The Dramatic Dialogues

The genius of Romanos lies in his dramatization of scripture: he puts speech into the mouths of biblical figures and lets scenes unfold as dialogue, so that his kontakia stand, in Derek Krueger’s phrase, “between church and theatre.” This file treats the named dialogue-hymns strophe by strophe — the Mother at the Cross, Peter’s Denial, the Harlot, Adam and Eve, the Wise and Foolish Virgins, Mary and the Magi, Mary and the Archangel.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

Between Church and Theatre

The single most distinctive feature of Romanos’s art is direct speech. Where a homilist might paraphrase a Gospel scene, Romanos stages it: he gives the characters their own voices, lets them argue, plead, weep, and answer one another, and so turns narrative into drama (Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 2014; Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, 1977). Scholars have long debated whether this owes anything to the classical or contemporary theatre of late antiquity; Romanos’s own world is sketched in the world of Justinian. Whatever the genealogy, the effect is unmistakable. As Krueger puts it, the kontakion occupies a space “between church and theatre,” for the dramatized speeches are performed before a congregation as part of the night office, yet they impersonate, individuate, and confront in a way that is recognizably theatrical (Krueger, 2014; Arentzen, The Virgin in Song, 2017).

The technique has a deep Syriac ancestry. The sughitha, the dialogue-poem of the Syriac tradition associated with St. Ephrem, set biblical speakers against one another in alternating stanzas, and Romanos — himself, by tradition, a deacon of Syrian origin from Emesa — almost certainly inherited the form and naturalized it in Greek (Grosdidier de Matons, 1977; Krueger, 2014). What follows surveys the most accomplished examples; the citations use the Oxford (Maas–Trypanis) numbering with the Sources Chrétiennes equivalents where they help.

The Inheritance of Ethopoeia

The dramatic technique of Romanos was not invented from nothing; it had a name and a pedagogy in the world that schooled him. The late-antique rhetorical curriculum, the progymnasmata, trained every educated speaker in ethopoeia — “speech-in-character,” the exercise of composing the words a given figure would plausibly say in a given situation (“What would Niobe say over her dead children? What would Achilles say beside the body of Patroclus?”) (Arentzen, The Virgin in Song, 2017; Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 2014). The handbooks of Aphthonius and Hermogenes, standard in the sixth-century schools, fixed ethopoeia as a set form with its own decorum of pathos, character, and circumstance, and Romanos’s monologues — the harlot debating with herself, Mary protesting at the Cross, Adam pleading from Hades — are recognizably its Christian offspring (Arentzen, 2017; Grosdidier de Matons, 1977). What he added was the liturgical frame and the Syriac dialogue-poem behind it: where the rhetor’s ethopoeia was a school display, Romanos’s is a sung sermon that draws a worshipping congregation into the very interiority it stages (Krueger, 2014). The classical exercise becomes, in his hands, a means of grace — a point developed in the theology of repentance, where the dramatized “I” of the sinner is offered to the hearer as a script for his own confession.

The Mother of God at the Cross

The supreme example is the kontakion On the Lament of the Mother of God (Oxford 19 = SC 35), sung in the Byzantine rite for Great Friday. Its prooimion — “Come, let us all praise him who was crucified for us” — opens the way to a long dialogue between the Virgin and her crucified Son across a four-line prelude and seventeen ten-line strophes (Maas–Trypanis, Cantica Genuina, 1963; Lash, On the Life of Christ, 1995). Mary speaks first, following Christ to Golgotha and crying out as a mother: “Where are you going, my child? Why do you run so fast?” (str. 1). She protests against the cross, fears she is losing him, and in her grief cannot yet see past her wound (Lash, 1995; Krueger, 2014).

The “where are you going, my child?” of the opening strophe is the seed of the whole drama, and Romanos lets it flower into a genuine argument. Mary reasons like a mother: if he is the Son of God, why does he go to death like a criminal; if he means to heal the world, let him heal it without the cross; she even offers to come with him, or to die in his place (str. 2–6; Lash, 1995; Arentzen, 2017). Romanos is bold enough to give the Theotokos something close to protest and incomprehension — not unbelief, but the refusal of a loving heart to consent to the wound — and this is precisely what makes the hymn so affecting: the doctrine of the saving Passion has to be won, strophe by strophe, against the resistance of the holiest of human loves (Arentzen, 2017; Krueger, 2014).

Christ answers her, and the strophes thereafter become a dialogue of increasing intimacy and frequency. He consoles her not by denying his death but by interpreting it: he is the physician who must himself be wounded to heal Adam, and his Passion is the cure of the whole human race. He bids her “take courage, Mother,” tells her that he goes to raise the fallen Adam and Eve who are the cause of her own descent, and promises that she will be the first to see him risen (str. 7–16; Lash, 1995; Arentzen, 2017). The climactic theological speech, in which Christ unfolds the economy of redemption to his mother in the imagery of medicine and healing, falls near the centre of the poem (around str. 13), so that her private lament becomes the vehicle for public doctrine (Lash, 1995; Krueger, 2014; Arentzen, 2017). By the end the Theotokos is reconciled to the Passion and prays for the world. The hymn’s astonishing achievement is to let raw maternal grief and the dogma of the saving death speak in one and the same voice — the subject of Christology and Mariology sung.

Peter’s Denial

In the kontakion On Peter’s Denial (Oxford 18 = SC 34), Romanos dramatizes the night of the betrayal as a confrontation of words (Maas–Trypanis, 1963; Lash, 1995). The hymn turns on the gap between Peter’s bold promise — “Though all should be offended, yet will not I” — and his threefold collapse before a servant girl in the courtyard. Romanos gives Christ a speech that foretells the fall with sorrowful precision, and he lets the reader hear the disproportion between the apostle’s confidence and his weakness (Lash, 1995; Grosdidier de Matons, SC 110, 1965). The dramatic irony is the whole point: the congregation, who know how the night will end, watch Peter speak past his own danger, and so are warned of their own.

Romanos sharpens the contrast by setting Peter’s bravado at the Supper directly against Christ’s quiet foreknowledge: the disciple who draws the sword and swears he will die rather than deny is the same who, hours later, cannot face a doorkeeper’s question. The poet does not gloat over the fall; he uses it pastorally, turning Peter into the type of every Christian whose resolve outruns his strength, and the servant girl’s small challenge into the image of the trivial occasions on which great confessions collapse (Lash, 1995; Krueger, 2014). The crowing of the cock and the bitter weeping that follow become, in Romanos’s hands, the model of the tears of compunction explored in the theology of repentance: the same Peter who fell is restored precisely through his tears, so that the hymn closes not in condemnation but in the hope of the penitent who weeps and is received.

The Harlot

The kontakion On the Harlot (Oxford 10 = SC 21) retells the anointing of Christ by the sinful woman (Luke 7; Matt. 26), and it is among the most psychologically vivid of all the dialogue-hymns (Maas–Trypanis, 1963; Lash, 1995). Romanos enters the woman’s interior monologue: she resolves to go to Christ, debates with herself, addresses the perfume-seller from whom she buys the myrrh, and reasons her way from despair to daring. In one celebrated passage she speaks to the merchant as one buyer to another, asking for myrrh worthy of him “who has wiped away the multitude of my sins” — a domestic, almost mercantile scene transfigured into an act of faith (Lash, 1995; Krueger, 2014). The hymn lets the audience overhear a sinner’s mind turning toward repentance, and so makes her the mirror of every penitent in the church.

Adam and Eve

Romanos repeatedly gives the first parents a voice, most memorably in his second kontakion On the Nativity (Oxford 2), where the scene shifts to Hades. Eve, hearing the Virgin’s song of praise rise over Bethlehem, rouses the sleeping Adam: the good news has come. Adam at first hesitates — he has been deceived by a woman’s voice once before — but relents, and together they make their way in spirit to the cave to petition Mary to lift their ancient shame (Lash, 1995; Arentzen, 2017). Mary answers them directly: “Chase off your distress, for I have given birth to Joy.” The lament of Adam — the grief of fallen humanity longing for paradise — recurs across the corpus and is one of Romanos’s signature dramatic motifs, binding the Nativity to the redemption of the whole race (Arentzen, 2017; Krueger, 2014). The typology of the New Adam and New Eve that the scene embodies is developed in Christology and Mariology sung.

The Wise and Foolish Virgins

Romanos devoted hymns to the parable of the Ten Virgins (Matt. 25), material woven into the Bridegroom services of the first days of Holy Week (Maas–Trypanis, 1963; Lash, 1995). Here the dramatic technique sharpens into pathos: the foolish virgins, shut out of the wedding, plead at the closed door — “Open to us!” — and the Bridegroom answers, “I do not know you.” Romanos lets us hear the foolish virgins reason too late, lamenting the oil of mercy and almsgiving they failed to gather while there was time (Lash, 1995; Krueger, 2014). The closed door and the unanswered plea give the parable an eschatological edge taken up in the theology of repentance.

Mary and the Magi; Mary and the Archangel

Two further dialogues belong to the joyful mysteries. The first kontakion On the Nativity (Oxford 1), “Today the Virgin gives birth to the Transcendent One,” is largely a conversation between the Mother of God and the visiting Magi: Mary questions the strangers and then, holding her child, herself interprets the mystery to them, becoming theologian as well as mother (Lash, 1995; Arentzen, 2017). This hymn is studied in detail in “Today the Virgin”. The second is the kontakion On the Annunciation, which stages the exchange of Mary and the Archangel Gabriel — the Virgin’s wondering questions and the angel’s reassurance — as a dialogue of trust and assent (Maas–Trypanis, 1963; Arentzen, 2017). In both, Romanos gives Mary an active, speaking voice that is one of the most striking features of his Mariology, the very feature Thomas Arentzen has called the Virgin “in song” (Arentzen, 2017).

See Also

References

  • Paul Maas and C. A. Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica Genuina (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963).
  • José Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, Hymnes, Sources Chrétiennes 99, 110, 114, 128, 283 (Paris: Cerf, 1964–1981).
  • José Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance (Paris: Beauchesne, 1977).
  • Ephrem Lash, trans., St. Romanos the Melodist: On the Life of Christ — Kontakia (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995).
  • Derek Krueger, Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).
  • Thomas Arentzen, The Virgin in Song: Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
  • “Saint Romanos Melodos: The Lyric Poetry and Drama of Great Friday,” Orthodox America: https://roca.org/oa/volume-xviii/issue-157/saint-romanos-melodos-the-lyric-poetry-and-drama-of-great-friday/