Hymnography as Dogma Sung

In the Orthodox Church theology is not only written and argued but sung: the dogmas defined by the councils pass into the troparia, kontakia, and canons of the daily services and are there made the possession of the whole praying Church. This file develops the principle of lex orandi, lex credendi as it bears on hymnography — how the Church’s poetry teaches, guards, and confesses her faith.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

The Rule of Prayer Is a Rule of Belief

The classic Latin tag lex orandi, lex credendi — “the rule of prayer [is] the rule of belief” — condenses a principle the Orthodox Church holds as native to her own life: that the way the Church prays is a primary witness to what she believes, so that liturgical texts are not a decorative overlay upon doctrine but one of the places where doctrine actually lives (see Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi). The phrase descends from a fifth-century formula of Prosper of Aquitaine — ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi, “let the rule of supplication establish the rule of belief” — coined in the Western debates over grace, but the conviction it names is older and thoroughly Eastern: that the Church learns and confesses her faith in the act of worship (Wybrew, The Orthodox Liturgy, SVS Press, 1990, on the principle; Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, SVS Press, 1966, on worship as the locus of theology). For the Byzantine tradition this principle bears with peculiar force on hymnography, because in the received Byzantine rite the sung poetry is not a small part of the service but the greater part of it: the fixed prayers of the offices are relatively few, and it is the changing hymns — the stichera at “Lord, I have cried,” the troparia and kontakia, the odes of the canon — that carry the theological content of each day and feast.

The result is that the average Orthodox Christian receives the dogma of the Church far more through what is sung than through what is read or preached. Fr. Georges Florovsky put the point sharply: the Church’s hymnody is “theology in doxology,” a sung dogmatics through which the definitions of the councils reach the faithful in a form they can pray (a formulation associated with the neo-patristic revival’s insistence on the liturgical grounding of theology; see Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, SPCK, 2015, on the liturgical theology of the Russian émigrés). The hymns are the Church’s catechism in verse, sung until the doctrine becomes reflex.

The Councils Sung

The clearest demonstration is the way the christological and mariological definitions of the ecumenical councils are versified in the hymns. The Council of Ephesus (431) confessed the Virgin as Theotokos, “God-bearer,” against Nestorius; the Council of Chalcedon (451) defined the one Christ “in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.” These are not left as archival formulas: they are sung. The dogmatika — the theotokia appointed at “Lord, I have cried” at Great Vespers on Saturday evening across the eight tones of the Octoechos — are so called precisely because they set forth the dogma of the Incarnation, the union of the two natures in the one Christ born of the Virgin, teaching in song what Ephesus and Chalcedon defined in prose (see The Theotokia and Axion Estin; The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Ware, Faber, 1969, appendices on the tones). The first dogmatikon, in Tone 1, sings the whole Chalcedonian mystery: the Virgin who is “the gate of salvation,” who “without corruption gavest birth to God the Word,” the one who is “truly Theotokos” — the conciliar confession made a hymn on the lips of the assembly.

The kontakia of St. Romanos the Melodist do the same work for the sixth century. His Nativity kontakion sings the paradox of Chalcedon before Chalcedon is a generation old: the Virgin gives birth to “the pre-eternal God,” the “little Child, God before the ages” — the two natures of the one Christ preached in the very language the Cappadocian Fathers had forged against the heretics (see The Kontakion and Romanos; and the deep treatment in St. Romanos: Christology and Mariology Sung). The canons of St. John of Damascus versify his own Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith: the Paschal canon preaches the descent into Hades and the trampling of death; the Nativity and Theophany canons sing the two natures of the incarnate Word; the funeral idiomela teach the doctrine of death and resurrection over the open grave (see John of Damascus and Cosmas; and St. John of Damascus: Canons and the Octoechos). In each case the hymn is the doctrine made audible and prayed — “just as the icon makes the Incarnation visible, the canon makes the dogma audible” (the formulation of the Damascene collection, canons-and-octoechos.md).

The Hymn as Guard of Orthodoxy

Because the hymns carry the dogma, they also guard it — and, in the wrong hands, could betray it. The iconoclast controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries turned in part on hymnography: the iconophiles composed hymns confessing the veneration of images, and the triumph of Orthodoxy in 843 was itself commemorated in a new liturgical office, the Synodikon of Orthodoxy read on the First Sunday of Great Lent, and in the hymnography of that Sunday (see The Studite Hymnographers). The heretics understood the stakes as well as the Orthodox: heretical parties in the early Church, from the Gnostics to Arius with his Thalia, propagated their teaching in song precisely because song embeds doctrine in memory and affection (Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1961, on the early use of hymnody in doctrinal controversy). St. Ephrem the Syrian’s madrāšê, composed to counter the popular hymns of Bardaisan and the Arians, are the great early instance of orthodox hymnody deployed as a weapon against heresy (Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem, Cistercian, 1992). The Byzantine tradition inherited this understanding: to fix the Church’s poetry was to fix the Church’s confession, and the service books became, over centuries, a settled and self-consistent body of sung theology that could be trusted to teach nothing contrary to the faith.

This is why the Church has been careful about what enters her books. A hymn received into liturgical use acquires a kind of authority — not the authority of a conciliar definition, but the standing of a text the Church prays as her own (treated in Hymnography within Holy Tradition). The corollary is that hymnography is a theological source that must itself be read theologically: its idiom is doxological and poetic, given to hyperbole and paradox, and it teaches doctrine in the mode of praise rather than of definition. The dogmatic content is real, but it is carried in a poetry that intends to move the heart to worship, not to serve as a set of propositions abstracted from prayer.

Doxology as the Form of Knowing

The deepest claim of the Orthodox tradition about its hymnography is that praise is not merely a vehicle for theology but is itself the proper form of theological knowing. The tradition’s most quoted definition of the theologian — attributed to Evagrius of Pontus — makes prayer the criterion: “If you are a theologian, you will pray truly, and if you pray truly, you are a theologian” (Evagrius, On Prayer 60; trans. in The Philokalia, vol. 1, Faber, 1979). On this understanding, the highest theology is not discourse about God but address to God, and the hymns of the Church — which are precisely address to God and to His saints, in the second person, in praise — are theology in its most native form. When the Church sings “It is truly meet to bless thee, the Theotokos,” or “The day of Resurrection! Let us be radiant, O peoples!”, she is not illustrating a doctrine held elsewhere; she is doing theology in the only way the tradition finally trusts it to be done — on the knees, in the choir, in praise. This is the conviction that makes a study of Orthodox hymnography a study of Orthodox theology, and it is the ground on which everything that follows in this collection is built.

References

Wellesz, Egon. A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961. (Hymnody in doctrinal controversy; the forms of Byzantine hymnography.)
Schmemann, Alexander. Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Trans. Asheleigh Moorhouse. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1966. (Worship as the locus of theology; lex orandi.)
Wybrew, Hugh. The Orthodox Liturgy: The Development of the Eucharistic Liturgy in the Byzantine Rite. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1990. (The principle of lex orandi, lex credendi.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The liturgical theology of the neo-patristic revival.)
Brock, Sebastian. The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem the Syrian. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1992. (Ephrem’s hymns against Bardaisan and Arius.)
The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. (The tones and the dogmatika.)
The Philokalia, vol. 1. Trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1979. (Evagrius, On Prayer 60.)
Scripture and councils: Ephesus (431), the Theotokos; Chalcedon (451), the Definition of the two natures.