Today the Virgin: The First Kontakion on the Nativity

“Today the Virgin gives birth to the Transcendent One, and the earth offers a cave to the Unapproachable” — so opens Romanos’s masterpiece, the First Kontakion on the Nativity, whose proem the Orthodox Church still sings each Christmas. Across some twenty-four strophes, all closing on the refrain “a little Child, God before the ages,” the poem stages a great dialogue between the Mother of God and the visiting Magi, summons Adam and Eve, and unfolds the paradox of the Incarnation in the cave of Bethlehem.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

The Hymn and Its Fame

The First Kontakion on the Nativity (Maas–Trypanis, Cantica Genuina 1) is by long consent Romanos’s masterpiece and the most celebrated of all his works (Lash, On the Life of Christ: Kontakia, 1995, 1–12; Carpenter, Kontakia of Romanos, 1970, vol. 1). It is the hymn that tradition ties to the legend of his calling: the deacon, mute and untalented, is given a scroll to eat by the Theotokos at the Christmas vigil and rises to chant this poem extempore from the ambo (see the Theotokos and the scroll). Whatever the history behind the legend, the poem’s standing is independent of it: in the wholeness of its design, the boldness of its theology, and the warmth of its drama it is the supreme example of the genre Romanos perfected (Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, 1977, 159–198; Lash, 1995, 1–12).

Its opening strophe has outlived the rest in the living rite. The proem — “Today the Virgin gives birth to the Transcendent One, / and the earth offers a cave to the Unapproachable; / angels with shepherds give glory, / and Magi journey with a star; / for to us there has been born a little Child, God before the ages” (Lash, 1995, 3) — is sung still as the kontakion of the Feast of the Nativity, and the first oikos that follows it is chanted as the festal oikos after the sixth ode of the Christmas canon (OMHKSEA, “The Nativity Kontakion of Saint Romanos the Melodist”; OCA, Kostoff, “St Romanos the Melodist and the Kontakion”). The full poem, by contrast, has fallen out of regular liturgical use and survives chiefly in the manuscripts and critical editions (Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music, 1961, 179–181).

Structure and Refrain

The hymn has the canonical architecture of the kontakion (see the genre). It opens with the proem in its own metre and proceeds through about twenty-four metrically identical oikoi, each built on the same model strophe (Lash, 1995, 1–12; Maas–Trypanis, 1963, Cantica Genuina 1). The closing words of the proem — “a little Child, God before the ages” (παιδίον νέον, ὁ πρὸ αἰώνων Θεός) — become the ephymnion, the refrain repeated at the end of every strophe (Lash, 1995, 3; OMHKSEA). The phrase is itself a study in paradox: the new little Child (παιδίον νέον) is the same as the God before the ages (ὁ πρὸ αἰώνων Θεός), the newborn of Bethlehem identical with the eternal Son. By returning to this confession after each oikos, the congregation rehearses the central mystery of the feast again and again, until the paradox is no longer an idea to be grasped but a refrain to be sung.

The strophes are unified, as Romanos’s hymns characteristically are, by an acrostic spelling out the poet’s signature in the manner “of the humble Romanos” (Grosdidier de Matons, 1977, 35–37; Lash, 1995, introduction). The whole, then, is a single sustained composition — proem, chain of houses, recurring refrain, and hidden name — and not the brief modern troparion that bears the same opening words.

The Drama: Mother and Magi

The poem’s narrative heart is a dialogue. After the Nativity is announced, the Magi arrive at the cave, and the body of the kontakion stages an extended exchange between them and the Mother of God (Shrewsbury Orthodox Church, “Dialogue of Theotokos and Magi”; Lash, 1995, 3–12; Carpenter, 1970, vol. 1). This is Romanos’s signature technique: he takes a terse Gospel scene — the visit of the wise men, told in a few verses of Matthew 2 — and opens it into living speech, giving voice to figures the evangelist left silent (Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 2014, 67–105; and see the poet as preacher).

The Magi, journeying by the star, come and ask to see the Child; Mary, marvelling at these strangers from Persia kneeling at her cave, speaks with them, questions them, and at length presents her Son to them. The dialogue lets Romanos draw out, through the mouths of his characters, the wonder of the event: that kings have come from afar to a manger, that a Virgin holds the Maker of all, that the cave shelters the Unapproachable. The Magi’s homage becomes the occasion for the Mother to ponder aloud the identity of the Child she bears — and so for the congregation to be taught who he is (Lash, 1995, 3–12; Krueger, 2014, 67–105).

Within this exchange Mary speaks also as intercessor. She presents the Magi to her Son and commends them — and, through them, all who would come to the cave — to his mercy, so that the historical scene becomes a model of the Theotokos’s continuing intercession for those who approach Christ (Lash, 1995, 3–12; Carpenter, 1970, vol. 1; and see Christology and Mariology sung).

Adam and Eve in the Cave

Romanos does not let the Nativity stand as an isolated event. Into the dialogue he draws Adam and Eve — the first-formed pair whose fall the Incarnation comes to undo (Lash, 1995, 3–12; Carpenter, 1970, vol. 1). The Mother of God, contemplating her Child, names the reason for his coming: he is born to seek and save the lost Adam, to recall Eve from her exile, to open again the Paradise that the first parents forfeited (Lash, 1995, 3–12; OMHKSEA). The newborn in the manger is set against the ancient catastrophe in the garden, and the whole sweep of salvation history — Eden, the Fall, the long expectation, the redemption now begun — is gathered into the cave of Bethlehem.

This typological reach is characteristic of Romanos and roots him in the Syriac tradition of Ephrem, for whom the Eve–Mary and Adam–Christ parallels were the very grammar of theology (Grosdidier de Matons, 1977, 16–27; and see St Ephrem the Syrian). The cave and the manger themselves are read with the same typological eye: the cave that receives the Unapproachable, the manger that cradles the Bread of life, the swaddling-bands that bind the One who looses the bonds of sin (Lash, 1995, 3–12; Carpenter, 1970, vol. 1).

The Theology of the Hymn

The doctrinal substance of the kontakion is the paradox of the Incarnation, confessed in the refrain and unfolded in every strophe. The One who is “above all being” (the Transcendent One, ὁ ὑπερούσιος) takes flesh; the “Unapproachable” is laid in a cave; the “God before the ages” is a newborn child (Lash, 1995, 3; OMHKSEA). Romanos does not soften these contradictions but heightens them, piling antithesis on antithesis so that the hearer feels the full strangeness of the mystery: the eternal becomes temporal, the boundless becomes contained, the Creator becomes creature without ceasing to be Creator (Carpenter, 1970, vol. 1; Krueger, 2014, 67–105).

The hymn is thoroughly Marian. The Theotokos is not merely the setting of the miracle but its active theological centre: she gives birth to God, holds him, speaks for him, and intercedes through him (Lash, 1995, 3–12; and see Christology and Mariology sung). Her title “Theotokos,” God-bearer — the watchword of the Council of Ephesus in 431 — is enacted in the very plot of the poem: this is what it means that she gives birth to “God before the ages” (Carpenter, 1970, vol. 1; Krueger, 2014, 67–105).

And the hymn is typological: the Nativity is read backward to Adam and Eve and forward to redemption, the cave and manger seen as figures of mysteries to come, so that the single night at Bethlehem becomes the hinge of the whole economy of salvation (Lash, 1995, 3–12; Grosdidier de Matons, 1977, 16–27). The number of the strophes is given variously in the manuscripts and editions, and the genuine extent of Romanos’s surviving corpus is itself contested — [Disputed: about 59–60 kontakia accepted as authentic by Maas and Trypanis (Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica, 1963); some 85–89 surviving under his name in the manuscripts (Grosdidier de Matons, 1977, 49–58); roughly 1,000 attributed to him by hagiographic tradition] — but the pre-eminence of this Nativity hymn among them is not in doubt.

See Also

References

  • Lash, Ephrem (trans.). On the Life of Christ: Kontakia. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995 (Nativity I, “Today the Virgin”).
  • Maas, Paul, and C. A. Trypanis (eds.). Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963 (Cantica Genuina 1).
  • Carpenter, Marjorie (trans.). Kontakia of Romanos, Byzantine Melodist. 2 vols. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1970.
  • 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.
  • Krueger, Derek. Liturgical Subjects. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
  • Wellesz, Egon. A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961.
  • “The Nativity Kontakion of Saint Romanos the Melodist.” OMHKSEA. https://omhksea.org/archives/3608
  • Kostoff, Steven. “St. Romanos the Melodist and the Kontakion.” Orthodox Church in America. https://www.oca.org/reflections/fr.-steven-kostoff/st.-romanos-the-melodist-and-the-kontakion
  • “Dialogue of Theotokos and Magi — the Kontakion of Romanos.” Shrewsbury Orthodox Church. https://shrewsburyorthodox.com/history/