The Soul Addressing Itself

The inner mechanism of Andrew’s penitential theology: the Great Canon makes the worshipper speak in the second person to his own soul — “O my soul, why sleepest thou?” — turning each singer into both the prophet who rebukes and the sinner rebuked, and so summoning the compunction (penthos) and the gift of tears that the Orthodox ascetic tradition holds to be the beginning of return to God.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

The Grammar of Repentance

The most characteristic move of the Great Canon is grammatical before it is theological. Over and over, Andrew has the worshipper turn and address his own soul in the second person: “O my soul, O my soul, rise up! Why art thou sleeping? The end draws near, and soon thou shalt be troubled” (Great Canon, kontakion; The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware). The soul (psychē) is commanded, questioned, reproached, and entreated, as though the singer stood outside himself and pleaded with the part of him that has gone astray. This self-address is not a rhetorical ornament; it is the spiritual method of the whole work. By splitting the self into the one who exhorts and the one exhorted, Andrew makes each worshipper at once the watchman and the city, the physician and the patient — so that the liturgy does not merely teach about repentance but enacts it in the first person of every voice in the church (Derek Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, ch. 5).

Derek Krueger has shown that this is the deliberate genius of Byzantine penitential hymnody: the texts of Lent are designed to construct a particular kind of self — a “liturgical subject” who learns, by singing these words in his own mouth, to see himself as the sinner the words describe (Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, esp. ch. 5, on the Great Canon). The worshipper does not overhear a story about Adam or David; he is made to say “I am Adam,” “I have done as David did,” until the distance between the biblical sinner and himself collapses. The second-person address to the soul is the hinge on which that identification turns.

The Liturgical Self

Krueger’s larger argument is worth setting out, because it reframes what the Great Canon is for. Byzantine penitential hymnody, he shows, was not merely expressive — a way of voicing feelings the worshipper already had — but formative: it was designed to produce a particular kind of person, to school the worshipper, through the repeated performance of these texts, into seeing himself as a sinner in need of mercy and into the dispositions of compunction, humility, and hope. The Great Canon is the supreme instrument of this formation. By placing in the worshipper’s mouth, year after year, the words “I have sinned,” “my soul, why sleepest thou,” “have mercy on me,” it gradually forms the “liturgical subject” — the self that knows itself in the way the Church’s repentance requires (Derek Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, esp. introduction and ch. 5).

This is a profound claim about how the Church works on her members. She does not chiefly tell the worshipper that he is a sinner; she gives him words to say it, in the first person, in the most solemn services of the year, with his body bowing to the ground at every line — until the saying becomes a seeing, and the seeing becomes a turning. The Great Canon, on this account, is not a poem to be admired but a discipline to be undergone, a means by which the Church forms repentant souls. And the second-person self-address is the engine of that formation: it is the device by which the worshipper is made to do the work upon himself.

Penthos: The Gift of Tears

What the self-address aims to produce is penthos — the technical term of Orthodox ascetic theology for compunction, the godly grief that breaks the heart open and overflows in tears (on the wider tradition, see The Church Fathers). Penthos is not despair; it is the precise opposite. In the teaching of the desert fathers and of writers such as St. John Climacus — whose Ladder of Divine Ascent devotes a famous step to “joy-making mourning” — the tears of compunction are a charism, a gift of the Holy Spirit, and they carry within them a hidden gladness, because they are the soul’s first true turning back toward the God it has wounded (John Climacus, Ladder, Step 7, “On Mourning”; cf. the Great Canon’s refrain of lament). The Great Canon is, from beginning to end, an engine for penthos. Its opening question — “Whence shall I begin to lament the deeds of my wretched life?” (Ode 1, troparion 1) — is a request for tears, and its long catalogue of self-accusation is calculated to soften a heart that has grown hard, until the worshipper weeps not in performance but in truth.

This is why the Canon is so unsparing. Andrew refuses every comfort that would let the singer off the hook: he will not let the soul plead its circumstances, blame another, or take refuge in the sins of the wicked it has just heard recited. “I alone have sinned against Thee, sinned above all men; O Christ my Saviour, despise me not” (Great Canon, Ode 1). The relentlessness is pastoral. Compunction does not come to a heart that has reserved a corner of self-justification; it comes only when the soul, having run out of excuses, throws itself entirely on the mercy of God. The Canon’s severity is in the service of that surrender.

The Soul as Interlocutor

It is worth dwelling on the strangeness of the device, because its strangeness is its power. Ordinary prayer addresses God: “have mercy on me,” “save me,” “hear me.” The Great Canon does this too, in its refrain and its closing appeals — but its most characteristic voice is turned not upward to God but inward, to the soul itself. The singer becomes two: a watching, exhorting self and a sleeping, sinning self, and the watching self labors to wake the other. “My soul, O my soul, rise up! Why art thou sleeping?” (Great Canon, kontakion); “Running through all who lived before the Law, my soul, thou hast not been like Seth” (Ode 2); “Thou hast heard, my soul, of the basket of Moses… draw thou from wisdom the thoughts of repentance” (Ode 6). The soul is treated as a separate person who must be argued with, shamed, encouraged, and roused.

This doubling has deep roots in the ascetic tradition, where the spiritual life is understood as exactly this kind of inner watchfulness (nēpsis) — the higher mind standing guard over the wandering soul, calling it back from the passions, refusing to let it sleep. Andrew makes the whole praying congregation perform that watchfulness aloud. Each worshipper, singing “rise up, my soul,” is at once the watchman who calls and the sleeper who is called — and the hope is that, hearing himself summon his own soul night after night, the sleeper will at last wake. The Canon is, in this sense, an instrument for turning the abstract counsel “watch over your soul” into a thing the body actually does in church (Derek Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, ch. 5; on watchfulness, see The Church Fathers).

Not Despair but Hope

Because penthos is so easily confused with despondency — itself, in Orthodox teaching, one of the deadliest of the passions — it is vital to see how the Canon guards against it. Three safeguards run through the work. First, the refrain of mercy: every spasm of self-accusation is answered by “Have mercy upon me, O God, have mercy upon me,” so that the soul never accuses itself except in the act of appealing to mercy (Great Canon, refrain). Second, the theotokia: each ode closes with verses to the Mother of God, the refuge of sinners, so that the singer is never left alone with his sin but is handed, at every turn, to her intercession (The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mary and Ware). Third, the turn to the penitents of Scripture: as the Canon moves toward the Gospel, the gallery of warnings gives way to a gallery of hope — the publican, the prodigal, the harlot who wept at the Lord’s feet, the thief who stole paradise with a word — every one a sinner like the singer, and every one received (Great Canon, Odes 8–9; see Scripture as the Mirror).

The soul that addresses itself, then, is not being driven to despair but being woken from sleep. “Why sleepest thou?” is the Canon’s deepest question, and its whole labour is to rouse the soul before “the end draws near” — to make it grieve in time, while grief can still bear the fruit of return. Andrew’s own life gives the theme its weight: the man who wrote these words had, in the affair of 712, himself fallen and risen (see Repentance and Rehabilitation). The summons to the sleeping soul is not the rhetoric of a stranger to the fall; it is the testimony of one who had to wake himself.

References

The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1978 — the Great Canon, cited by ode, troparion, and kontakion for the self-address and the refrain.
Krueger, Derek. Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014, ch. 5 — the construction of the penitent “liturgical subject” through second-person self-address in the Great Canon.
John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 7 (“On Joy-Making Mourning”). Trans. Luibheid and Russell, Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1982 — the Orthodox ascetic theology of penthos and the gift of tears.
On the patristic tradition of compunction, see the repository entry The Church Fathers.