The Theology of Repentance

Repentance is the beating heart of Romanos’s penitential kontakia: he dramatizes the sinner’s turning to God and, through compunction and tears, makes the hearer the true subject of the hymn. This file treats the penitential cycle — the Harlot, the Prodigal Son, the Ten Virgins, the Last Judgement, On Repentance — and the compunction (katanyxis), the eschatological urgency, and the formation of the worshipper that Romanos works through them.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

Katanyxis: The Piercing of the Heart

The Greek word for the affect Romanos seeks is katanyxis — compunction, the “pricking” or piercing of the heart that breaks it open to repentance and tears (Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 2014; Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, 1977). It is a quintessentially Byzantine spiritual category, and Romanos is one of its great poets. His penitential kontakia are engineered to produce it: by staging the sinner’s interior struggle and then turning, in refrain and apostrophe, to address the listener directly, he aims not to describe repentance but to provoke it in the church (Krueger, 2014). This is the affective core of hymnody that also carries, as “Christology and Mariology sung” shows, the highest doctrine; in Romanos doctrine and compunction are one movement of the soul toward God.

Penthos: The Gift of Mourning

Alongside katanyxis stands its companion in the Byzantine vocabulary of repentance: penthos, the godly mourning or “joyful sorrow” that the ascetic tradition prized as a gift of the Spirit rather than a passing mood (Hannick, “Liturgie et Hymnographie,” 1980–81; Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, 1977). Where katanyxis names the moment of piercing, penthos names the abiding state of contrition that the pierced heart settles into — the “mourning” the Beatitude promises shall be comforted, cultivated by the desert fathers as the very atmosphere of the praying soul. Romanos is one of the great liturgical poets of this disposition. His penitential kontakia do not merely narrate sorrow for sin; they are composed to induce and sustain it in the congregation, so that the hymn becomes an exercise in penthos as much as a teaching about it (Hannick, 1980–81; Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 2014). This is why his repentance is never morbid: the mourning is ordered toward the joy of forgiveness, and the same hymn that opens the heart’s wound holds out the Physician who heals it. The kanon and the kontakion together, Hannick argues, carry this affective theology through the Byzantine office, and Romanos stands near its source (Hannick, 1980–81).

The Penitential Kontakia

Several of the genuine hymns form a recognizable penitential cluster (Maas–Trypanis, Cantica Genuina, 1963; Lash, On the Life of Christ, 1995).

On the Harlot (Oxford 10 = SC 21) is the paradigm. Romanos enters the mind of the sinful woman of the Gospel and lets the congregation overhear her resolve to abandon her former life, her self-questioning, her purchase of the myrrh, and her daring approach to Christ (Lash, 1995; Krueger, 2014). Her turning is total and concrete — she reasons her way from despair to hope — and because we hear it from the inside, her repentance becomes available as a script for our own. The hymn’s whole rhetorical strategy is to make the harlot a figure the worshipper can inhabit (Krueger, 2014).

The strophe-level drama repays attention. Romanos gives the woman a long interior monologue in which she argues herself toward Christ: she has heard that he eats with publicans and sinners, and she dares to hope that she too might be received. She debates her own unworthiness, steels her resolve, and then — in a scene without warrant in the Gospel and entirely Romanos’s invention — goes to a perfume-seller to buy the myrrh, addressing him as one buyer to another and asking for ointment worthy of the one “who has wiped away the multitude of my sins” (Lash, 1995; Krueger, 2014). The domestic, almost mercantile exchange grounds her conversion in the ordinary world and makes it concrete: repentance here is not an abstraction but a woman counting out money for myrrh. Romanos even lets a touch of the old life linger in her speech — the language of allurement turned now toward Christ — so that the whole self, not a sanitized fragment of it, is what comes to be forgiven (Arentzen, The Virgin in Song, 2017, on the gendered voice; Krueger, 2014). When at last she washes his feet with her tears and dries them with her hair, the long preparation makes the act the climax of a decision the hearer has watched her reach.

On the Prodigal Son retells Luke 15 as the drama of return: the squandering, the famine, the coming-to-himself in the far country, and the father who runs to meet him. Romanos lingers on the son’s interior speech — “I will arise and go to my father” — making the parable a map of the penitent’s own road home and the father’s mercy the measure of God’s (Lash, 1995; Grosdidier de Matons, 1977).

On the Ten Virgins (the two kontakia on Matt. 25) and On Repentance / On the Sinful Woman carry the same lesson with a sharper edge: mercy and almsgiving are the oil that must be gathered now, before the door is shut (Maas–Trypanis, 1963; Lash, 1995). The foolish virgins’ too-late plea — “Open to us!” — answered by “I do not know you,” is repentance considered from the side of its possible failure (Krueger, 2014).

On the Second Coming / the Last Judgement sets all of this under the shadow of the end, depicting the dread tribunal and summoning the hearer to repent while there is time (Maas–Trypanis, 1963; Grosdidier de Matons, 1977).

What unites these hymns is a single pastoral logic. Each takes a biblical figure who stands at the threshold of mercy — the harlot at Christ’s feet, the prodigal at the edge of his father’s land, the virgins at the closed door, every soul before the judgement seat — and slows the moment of decision so that the congregation can dwell in it. Romanos is not content to report that the harlot was forgiven; he holds open the interval in which she might still have turned away, so that her choosing of Christ is felt as a choice the hearer too must make (Krueger, 2014; Lash, 1995). The penitential corpus is thus less a gallery of past conversions than a series of present invitations, each shaped so that the worshipper recognizes his own situation in the sinner’s and is moved, while there is still time, to imitate the turning rather than the refusal.

Tears and the Appeal to Conscience

Across these hymns the recurring physical sign of true repentance is weeping. Peter, having denied his Lord, goes out and weeps bitterly, and Romanos makes his tears the very token of restoration (On Peter’s Denial, Oxford 18; Lash, 1995). The harlot’s tears wash Christ’s feet; the prodigal’s confession is wrung from a broken heart. For Romanos, as for the whole ascetic tradition behind him, tears are not sentimentality but the outward water of inward katanyxis, the gift that softens the hardened conscience (Krueger, 2014; Grosdidier de Matons, 1977).

And the conscience addressed is the listener’s. Romanos continually breaks the frame of the narrative to speak to “you” — to plead, exhort, and accuse the worshipper standing in the dark church. He moves without warning from the third person of the story to the second person of the sermon, so that the biblical sinner’s case is suddenly the hearer’s own (Krueger, 2014; Lash, 1995). This homiletic turn is the technique examined in “the poet as preacher”: the kontakion is a sung sermon, and its altar call is repentance.

The Eschatological Horizon

Romanos’s repentance is never merely therapeutic; it is oriented to the Last Things. The urgency of his penitential hymns derives from the conviction that time is short and judgement is real (On the Last Judgement; On the Ten Virgins; Maas–Trypanis, 1963; Krueger, 2014). The closed door, the unanswered plea, the dread tribunal, the separation of sheep and goats — these images set the present moment of the hymn under the pressure of the end, and make repentance not a mood but a decision that cannot be deferred. Yet the eschatology is finally one of hope: the same Christ who judges is the Physician who heals Adam (On the Lament of the Mother of God, Oxford 19, around str. 13; Lash, 1995), and the door that may be shut is, for the penitent who turns in time, the door of the wedding feast. Mercy and judgement are held together, as they are in the Divine Liturgy itself.

The Sinner as Mirror: Liturgical Subjects

Derek Krueger has given the deepest account of what Romanos is doing. In Liturgical Subjects he argues that the penitential kontakia are technologies for forming the Christian self: by performing the first-person speech of biblical sinners — the harlot, the prodigal, the denying Peter, the lamenting Adam — the congregation is trained to take that speech onto its own lips and so to become a penitent subject (Krueger, 2014). The dramatized sinner is, precisely, a mirror. When the harlot says “I have sinned,” the worshipper, singing or hearing in the night office, is invited to say it too; the hymn supplies the very interiority it asks the listener to have (Krueger, 2014). This is why Romanos’s drama matters theologically and not only aesthetically: the dialogues treated in “the dramatic dialogues” are the means by which the liturgy fashions repentant hearts. The hymn does not merely teach repentance; it rehearses the congregation in it, night after night, until the biblical “I” becomes their own.

Repentance and the Whole Corpus

The penitential hymns are not a department sealed off from the rest of Romanos’s work; they are the pastoral application of his whole theology. The Incarnation he sings is the ground of mercy; the Passion he dramatizes is the cure of sin; the typology by which Adam is raised is the promise held out to every penitent (Christology and Mariology sung; the authentic kontakia). To repent, in Romanos, is to step into the salvation history his hymns unfold — to be the Adam who is raised, the prodigal who is received, the harlot who is forgiven. That is why his kontakia have nourished Orthodox prayer for fifteen centuries and stand near the source of the Church’s penitential mind (Krueger, 2014; Grosdidier de Matons, 1977; see the place in the rite).

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).
Marjorie Carpenter, Kontakia of Romanos, Byzantine Melodist, 2 vols. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1970, 1973).
Thomas Arentzen, The Virgin in Song: Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
Christian Hannick, “Liturgie et hymnographie: Kontakion et canon,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 34/35 (1980–1981), pp. 191–203.