The Kontakion and Romanos the Melodist

St. Romanos the Melodist (c. 490 – c. 556) brought the kontakion to its classical perfection in sixth-century Constantinople — the sung verse-sermon that dominated Byzantine hymnody for a century and a half. This file treats the works: the form Romanos shaped, his authentic corpus, the theology he sang, and the later eclipse of the genre. His biography is deferred to the dedicated collection.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

The Poet and His Age

St. Romanos the Melodist — ho Melōdós, “the Melodist” — is the supreme master of the kontakion and one of the greatest liturgical poets in the history of the Church. He was a deacon, of Syrian and probably Jewish descent, who came from Emesa (Homs) by way of Beirut to Constantinople in the reign of the Emperor Anastasius, and worked in the capital through the age of Justinian, reposing around 556 (the biography, the legend of his poetic gift received from the Theotokos, and the dating are treated in St. Romanos the Melodist; on the sources and the “gift” tradition see St. Romanos: History and Hagiography). This file leaves the life aside and treats the achievement: the kontakion as Romanos made it, and what it did in the Church’s worship.

The Sung Sermon

The kontakion in Romanos’s hands is a long poem that is also a homily — a verse sermon sung, in the cathedral vigil, by a soloist chanting from the ambo with the people answering the refrain (Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance, Paris, 1977; and see St. Romanos: The Genre). Its classical form is fixed: an introductory strophe, the prooimion (or koukoulion), sets the theme and states the refrain; there follow a long series of metrically uniform strophes, the oikoi — often eighteen to twenty-four of them — each built on the same rhythmic-melodic model (the heirmos or first stanza fixing the pattern), each closing with the shared refrain (ephymnion), and the whole carrying an acrostic spelled down the initial letters of the strophes. Romanos signed his kontakia with the acrostic τοῦ ταπεινοῦ Ῥωμανοῦ, “of the humble Romanos” — the self-abasing signature that lets us recover his authentic work (Grosdidier de Matons, 1977; and see St. Romanos: Metre, Music and Performance).

The kontakion’s genius is dramatic. Romanos does not merely narrate a feast; he stages it, giving speeches to its figures — the Virgin at the manger, Mary at the tomb, the harlot with her ointment, Abraham and Isaac on the mountain, the Devil and Death in dialogue — so that the scriptural scene is played out as a sung drama and the congregation is drawn inside it (see St. Romanos: The Dramatic Dialogues). The refrain, repeated at the close of every oikos, is the people’s part: a single line that gathers the meaning of the whole and binds the strophes into one meditation. This is the manner — a single recurring refrain, uniform strophes, sustained dramatic narrative — that is the baseline against which the Akathist’s divergent form is measured (see The Authorship Question).

The Authentic Corpus

Romanos was extraordinarily prolific: later tradition credited him with a thousand kontakia, and while that figure is a round hyperbole, the surviving corpus is large. The critical edition of Maas and Trypanis distinguishes the genuine kontakia (cantica genuina) from the doubtful (cantica dubia), and the modern Sources Chrétiennes edition of Grosdidier de Matons made the authentic corpus available with French translation (Maas and Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica Genuina, Oxford, 1963; Cantica Dubia, 1970; Grosdidier de Matons, ed., Romanos le Mélode, Hymnes, Sources Chrétiennes 99, 110, 114, 128, 283, Paris, 1964–1981; and see St. Romanos: The Authentic Kontakia). The most celebrated of all is the Nativity kontakion, Ἡ Παρθένος σήμερον — “Today the Virgin gives birth to the pre-eternal God” — which was so beloved that, by long tradition, it was sung at the imperial banquet table at Christmas and whose prooimion and first oikos survive in the services to this day as the Nativity kontakion (see St. Romanos: Today the Virgin). Notably, the Akathist is not among the kontakia the critical editors count as securely Romanos’s — its exclusion from the authentic corpus is part of the evidence in the authorship debate (Grosdidier de Matons, 1977; see The Authorship Question).

The Theology Sung

Romanos is a theologian in verse. His kontakia sing the Incarnation with a christological precision drawn from the Cappadocian Fathers and the Council of Ephesus: the Virgin bears “the pre-eternal God,” the “little Child, God before the ages,” the paradox of the Creator contained in the creature stated again and again in the mode of wonder (see St. Romanos: Christology and Mariology Sung). His penitential kontakia — on the Prodigal Son, on the harlot, on the Last Judgement — sing a theology of repentance that would find its greatest later echo in Andrew of Crete’s Great Canon (see St. Romanos: The Theology of Repentance). Throughout, the doctrine is carried in the idiom of drama and praise: Romanos preaches by making the congregation overhear the Virgin’s wonder, the harlot’s boldness, the Devil’s dismay. This is the sung dogma treated in Hymnography as Dogma Sung — theology in doxology, the councils versified for the people to sing.

The Golden Age and Its Eclipse

The century and a half from Romanos to the rise of the canon was the golden age of the kontakion, when the sung verse-sermon was the great vehicle of Byzantine liturgical poetry. That age ended. From the seventh and eighth centuries the canon — the multi-ode form perfected at Mar Saba by Andrew of Crete, Cosmas of Maiuma, and John of Damascus — displaced the kontakion from its central place at Matins (see Andrew of Crete and the Great Canon; John of Damascus and Cosmas). The kontakia were not abolished but progressively truncated: in the received services only the prooimion and first oikos of a kontakion survive, sung after the sixth ode of the canon, and the long dramatic poem behind them fell out of use (Metropolitan Cantor Institute, “Kontakia,” mci.archpitt.org; and see St. Romanos: The Surviving Fragments). Of Romanos’s thousand kontakia, the Church now sings only stumps — except that one complete kontakion, the Akathist, survived whole, a single standing cathedral among the ruins (see The Structure and the Chairetismoi).

The eclipse of the kontakion is one of the great turns in the history of Orthodox hymnography, and it explains the shape of the services as they now stand: the “kontakion and oikos” a worshipper hears at Matins are the last fragment of the form Romanos brought to perfection, preserved like a fly in amber within the newer architecture of the canon. Romanos himself, however, was never forgotten: he is venerated as the patron of Orthodox hymnographers, his Nativity kontakion is still sung every Christmas, and the modern rediscovery of his corpus — by Pitra, Krumbacher, Maas, Trypanis, Grosdidier de Matons, and their successors — has restored him to his place as one of the supreme poets of the Christian East (see St. Romanos: Modern Scholarship).

See Also

References

  • Grosdidier de Matons, José. Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie religieuse à Byzance. Paris: Beauchesne, 1977; and Romanos le Mélode, Hymnes, Sources Chrétiennes 99, 110, 114, 128, 283. Paris: Cerf, 1964–1981. (The kontakion form; the acrostic signature; the authentic corpus.)
  • Maas, Paul, and C. A. Trypanis, eds. Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica Genuina. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963; Cantica Dubia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. (Genuine versus doubtful kontakia.)
  • Lash, Ephrem (Archimandrite), trans. On the Life of Christ: Kontakia. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995. (English translations of Romanos.)
  • Metropolitan Cantor Institute. “Kontakia.” mci.archpitt.org/liturgy/Kontakia.html. (The classical kontakion and its truncation.)