The Kontakion as a Genre

The kontakion is a sung metrical sermon — a verse-homily of some eighteen to twenty-four strophes, prefaced by a short proem in a different metre, unified by an acrostic and a recurring refrain, and chanted from the ambo by a soloist-preacher after the Gospel while the people answered the refrain. Perfected by St Romanos the Melodist in sixth-century Constantinople, it stands as one of the great achievements of Christian liturgical poetry, drawing on the Syriac verse-homily and teaching-hymn as its deep background.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

What a Kontakion Is

A kontakion is not, in its original sixth-century form, the brief one-strophe hymn of the same name that Orthodox Christians sing today after the sixth ode of the canon. It is a long, dramatic, theologically charged poem — in effect a sermon in verse — running to roughly eighteen to twenty-four strophes (the attested range is about eleven to thirty-three), and conceived for chanted performance within the night office (Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, 2nd ed. 1961, 179–197; Lash, On the Life of Christ: Kontakia, 1995, introduction). The modern liturgical “kontakion” and its companion “oikos” are the fossilised opening fragments — the proem and first strophe — of these once-monumental compositions, all that the later rite retained when the full genre fell out of regular use (Wellesz, 1961, 179–181).

The genre’s classic shape was given it by St Romanos (c. 490 – c. 556), a deacon of Syrian origin who came from Emesa by way of Beirut to Constantinople under the Emperor Anastasius and flourished there into the reign of Justinian (Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance, 1977, 159–198; Carpenter, Kontakia of Romanos, 1970, vol. 1, xv–xxiii). How many kontakia Romanos actually wrote is contested: hagiographic tradition credits him with about a thousand, while the critical editors count far fewer surviving and genuine — [Disputed: roughly 1,000 attributed by tradition (the Synaxarion and later Vitae); about 59–60 accepted as authentic by Maas and Trypanis (Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica, 1963–1970); some 85–89 kontakia surviving under his name in the manuscripts (Grosdidier de Matons, 1977, 49–58)].

The Architecture: Proem, Oikoi, Acrostic, Refrain

The kontakion opens with a prooimion — a short introductory strophe also called the koukoulion, “the cowl,” because it caps the poem as a monk’s hood caps the head (Wellesz, 1961, 181; Kontakion, Wikipedia, citing the standard hymnographic terminology). The proem stands in a metre of its own, distinct from the body of the hymn, and serves as prelude: it announces the feast or theme and, crucially, its closing line introduces the words that will become the refrain (Wellesz, 1961, 181–183).

After the proem come the oikoi — literally “houses” (singular oikos), the Greek calque of a term that in Syriac hymnography also named the strophe (Grosdidier de Matons, 1977, 16–18; Brock, in The Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture, on Syriac antecedents). These strophes are metrically identical to one another, every oikos reproducing the same pattern of line-lengths and accents as a single model strophe; only the proem differs (Wellesz, 1961, 182–183; Maas–Trypanis, 1963, introduction). A long kontakion is thus a chain of houses of uniform construction, each built to the same plan, through which a single narrative or argument unfolds.

Two devices bind the whole together. The first is the acrostic: the initial letters of the successive strophes, read down the poem, spell out a phrase. In Romanos’s hymns this acrostic regularly carries his signature — most often in the form “Of the Humble Romanos” (τοῦ ταπεινοῦ Ῥωμανοῦ) or “the hymn/poem of humble Romanos” — so that the poet’s name, and his self-styled humility, is woven invisibly into the very letters of the work (Grosdidier de Matons, 1977, 35–37; Lash, 1995, introduction; Carpenter, 1970, vol. 1, xxiv). The acrostic was both a mark of authorship in an age before title-pages and a guarantee of textual integrity, since a copyist could not drop or reorder strophes without breaking the spelled-out phrase (Wellesz, 1961, 184).

The second binding device is the refrain, the ephymnion. Introduced by the last line of the proem, it is then repeated word-for-word at the close of every single oikos (Wellesz, 1961, 181–183; Kontakion, Wikipedia). The refrain is the theological pulse of the poem: a short, memorable, often paradoxical phrase to which the whole congregation could return after each strophe, so that the sustained argument of the soloist was punctuated again and again by the same confession on the lips of the people.

How It Was Performed

The kontakion was a performed homily, and its structure presupposes its performance. The main body was chanted from the ambo — the raised pulpit at the centre of the church — by a single trained voice, a soloist who functioned as preacher; in many settings this was a deacon or the hymnographer himself (Wellesz, 1961, 179–181; Kontakion, Wikipedia). The proem and the long succession of oikoi belonged to this soloist, who carried the narrative, voiced the dramatic dialogues, and pressed the exhortation.

The refrain, however, belonged to the assembly. After the soloist completed each strophe, a choir — or, in the simpler and more direct syllabic style, the whole congregation — answered with the ephymnion (Wellesz, 1961, 181; Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 2014, 29–66). The faithful thereby became participants rather than mere auditors: the recurring line drew them into the meaning of the feast and made the sermon a shared act of worship. The kontakion was thus delivered in its proper place after the reading of the Gospel, taking the homiletic slot of the liturgical day and filling it with sung poetry (see the genre’s metre, music, and performance, and the place of preaching in the Divine Liturgy).

The Name and Its Lateness

The very word kontakion is, paradoxically, no part of Romanos’s own vocabulary. In the sixth century these poems were simply called hymnoi or psalmoi; the term kontakion is not attested until later — by general scholarly reckoning around the ninth century (Kontakion, Britannica; Wellesz, 1961, 179–180). It derives from κοντός / κόνταξ, the rod or shaft around which a parchment scroll was wound for storage. The name therefore describes not the poem but its physical carrier: a kontakion was a text rolled on its little staff, and the word for the staff came, by metonymy, to name the kind of poem habitually kept that way (Grosdidier de Matons, 1977, 16; Kontakion, Wikipedia and Britannica). The image is fitting for the tradition that the Theotokos gave Romanos a scroll to eat (see the Theotokos and the scroll), but the etymology is independent of that legend and belongs to the later, technical naming of an already-old genre.

The Syriac Background

Romanos did not invent his form out of nothing. He was a Syrian, and behind the Greek kontakion stand the great genres of Syriac Christian poetry, above all those associated with St Ephrem the Syrian in the fourth century (Grosdidier de Matons, 1977, 16–27; Brock, on Syriac hymnography; see St Ephrem and the teaching-hymn). Two Syriac forms are the principal antecedents. The memra is the verse-homily proper — a metrical sermon, narrative and didactic, in couplets of isosyllabic lines, which expounds a scriptural episode at length; in it the kontakion’s character as a sung sermon is already present (Grosdidier de Matons, 1977, 18–21; Wellesz, 1961, 184–185). The madrasha is the teaching-hymn, strophic and provided with a refrain sung by the people, and built on a model strophe to which all the others conform — precisely the strophic-plus-refrain architecture that the kontakion would inherit (Brock, on the madrasha; Grosdidier de Matons, 1977, 21–25).

From the memra the kontakion took its homiletic substance and its narrative drive; from the madrasha it took its strophic build, its model-strophe metre, and its congregational refrain. The fusion of the two — preaching matter in teaching-hymn form, carried into Greek and given the rhetorical polish of the Constantinopolitan church — is the genre Romanos perfected (Grosdidier de Matons, 1977, 25–48; Carpenter, 1970, vol. 1, xxv–xxx). The relationship is one of genuine descent, though scholars debate how direct and how mediated the borrowing was, and caution against treating the Greek form as a simple translation of any single Syriac genre (Grosdidier de Matons, 1977, 16–27).

References

Wellesz, Egon. A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961.
Grosdidier de Matons, José. Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance. Paris: Beauchesne, 1977.
Grosdidier de Matons, José (ed., trans.). Romanos le Mélode, Hymnes. Sources Chrétiennes 99, 110, 114, 128, 283. Paris: Cerf, 1964–1981.
Maas, Paul, and C. A. Trypanis (eds.). Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963 (Cantica Genuina); 1970 (Cantica Dubia).
Carpenter, Marjorie (trans.). Kontakia of Romanos, Byzantine Melodist. 2 vols. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1970.
Lash, Ephrem (trans.). On the Life of Christ: Kontakia. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995.
Krueger, Derek. Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
“Kontakion.” Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/art/kontakion
“Kontakion.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kontakion