Akathist Saturday and the Akathist as a Genre

The Akathist Hymn has a fixed liturgical home — the Salutations of the first four Fridays of Great Lent and the whole hymn on the Fifth Saturday, “Akathist Saturday” — and it became the seed of a whole genre: the hundreds of later akathists, modelled on the one great original, that flowered especially in Russian piety. This file treats the Akathist’s place in the calendar and the proliferation of the akathist as a devotional form.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Byzantine hymnography)

The Akathist in the Calendar

The Akathist Hymn has one fixed and singular liturgical home in the Byzantine year, in the Lenten Triodion. It is appointed for the Saturday of the Fifth Week of Great Lent — the “Saturday of the Akathist” (Greek Sabbaton tou Akathistou) — when the whole hymn, prooimion and all twenty-four oikoi and refrains, is sung as a single great act of praise (Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, “5th Saturday of Lent: The Akathist Hymn,” goarch.org; The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Ware, Faber, 1978). In common practice the hymn is divided into four portions — the Salutations (Chairetismoi, or Staseis, “standings”) — chanted at Small Compline on the first four Friday evenings of Great Lent, with the whole hymn sung on the fifth Friday’s eve (that is, going into the Fifth Saturday), the faithful standing — a-káthistos, “not sitting” — through its length (goarch.org; Lash, orthochristian.com/45826.html; and see St. Romanos: Kontakion and Akathist). The four-fold staseis of the rite map onto the four six-oikos sections of the hymn’s text, so that its literary architecture and its liturgical delivery are one structure seen twice (see The Structure and the Chairetismoi).

The Synaxarion appointed for Akathist Saturday binds this Lenten vigil to the deliverance of Constantinople from the Avar-Persian siege of 626, the thanksgiving to which the martial «Τῇ ὑπερμάχῳ» prooimion was attached (see The Structure and the Chairetismoi and The Authorship Question). The Akathist’s place in Lent is thus a memorial as well as a devotion: the City’s song of victory, become the whole Church’s Lenten praise of the Theotokos. That the one complete kontakion still sung whole should have this fixed and beloved place is a large part of why the Akathist, alone among the kontakia, was preserved entire while the rest were truncated (see The Kontakion and Romanos).

The Akathist Becomes a Genre

The Akathist to the Theotokos was so beloved, and its form so distinctive and portable, that it became the model for a whole genre: over the following centuries, and above all in the modern period, countless new hymns were composed in imitation of it — each called an “akathist,” each built on the same architecture of an introductory kontakion and alternating oikoi and kontakia, each long oikos closing with a chain of chairetismoi and a “Rejoice…” refrain proper to its subject, each short kontakion closing with “Alleluia” (Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1961; and see The Theotokia and Axion Estin). The original Akathist thus gave its name and its form to an indefinitely expandable devotional type: an akathist could now be composed to Christ, to any feast, to any saint, to any wonderworking icon of the Theotokos.

The earliest of these secondary akathists is Byzantine: the Akathist to the Most Sweet Lord Jesus (the “Akathist to Jesus,” Akathistos eis ton Kyrion Iēsoun), whose refrain is “Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me” and which is often associated with the milieu of the Jesus Prayer, is a late-Byzantine composition of uncertain authorship widely used across the Orthodox world (see The Jesus Prayer for the spirituality it draws on). From these Byzantine beginnings the genre spread through all the Orthodox Churches, but nowhere did it flower as it did in Russia.

The Russian Flowering

In Russian piety the akathist became one of the most popular of all devotional forms. From the seventeenth century onward, and with great intensity in the eighteenth and nineteenth, hundreds of new akathists were composed — to Christ, to the Theotokos under her countless titles and icons (the Kazan, the Vladimir, the “Joy of All Who Sorrow,” and dozens more), to St. Nicholas, to St. Sergius of Radonezh, to newly glorified Russian saints, and to almost every feast and holy patron (Wellesz, 1961, on the modern proliferation; the standard accounts of Russian akathistography). The akathist suited Russian devotion perfectly: it was long enough for a real vigil, warm and repetitive in its salutations, easily sung by a congregation, and endlessly adaptable to a new saint or a new icon. Reading or singing an akathist became a staple of Russian parish and domestic piety, a devotion the faithful could offer at home or gather for in church outside the fixed cycle of the services.

This very popularity created a problem of quality and discipline, and the Russian Church responded with censorship and approval. The Holy Synod established a process for reviewing new akathists before they could be printed and used, precisely because so many were being composed, of very uneven theological and poetic quality, and not all were fit to be prayed as the Church’s own (the standard accounts of Synodal-era akathist censorship; and see Hymnography within Holy Tradition on the Church’s continuing discernment over what she will pray). Many submitted akathists were approved; many were not; the process is itself a witness to the principle that the akathist form, however popular, does not by itself confer the authority of the received corpus. The flowering of the genre and the Church’s discipline over it are two sides of one fact: the akathist had become the living, growing edge of Orthodox hymnography, where new devotion was continually being cast in an ancient form.

The Genre into the Present

The akathist remains the one classical hymnographic genre that is still actively composed. Where no one now writes new kontakia in the manner of Romanos or new canons in the manner of John of Damascus for general use, new akathists continue to be written — to newly glorified saints of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to local patrons, and, most remarkably, in wholly new registers such as the modern Glory to God for All Things, the “akathist of thanksgiving” that reimagines the form as a hymn of gratitude wrung from the age of persecution (treated in Glory to God for All Things). The genre that began as a single sixth- or fifth-century hymn to the Theotokos, sung standing in a delivered city, has become the enduring form in which the Orthodox Church still sets her new songs — the living descendant of the one great Akathist, whose architecture it everywhere preserves. That continuity, from the walls of Constantinople to a Soviet prison camp, is itself a witness to the Akathist’s place at the centre of Orthodox hymnography.

References

The Lenten Triodion. Trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1978. (Akathist Saturday; the Salutations on the Fridays of Lent; the Synaxarion.)
Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. “5th Saturday of Lent: The Akathist Hymn”; “The Akathist Hymn and Small Compline.” goarch.org. (The liturgical placement; the four Friday-evening staseis.)
Lash, Ephrem (Archimandrite). “The Akathist Hymn to the Mother of God.” orthochristian.com/45826.html. (The Lenten vigil and the 626 tradition.)
Wellesz, Egon. A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961. (The Akathist as the model of a genre; the later proliferation.)
Standard accounts of Russian akathistography and Synodal-era akathist censorship (used to locate the Russian proliferation and the approval process; cross-checked).