cold, but he had made his way across streets packed with sellers and entertainers, out to the popular sanctuary down by the Golden Horn. And it was there, during the night, that the Mother of God approached him. In a dream or a vision the artless young man suddenly saw the Virgin Mary herself standing in front of him. She held up a scroll, a written text rolled up. And then she moved it toward his mouth. “Swallow it!” she said. He may have been baffled, but he opened up and ate it. This enigmatic scroll, the legend says, transformed the hoarse lad. His voice turned sweet and gentle. After their secret encounter he mounted the ambo, a raised platform in the middle of the church nave, and began to sing “The Virgin today gives birth.” This Christmas hymn remains his most famous song.2 This Christmas hymn also, incidentally, gives a strongly Mariocentric version of the events in Bethlehem.

      The name of the young man was Romanos, whom history has called “the Melodist.”3 The legendary episode brings the story of his life in close contact with that of Mary’s: As a maiden, the Virgin had received the Word into her body through divine intervention; now young Romanos received a text into his own body through her intervention. The incident gave birth to song.

      Eating writing was not an entirely new phenomenon; in fact there are biblical models. When Ezekiel was called to be a prophet, God’s voice commanded: “O mortal, eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.” The author of the New Testament Apocalypse had a similar vision; he had to swallow a scroll that an angel gave to him.4 Through scrolls, God bestows unique insights on chosen seers. What makes Romanos’s case special is that he received the edible document neither from God nor from God’s angel; his inspiration came from the Mother of God. She instigated his production of exceptional words and granted him the supernatural talent to sing them. The story reflects a pairing of the Theotokos (i.e., the Mother or “Birth giver” of God) and the poet, not unlike the pairing of Gabriel and Mary through the story of the Annunciation. In the history of Romanos reception, the Virgin and the singer become two inseparable persons. The so-called Menologion of Basil II, an eleventh-century Byzantine manuscript now in the Vatican Library, depicts Romanos the Melodist reclining in the fields on a red blanket (Figure 1).5 He receives the scroll from the Virgin, who stands behind him. The viewer sees Romanos lying stretched out in the Constantinopolitan night. The Virgin is about to penetrate his lips with the scroll, rendering him at the same time closed and unclosed. Although we see him with a shut mouth, we know that it is about to open; although we see him with a shut mouth, we know that this mouth is going to unseal a host of songs. Romanos’s posture is strikingly reminiscent of Mary’s in the traditional Byzantine Nativity icon (Figure 2). The image suggests for a moment an almost confusing identification of the Virgin with her servant, the singer.

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      From a strict historical point of view, we know very little about Romanos’s life; the stories recounted here derive from later legendary sources. Some of them place the scroll episode in Blachernae, and others do not. There are vague historical traces indicating that Romanos had a Jewish background, in which case he must have left his ancestral tradition for Christianity, but this piece of information is highly unspecific, late, and unreliable. That he came from Emesa and Berytus is more plausible, for his songs show Syriac influence. And it is not historically improbable—but a pure speculation—that he attended the famed law school in Berytus some years after Severus of Antioch (ca. 465–538) had graduated from it. What we know with a higher degree of certainty is primarily what Romanos himself tells us indirectly through his songs. We are able to establish that he lived in sixth-century Constantinople, and that the Constantinopolitans cherished his songs and his talent. He seems to have created a workshop for writing hymns, for a number of transmitted hymns bear his name even though the modern editors think other poets wrote them. Already by the year 641, the city venerated him as a saint on his feast day, October 1.6 Much later, that same day would turn into a minor Marian feast, the celebration of the Virgin’s Protecting Veil (skepē). The standard icon for the feast merges the two: Romanos stands right underneath the Virgin in Blachernae (Figure 3). She protects with her veil, and he performs his songs.

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      Before the poet died in Constantinople sometime around 560 he had composed at least sixty long liturgical hymns called kontakia—and probably many more.7 The epithet “Melodist” (Gr. Melōdos) indicates that he was not only a poet but also a singer in church, who performed his own hymns. The incident with the scroll—when Romanos received the charism from his muse—has made him an example of those who take their wisdom from the Virgin, and yet it also indicates that she made him a performer.8 She turned a man without a voice into a vocalized singer. The moment he had eaten her scroll, he burst out in song and performed a hymn. He received a voice. Through his hand, in turn, Mary was not merely spoken of but came most explicitly to be speaking herself, in dialogues and monologues. Through the performance of his hymns, she raised her voice and was heard in the great churches and streets of the imperial city. As we shall see in this book, Romanos envisaged the Mother of God to be the voice of her people. According to the legend, contrariwise, Romanos gave her a voice and spoke for her, he who had received his voice from her hand. The story of the scroll attests to the lasting imprint that hearing Mary’s words through his words left on the imagination of the Christians in Constantinople—so much so that posterity could not distinguish their voices.

      The first poetic words that Romanos uttered, according to the legend, were “the Virgin today gives birth.” This may be taken to mean that through her intervention, she gave birth to her own voice in a man’s body. From this Marian beginning evolved a remarkable career in song, yielding vivid verbal displays that filled churches with imaginary dramatics. Through Romanos, Mary staged herself. If, in other words, we would like to understand how the Virgin Mary is imagined in this period, we have to turn to Romanos the Melodist. We shall never be able to read the scroll that he digested, but the present book studies the texts it produced. Can they give us a hint about why later generations came to regard Romanos and the Virgin as inseparable? How could his songs generate the legendary scroll?

      THE RISE OF THE KONTAKION

      From a literary perspective, the sixth century was a prolific period. Such outstanding figures as the historian Procopius of Caesarea (ca. 490–562), the poet Paul the Silentiary (d. ca. 580), and the poet and historian Agathias Scholasticus (ca. 532–80) all benefited from the favorable air of relative meritocracy under the sixth-century emperors, as did Romanos. He wrote dramatic poetry, and his songs epitomize an ecclesiastical attempt to appropriate more advanced poetic expressions for liturgical use.

      The

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