Hymnography and the Shape of a Feast

A Great Feast is not a day but a form — a structure of preparation, celebration, and prolongation, filled with a body of hymnography that is itself dense theology. This file treats the building-blocks of the festal texts (troparion, kontakion, canon) and the shape of the festal cycle (vigil, forefeast, afterfeast, leave-taking), showing how the Church builds each feast as a season and teaches its doctrine in song.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Hymnography as theology

The primary theology of a feast is its hymnography. Long before most Orthodox read a work of dogmatics, they knew the faith from the texts sung on the feasts — which is why the tradition holds that the Church’s lex orandi, her law of prayer, is her lex credendi, her law of belief (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, SVS Press, 1966, on liturgy as the Church’s theology; and see Orthodoxy: Liturgy as Theology for the Scriptural saturation of the texts). The festal hymns are not devotional decoration but compressed doctrine: the Nativity kontakion of St Romanos is a Chalcedonian confession in verse, the Transfiguration kontakion a summary of Palamite theology, the Pentecost kontakion a reading of Babel reversed. To learn the feasts is, in large part, to learn their hymns.

The building-blocks: troparion, kontakion, canon

Several fixed genres carry the theology of every feast, and each was cited repeatedly in the feast-files of this collection.

The troparion (Greek apolytikion) is the short principal hymn of the feast, sung at Vespers, Matins, and the Liturgy, stating the feast’s meaning in a sentence or two. It is the hymn a worshiper most readily memorizes: “Your Nativity, O Christ our God, has shone upon the world the light of knowledge” (Nativity); “When You were baptized in the Jordan, O Lord, the worship of the Trinity was made manifest” (Theophany) (The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Ware, Faber, 1969, the troparia of the feasts).
The kontakion, with its opening stanza and following oikos (strophe), gives a fuller poetic statement. The genre reached its height in the sixth-century St Romanos the Melodist, whose kontakia were long metrical sermons; the surviving kontakia of the feasts are usually the proem and first oikos of these longer works (José Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode, and the introduction to St Romanos the Melodist: On the Life of Christ, trans. Ephrem Lash, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995). The Nativity kontakion — “Today the Virgin gives birth to him who is above all being” — is the classic example (The Festal Menaion, p. 279; and see The Nativity of Christ).
The canon, sung at the festal Matins, is the great structure of Byzantine hymnography: nine odes (the second usually omitted), each keyed to one of the biblical canticles, each built of a heirmos (model stanza) and troparia. The canons of the feasts are the work of the greatest hymnographers — St John of Damascus, St Cosmas of Maïuma, St Andrew of Crete — and the Paschal Canon of John of Damascus is the summit of the genre (The Festal Menaion and The Pentecostarion, the festal canons; Egon Wellesz, A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon, 1961, on the canon and its authors). The katavasiai — the heirmoi repeated as refrains — are themselves a signal of the season: from the Entrance of the Theotokos the katavasiai of the Nativity (“Christ is born, give ye glory”) are sung, tuning the whole pre-Christmas period to the coming feast (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga, 1900, on the katavasiai; and see The Entrance of the Theotokos).
The stichera (verses inserted among the psalm-verses at Vespers and Matins), the exaposteilaria, and the festal antiphons and megalynarion (“It is truly meet” replaced by a proper hymn) fill out the services, each carrying its portion of the feast’s doctrine (The Festal Menaion, the propers).

The vigil

The Great Feasts are marked liturgically by the All-Night Vigil (agrypnia), the joining of Great Vespers, Matins (Orthros), and the First Hour into a single extended service kept on the eve. The Vigil is the surest external sign of a feast of high rank: it includes the festal Old Testament readings (paremias) at Vespers, the lity and blessing of loaves, the festal Gospel and the anointing at Matins, and the singing of the canon (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga, on the structure of the Vigil; Ware, in The Festal Menaion, Introduction). The Vigil is where the fullest hymnography of the feast is deployed, and where forefeast anticipation gives way to the feast itself.

The shape of the cycle: forefeast, afterfeast, leave-taking

The most distinctive structural feature of a Great Feast is that it is extended into a season, by the same logic that gave Pascha its bright week (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, on the festal structure; and see The Twelve Great Feasts and the Calendar, where the calendrical side is treated).

The forefeast (proheortia, predprazdnstvo) is a period of anticipation, of one day for most feasts but five for the Nativity of Christ and four for Theophany, in which the hymns begin to sound the coming celebration before it arrives. The forefeast hymns of the Nativity, for instance, are modeled on those of Holy Week, casting the approach to Bethlehem as a solemn procession (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga; The Festal Menaion, the forefeast propers).
The afterfeast (metheortia, poprazdnstvo) prolongs the feast for several days, during which the festal hymns continue to be sung alongside the daily commemorations, so that the Church does not leave the feast at once but dwells in it.
The leave-taking or apodosis (otdanie) is the solemn last day of the afterfeast, on which the full festal propers are repeated as a formal farewell to the feast — an unusual and moving feature by which the Church “sends off” what she has celebrated (Ware, in The Festal Menaion, Introduction; ODB = The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Kazhdan, Oxford, 1991, s.v. “Apodosis”). The length of these periods, and the date of the apodosis, are fixed by the Typikon and vary from feast to feast — the Meeting’s afterfeast may be cut short by Lent, the Dormition’s runs to 23 August, the Nativity’s and Theophany’s are shaped by the twelve days between them.

The whole feast as a form

Seen together, these elements make the Great Feast a single extended form: days of forefeast tuning the ear to the coming celebration; the All-Night Vigil in which the fullest hymnography is unfolded; the feast-day Liturgy with its proper antiphons, readings, and megalynarion; the days of afterfeast in which the feast lingers; and the apodosis by which it is taken leave of. The theology is carried through the whole shape. The Church does not merely mention a mystery on its day and move on; she keeps it — approaches it, celebrates it at length, dwells in it, and formally releases it — so that the worshiper lives inside the feast for a season and receives its doctrine not as information but as a period of the year inhabited. This durative, cyclical keeping of the feasts is the ordinary way most Orthodox Christians have received the faith: not first as system, but as the year sung (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, ch. 4; For the Life of the World, SVS Press, 1973, ch. 3).

References

The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. (The troparia, kontakia, canons, and stichera of the fixed feasts; the Introduction on the structure of a feast.)
The Pentecostarion. Trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery. Boston, 1990. (The Paschal Canon and the movable feasts’ hymnography.)
Schmemann, Alexander. Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1966.
St Romanos the Melodist: On the Life of Christ — Kontakia. Trans. Ephrem Lash. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995.
Egon Wellesz. A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961.
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Ed. A. Kazhdan et al. Oxford, 1991 (s.v. “Kontakion,” “Kanon,” “Apodosis”).
Bulgakov, Sergei V. Nastolnaya Kniga. 2nd ed., 1900.