Ὁ τοῦ χρόνου δεσπότης τε καὶ κτίστης κατὰ χρόνου κατῆλθεν ἐν κόσμῳ·
ὁ ποιητὴς ἐγένετο ἐν τοῖς ἰδίοις θελήσας σῶσαι ἡμᾶς·
τὸν Ἀδὰμ ὁ πλαστουργήσας Ἀδὰμ ἐγένετο ἀρρήτως.
The Master and Creator of time came into the world of time.
The Maker was among his own, for he wished to save us.
The One who fashioned Adam became Adam ineffably.Footnote 1
With these words, the Byzantine poet Romanos the Melodist (c. 485–560 AD) celebrated the paradox of Christianity: God, who is beyond time, came into the world of time, the creator entered his own creation. This paradox bears close similarities to the modern narratological concept metalepsis, which describes the narratorial act of an author (creator) entering his/her own narrative (creation), for instance by addressing a character in an apostrophe, or conversely when a character speaks with the author or becomes aware of being part of a narrative. The hymns of Romanos are full of such metalepses; in this article, I analyse how Romanos uses metalepsis when retelling biblical narratives in his hymns (kontakia), sung at night vigils in the Byzantine church in order to connect the world of the listener (the congregation) with the storyworld of the Bible.Footnote 2
In several of Romanos’ hymns, we are sometimes left with the puzzle of who is actually speaking and who is listening. At times, Romanos speaks to or with his characters in apostrophes; at others, the characters seem to address topics and concerns that would have been foreign to the biblical world yet recognizable to a Byzantine audience. These topics and concerns thus have a ‘double relevance’: one for the characters in the storyworld and another for the audience hearing the story. Moreover, the merging of the time of the biblical events with the time of their retelling is sometimes explicitly stated by Romanos, while in other instances, it is merely alluded to. The playfulness of using these techniques when retelling a quasi-mythic past does not only serve an entertaining purpose, but also enables an encounter with the invisible, divine realm. It is intuitive to assume that a god addressed in a hymn is considered to be listening to the words of the singer, just like a prayer, but what of (biblical) characters, saints, or even personified entities such as Hades? The present article examines this question through a close reading of the hymns of Romanos. By placing Romanos’ hymns in dialogue with recent scholarship on the use of apostrophe in ancient Greek epic and song, I argue that the use of metalepsis in religious narrative works in strikingly similar ways across both Christian and non-Christian contexts and across different time periods.
One of the first scholars to explore the appearance of apostrophes to biblical characters in sermons in Late Antiquity was the Syriac scholar Karl-Heinz Uthemann in the early 1990s. He traces a development from the use of prokatalepsis by the preacher anticipating an objection, to the use of fictional interlocutors with whom the preacher feigns a dialogue, and finally to the incorporation of full-fledged dramatic dialogues between biblical characters, as seen in the hymns of Romanos. Uthemann poses the intriguing question of ‘what consciousness of God and biblical figures a speech delivered at that time in a liturgical context presupposed’, a question he leaves open.Footnote 3 Uthemann addresses the question from the perspective of a historian of Syriac Christianity rather than from a narratological one. He emphasizes the context of the liturgical celebration, in that ‘the liturgy makes present or actualizes God’s past salvific deeds. The homily thus becomes incorporated into an event in which God himself is encountered’.Footnote 4 If biblical characters and God were understood as existing and listening, then apostrophes of God and biblical characters may not have been perceived as a fictional play feigning a dialogue by the preacher, but rather as a kind of revelation or epiphany where biblical characters spoke through the preacher’s words.Footnote 5 A study of Romanos’ hymns, which belong to this broader development in early Christian communication, can therefore shed light not only on the literary dynamics of his hymnography but also on its spiritual and liturgical implications.
Uthemann’s question touches on a topic that lies beyond the scope of this article: what is fictionality in the late antique context?Footnote 6 The use of a fictional interlocutor in sermons in Late Antiquity is easy to distinguish in the form of ‘now one might ask’, but what about biblical characters appearing in, for instance, sermons and hymns, where they give more elaborate speeches than in the Gospels: were they fictionalized and seen as inventions of the poet, or were their speeches ultimately a kind of revelation from their eternal heavenly abode, channelled through the pen of the poet? Although this intriguing question cannot be fully explored here, I will return to it in the conclusion.
Metalepsis in Greco-Roman narratives
The use of metalepsis in Byzantine literature in general and Byzantine hymns in particular has not yet been studied thoroughly from a narratological perspective. However, metalepsis has received more attention from classicists, who have explored the usefulness of the concept in ancient literature. The narratological concept of metalepsis was, as Gérard Genette notes in his short book on the topic, annexed ‘from the field of rhetoric to narratology’.Footnote 7 He first introduced the term and concept at the end of the third volume of his highly influential Figures, which was later translated into English as Narrative Discourse. There, Genette defined metalepsis as
any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse [which] produces an effect of strangeness that is either comical (…) or fantastic.Footnote 8
For readers less familiar with Genette’s concepts, such as ‘extradiegetic’ and ‘metadiegetic’, we could rephrase it as a moment when a character in a story suddenly addresses the reader, when authors speak directly to their characters, or when authors or their characters deliberately reveal that the story is fictional. Whereas a substantial body of scholarly literature has explored the concept in modern and postmodern fiction, far fewer studies have examined its use in ancient literature, and almost none have considered its relevance for Byzantine literature.Footnote 9
The Dutch classicist and narratologist Irene de Jong has been a pioneer in adapting narratology to ancient literature; she was among the first to engage with the concept of metalepsis in Homer, notably in her 2009 work on the poet’s apostrophes to the characters.Footnote 10 A few years later, several scholars, in a collective volume, examined the use of metalepsis in images, sculptures, and literature from the earliest Mesopotamian writings, dated to around 1700 BCE, to the philosopher Boethius around the sixth century CE, across several languages and cultures.Footnote 11 More recently, in 2020, classicists revisited metalepsis in the ancient world and began to question the application of (post)modern concepts to the past without taking into account the often very different rhetorical setting in which ancient literature was produced – thus calling for a diachronic narratology.Footnote 12 Concerning the use of apostrophe, Jacqueline Klooster has shown how it not only functioned as a rhetorical device but also created a metaleptic effect in epic and hymns.Footnote 13 Irene de Jong, in turn, has coined the term ‘double relevance’ to describe utterances voiced by ancient heroes and gods in the epinician odes of Pindar. It is precisely these two notions – apostrophe and ‘double relevance’ – that I will employ to analyse similar cases in the hymns of Romanos the Melodist.Footnote 14
For De Jong, the term ‘double relevance’ pertains to utterances that belong to and are announced from within the storyworld of the mythic past but can also be heard as addressed directly to the champion who is celebrated by Pindar’s ode in the present moment of the performance. In other words, an apostrophe by the author addressing a character is a metaleptic move into the storyworld, whereas De Jong’s concept of ‘double relevance’ is a subtler movement out of the storyworld.Footnote 15 Recently, Gail Trimble and Sebastian Matzner have questioned whether there is any movement of, for instance, the author into the narrative or a character breaking out of the narrative in metalepsis. Rather than attempting to determine the direction of these movements, they suggest a ‘shared presence’ that ‘creates a moment of communion in a location of its own’.Footnote 16 In other words, when metalepsis occurs, author, reader/listener, and characters seem to meet somewhere in the present of the narration. For this reason, Matzner and Trimble suggest moving away from the spatial metaphors related to breaking into or out of a narrative.
A recurring and poignant question in studies of apostrophe as narrative metalepsis is whether the characters addressed by the author were understood, in some sense, to be listening – a question that closely echoes Uthemann’s cited above. Klooster analyses the use of apostrophes to the gods in Homer, Apollonius, and Callimachus. Drawing on the classical rhetorical definition of apostrophe, where it simply denotes a turning away – in Latin aversio – from the present audience to address someone absent, she argues that addressing gods in poetry might achieve a different effect. She wonders whether a god or a heroic character addressed in the Homeric hymns or works by Apollonius and Callimachus was not absent but present in some way, as gods are eternal entities ‘who straddle the intradiegetical world and that of narrator and narratees’. Likewise, apostrophe to heroes is related to the apostrophe to gods ‘in that the Greeks imagined Homeric heroes to have been historic entities, theoretically still present somewhere’.Footnote 17 According to Klooster, the effect of this kind of breaking into a storyworld would be less startling for an ancient audience, for whom the gods and heroes were thought to exist,Footnote 18 than apostrophes to clearly signalled fictional characters in modern and postmodern narrative.
Matzner and Trimble, along with Felix Budelmann and De Jong, concur with Klooster that mythical characters and ancient heroes differ from postmodern fictional characters in that they exist both inside and outside texts, however fictionalized they might be in an author’s version of a well-known myth or historical past.Footnote 19 Budelmann, however, moves the discussion in a slightly different direction. For him, the question of the possible existence of dead heroes or gods is less relevant than the readerly investment and the affective relationship readers build with characters: As he puts it, ‘[l]iterature, and especially literary characters, have a reality irrespective of their fictionality. They affect us, and mean something to us, sometimes in lasting ways’.Footnote 20 Apostrophes, in this sense, become an invitation by the author to form a close relationship with past, distant, and mythic characters, making them available, what he in short calls ‘apostrophic reading’.
When the address goes in the opposite direction in what De Jong calls ‘double relevance’, the listener in the present may also form a relationship with a character in the past. De Jong shows how the double relevance operates in the epinician odes of Pindar, composed to celebrate a victor of the Panhellenic games in Greece. These odes would often include a mythic narrative in which a god or a hero gives a speech in the mythic past. Such a speech given by a god in the past might resonate not only with the character’s audience in the mythic storyworld, but also with the victor in the present – or, as De Jong stresses, ‘to put it slightly exaggeratedly, a victor may feel that he is addressed by a mythical character’.Footnote 21 For this reason, she concludes that the epinician ode – as well as the ancient hymn – is ‘the metaleptic genre par excellence’.Footnote 22 As I argue in what follows, the hymns of Romanos are replete with metalepses comparable to those found in Homer, Callimachus, Apollonius, and Pindar. Indeed, one might go so far as to call the kontakia of Romanos the Byzantine metaleptic genre par excellence.
Apostrophe in the hymns of Romanos the Melodist
The use of apostrophe in the hymns of Romanos has been extensively studied by Sarah Gador-Whyte. She demonstrates how apostrophes to biblical characters already appear in early Christian homilies of, for instance, John Chrysostom, Basil of Seleucia, and Leontios of Constantinople.Footnote 23 Gador-Whyte analyses and interprets apostrophes in Romanos’ hymns within the framework of late antique rhetoric rather than through the lens of modern narratological theory. Her approach has the benefit of avoiding any kind of presentism in the reading of the hymns.Footnote 24 The present article, by contrast, adopts a narratological approach, which allows for comparisons across a broader literary-historical spectrum, transcending languages, geographies, time periods, and genres. In this sense, a continuity emerges between the epics of Homer, the epinician odes of Pindar, and the hymns of Romanos, as they all employ metaleptic techniques such as apostrophe and ‘double relevance’; these techniques are not unique to the Christian tradition of storytelling but inherent in all communication. Still, the specific historical configurations of such a universal property of communication may vary widely.Footnote 25
Turning to apostrophes in the hymns of Romanos the Melodist, these most often occur in the midst of a biblical story that Romanos is retelling. At certain places in his stories, Romanos will suddenly address a biblical character, for instance Judas, whom he castigates for betraying Christ in the kontakion On Judas. Footnote 26 In the hymn, Romanos addresses both Christ and Judas. While Christ is depicted as compassionate beyond measure – even the angels are amazed by his mercy, as we learn in stanzas 7–8 – Judas, by contrast, is subjected to a barrage of the harshest epithets Romanos can muster:
Ἄδικε, ἄστοργε, ἄσπονδε, πειρατά, προδότα, πολυμήχανε,
τί γέγονεν, ὅτι ἠθέτησας;
Τί ἰδὼν οὕτως ἠφρόνησας;
Unjust, unloving, unrelenting one, thief, traitor, trickster,
What made you reject him?
What had you seen to make you mindless like this?Footnote 27
The alliteration in this reproach must have had a pleasing effect on Romanos’ audience. Romanos is generally very fond of alliterations, assonances, and wordplays, not least in his reproaches, as this example demonstrates.Footnote 28 Judas is not only attacked with words, but the very sound of those words exerts a strong emotive force and is thus also a pleasurable rhetorical display. Besides this alliterating apostrophe, Romanos refers to Judas in the third person as stubborn (σκληρός, st. 12.3), terrible (τὸν δεινὸν Ἰούδαν, st. 13.1), and altogether a devil (ἔστιν ὅλως διάβολος, st. 13.3). The entire hymn is charged with words deployed like arrows against the arch villain both in the second and third person.
In the middle part of the hymn, we find an interesting passage just at the moment in the narrative when Judas meets the chief priests and asks them what they are willing to pay in exchange for the betrayal (st. 14–15, cf. Matt 26:14–15). At this juncture in the retelling of the gospel narrative, Romanos pauses his story to address the earth and sea:
Ἄκουσον, γῆ, καὶ φρῖξον· θάλασσα, φεύγειν σπεῦσον· φόνος γὰρ συμφωνεῖται.
Listen, earth, and shudder. Sea, flee in haste, for a murder is being agreed.Footnote 29
In this line, we encounter an apostrophe that is difficult to determine: is Romanos addressing the earth and the sea at the time of the betrayal – that is, the time of the event narrated in the gospel – or the earth and the sea at the time when the hymn is performed? The address becomes, in effect, omnitemporal. Also, by pausing the narrative and turning to the present, ‘a murder is being agreed’, Romanos engages in what Monika Fludernik has called a ‘rhetorical’ or ‘discourse’ metalepsis.Footnote 30 Genette had already identified a famous example of this kind of metalepsis in his Narrative Discourse, describing it as a feigned contemporaneity of the time of the telling and the time of the told – as if the events unfold in the instant of their narration. The example is from Honoré de Balzac’s Illusions perdues, where Balzac writes: ‘While the venerable churchman climbs the ramps of Angoulême, it is not useless to explain…’Footnote 31 In other words, the transgression between narrative levels is very subtle and does not disrupt the narrative world.Footnote 32 As I will show further below, we encounter such a subtle metalepsis again in another hymn, but this time voiced from inside the narrative.
After this address to the earth and the sea, the final scolding of Judas demonstrates Romanos’ fondness for rhetorical fireworks of reproach in yet another chain of apostrophes:
Νῦν σου ἐφάνη τὸ ἄπληστον, νῦν ἐφανερώθη τὸ ἀκόρεστον,
ἀχόρταστε, ἄσωτε, ἄσπονδε,
ἀναιδέστατε καὶ λαίμαργε, ἀσυνείδητε, φιλάργυρε.
Now your greed has appeared, now your insatiability has been revealed,
you unappeasable, unthrifty, unrelenting,
you most unashamed and gluttonous, consciousless lover of money!Footnote 33
After assailing Judas with these words, Romanos continues in four stanzas (16–19) to attack and scold him. However, we never hear Judas respond to these harsh words. This silence invites reflection: are these apostrophes only rhetorical, emotional outbursts that seek to both horrify and please the audience and create an outlet for pathos in distress, or might Judas, dead but still alive somewhere, be listening to these words? If thought of as alive, a tormented soul in the netherworld, these words would not only have an effect on the audience but also on the archvillain himself. Indeed, a stanza from the kontakion On the Man Possessed with Demons seems to confirm that the performance directly affects the enemies of Christ. With theatrical metaphors, Romanos tells his audience that by retelling the biblical stories and reproaching the demons and the devil, the fall of the demons is turned into a comedy.Footnote 34 Judas, clearly cast as the devil himself (ὅλως διάβολος), would be beaten to a pulp by Romanos’ performance.
In a few instances in the hymns of Romanos, characters do actually listen and respond. A particularly amusing example of a dialogue occurs in a hymn on the descent to Hades. First, Romanos states that no one knows what really happened at the descent; he therefore proposes to ask someone who was there – none other than Hades himself. Romanos asks the underworld villain:
Εἰπὲ οὖν πρῶτος, Ἅιδη, ὁ ἀεὶ ἐχθρὸς τοῦ γένους μου,
πῶς εἶχες ἐν τῷ τάφῳ τὸν ποθήσαντα τὸ γένος μου;
Tell me therefore as the first one, Hades, the eternal enemy of my race,
how could you keep him who longed for my race in the grave?
Hades, personified, is bewildered and exhausted and replies to Romanos:
Ὑπ’ ἐμοῦ θέλεις, ἄνερ, διδαχθῆναι πῶς ἐμοὶ κατεπέβη ὁ φονεύς μου;
Διαλέλυμαι καὶ οὐκ ἰσχύω σοι ἐρεύξασθαι· ἀκμὴν γὰρ τεθάμβημαι.
You, a man, want to learn from me how my murderer came down to me?
I am dissolved and too feeble to belch out to you – I am still astounded!Footnote 35
Hades is perplexed because Christ has descended into his belly and freed all the dead. In this interview with Hades, the descent and victory over Hades seem to have just taken place, as the subterranean, gluttonous monster is rendered powerless and astonished. Romanos seems to speak with Hades at the time and place of the Resurrection in the past from the time and place of the liturgical celebration in the present (or, indeed, anytime and anywhere this hymn is performed).
The transgression of time and place becomes even more tangible in the following stanzas. In an amusing and ironic turn, Hades seems to be aware of Easter, the liturgical celebration of the resurrection of Christ.Footnote 36 For Hades, the resurrection, the ἀνάστασις, entails the end of the infernal powers; he therefore laments:
ἀνάστασιν καλοῦσι τὴν ἡμέραν μου τῆς πτώσεως,
πανήγυριν τελοῦσι τὸν καιρὸν τῆς ἀπωλείας μου· οἴμοι οἴμοι, τί ἔπαθον.Footnote 37
‘Resurrection’ they call the day of my fall!
They celebrate the time of my destruction! Alas, alas! What I had to suffer!
This strange encounter with the personification of a realm inaccessible to the living produces a metalepsis that is comical and fantastic, as Genette defines the term. We might even go so far as to suggest that Romanos is actually addressing a person or entity that is not a fiction but exists in some sense. While such a suggestion may appear bold, it becomes less so when we consider that Romanos often tells stories about Christ, his mother Mary, and God the Father. Before, during, and after his retelling of a biblical episode, where he will even signal explicitly that he is imagining what, for instance, Christ would say almost in the manner of an ethopoiia, he also addresses these three persons directly in prayer. For the faithful, Christ, the Mother of God, and God the Father are not fictional characters but persons and entities who are believed to exist. In other words, metalepsis in the hymns of Romanos – and perhaps Christian prayers and hymns in general – does not have only a comical or fantastic effect, but also a mystical, non-fictional effect, which establishes a meeting with the divine realm, a revelation.
‘Double relevance’ in the hymns of Romanos the Melodist
When Hades speaks of the anastasis in the passage just cited, this could also be understood as an example of ‘double relevance’. For Hades, the word ‘anastasis’ signifies the end of reign and power; for the audience of Romanos’ hymn, it denotes a liturgical celebration. However, following Irene de Jong’s definition, ‘double relevance’ occurs not when a character in a story addresses the extradiegetical audience or listener directly, but when the audience perceives an utterance addressed to a character in the storyworld as addressed to them. We find several examples of ‘double relevance’ in the hymns of Romanos. In fact, this kind of metalepsis, the ‘double relevance’, is at play so often in the kontakia that José Grosdidier de Matons described some kontakia as ‘un sermon placé dans la bouche d’un des personnages’.Footnote 38
In the example of the kontakion ‘On the Meeting of the Lord’, Romanos retells the brief pericope in Luke 2.22–35, in which the infant Jesus meets the aged Symeon in the temple. While Romanos follows the biblical hypotext, he expands the narrative through extended speeches from the biblical characters. The first such expansion occurs when Mary, on her way to present her newborn child to the temple, becomes anxious and asks the infant how she should address him:
Ποίαν εὕρω, ὑϊέ μου, ἐπὶ σοὶ προσηγορίαν;
Ἐὰν γάρ, ὡς βλέπω, ἄνθρωπόν σε εἴπω, ὑπάρχεις ὑπὲρ ἄνθρωπον,
ὁ τὴν παρθενίαν μου φυλάξας ἀκήρατον,
ὁ μόνος φιλάνθρωπος.Footnote 39
What title can I find for you, my Son?
For should I call you, as I see you, man, you are more than man,
who kept my virginity unsullied,
only Lover of mankind?
Mary acknowledges that the infant is more than man and addresses him with the refrain ‘only Lover of mankind’, first introduced by Romanos in the proem to the hymn. The double relevance is already at play in the refrain, which in most of Romanos’ hymns is voiced not only by the poet but also by the biblical characters.Footnote 40 Outside the storyworld the refrain is a doxological affirmation, within the storyworld it is Mary’s attempt at finding the right title.
She continues trying to find the right words and then engages in doctrinal language that is foreign to the biblical hypotext:
Τέλειον ἄνθρωπον εἴπω σε; Ἀλλ’ ἐπίσταμαι
θεϊκήν σου τὴν σύλληψιν· οὐδεὶς ἀνθρώπων γὰρ πώποτε
δίχα συνουσίας καὶ σπορᾶς συλλαμβάνεται
ὥσπερ σύ, ἀναμάρτητε·
κἂν Θεόν σε καλέσω, θαυμάζω ὁρῶσά σε κατὰ πάντα μοι ὅμοιον,
οὐδὲ γὰρ ἔχεις παρηλλαγμένον οὐδὲν τῶν ἐν ἀνθρώποις,
εἰ καὶ δίχα ἁμαρτίας συνελήφθης καὶ ἐτέχθης.
Γαλακτοτροφήσω ἢ δοξολογήσω; Θεὸν γάρ σε τὰ πράγματα
κηρύττουσιν ἄχρονον, κἂν γέγονας ἄνθρωπος,
ὁ μόνος φιλάνθρωπος.Footnote 41
Should I call you perfect man? But you know my conception was divine.
None of humankind is ever
conceived without union and without seed, as you were, sinless One.
And if I call you God, I marvel as I see you like me in all things,
for you have nothing which differentiates you among humans,
even though without sin you were conceived and born.
Shall I suckle you, or give you glory? For the facts proclaim you
God without time, even though you have become man,
only Lover of mankind.
It is worth quoting this stanza in full as it echoes central doctrines on the two natures of Christ and the role of the Mother of God. As several scholars have pointed out, the theology voiced through Mary (and, as we shall see below, Symeon) aligns with the imperial orthodoxy promoted under Emperor Justinian in the sixth century.Footnote 42 However, we find these doctrines scattered throughout the hymns of Romanos, so the historical doctrinal discussions need not occupy us here, nor what the sources of these doctrines are. What is interesting is that something contemporaneous for the audience of the hymn is voiced not by the poet in his own persona, but through the biblical characters. Romanos grants authority to these doctrines by placing them in the mouth of the Mother of God herself. It is a clear case of ‘double relevance’: within the storyworld, these utterances appear as Mary’s ruminations; outside the storyworld, they function as firm Christological doctrines for the audience. Romanos uses sources such as the Bible and doctrinal formulations, but he does so with a particular purpose: to authorize the doctrines by transmitting them indirectly via Mary as his mouthpiece.Footnote 43
Whereas Mary’s concern is used to promulgate doctrines of the two natures and the sinlessness of Christ, the elderly Symeon ponders the trinity of the Godhead. As he meets the little child, he is afraid but also full of joy. Symeon cries out:
ὁ ὑπάρχων πρὸ αἰώνων καὶ τὰ σύμπαντα ποιήσας·
φῶς γὰρ τηλαυγὲς εἶ, φῶς τὸ τοῦ πατρός σου, ἀσύγχυτον, ἀορίστον
καὶ ἀπερινόητον, κἂν γέγονας ἄνθρωπος,
ὁ μόνος φιλάνθρωπος.Footnote 44
You exist before the ages and you made the universe,
for you are the far-shining light, the light of your Father, unconfused, unbounded
and beyond understanding, though you have become man,
only Lover of mankind
and he continues in the following stanza:
… μείζονα ἄλλον οὐκ ἔχεις ἐπίσταμαι, ἀσυλλόγιστε Κύριε·
ὁ γὰρ πατήρ σου τὸ κατ’ οὐσίαν οὐδέν σου ὑπερέχει·
ὁμοούσιος γὰρ τούτου καὶ συνάναρχος ὑπάρχεις·Footnote 45
…there is none greater, I know, than you, Lord beyond reason;
since your Father, as to essence, does not surpass you at all,
for you are consubstantial with him and, like him, without beginning.
In this speech, doctrines from the Council of Nicaea and the Cappadocian fathers are placed in the mouth of the old man.Footnote 46 If we apply a historical, realistic frame of understanding to this narrative, Symeon utters doctrines that do not belong to his own lifetime but to debates unfolding several centuries later. Romanos thus allows Symeon to deliver a sermon in which doctrine is explained. Inside the narrative, the speech is best understood as a doxology directed towards Christ and the triune God – Symeon is not giving a sermon to God – whereas the speech can be heard outside the narrative as a sermon affirming later doctrine by a biblical character, and not just any biblical character, but a particularly venerable one, as Grosdidier de Matons calls Symeon.Footnote 47
In the following stanzas, Symeon can even foretell the crucifixion of Christ to Mary as well as the rise of heresies that are, strictly historically speaking, unknown to the time of the biblical event:
τὸν σταυρούμενον ἄλλοι Θεὸν μὲν κηρύξουσιν, ἄλλοι δὲ πάλιν ἄνθρωπον,
καὶ ἀσεβείας καὶ εὐσεβείας τὰ δόγματα κινοῦνται·
καὶ οὐράνιόν τινες μὲν ὑποπτεύσουσι τὸ σῶμα,
ἄλλοι φαντασίαν· ἕτεροι δὲ πάλιν ἐκ σοῦ τὴν σάρκα ἄψυχον
καὶ ἕτεροι ἔμψυχον φασὶν ὡς ἀνέλαβεν
ὁ μόνος φιλάνθρωπος.Footnote 48
Some will proclaim the Crucified as God, while others yet again as man,
propounding the doctrines of false religion and of true.
Some suppose his body to be of heaven,
others a phantom; while others yet again say that, from you,
he assumed inanimate – but others animate – flesh,
the only Lover of mankind.
These lines clearly echo heresies condemned at the ecumenical councils. In the storyworld, Symeon foreshadows heresies that would arise in the future, which are well known at the time of the telling. The false doctrines can be heard inside the narrative as prophesies, outside the narrative as a contemporaneous rejection of heretical views endowed with the authority of this particular venerable biblical character.
The second example is a subtler case of double relevance. In the kontakion ‘On Joseph’, Romanos appears to present the figure of Joseph as a model for the Byzantine emperor.Footnote 49 Joseph’s mantle is repeatedly described as purple (πορφυρίδα), whereas it is ‘many-coloured’ (ποικίλος) in the hypotext (Gen 37 LXX). Purple was the colour reserved for the Byzantine emperor. By emphasizing the colour purple instead of referring to the mantle as ‘many-coloured’, Romanos aligns Joseph’s appearance with that of the emperor. The comparison, however, extends beyond clothing. Romanos draws a more direct parallel between Joseph and the Byzantine emperor in stanza six, where Joseph’s brothers call him ‘king’ (βασιλεύς, which would mean ‘emperor’ for Romanos’ audience). In the same passage, Joseph uses language that evokes the imperial court in sixth-century Constantinople:
‘Καλῶς’, φασίν, ‘ἦλθεν ὁ βασιλεύς·
βάψωμεν αἵματι αὐτοῦ τὴν πορφυρίδα·
ἐγκαινίσει πρόκενσον ἐν πύλαις νεκρῶν.’
Ῥουβὶμ δὲ συναλγῶν πάντας πείσας ῥίπτει αὐτὸν
ἐν τῷ λάκκῳ βοῶντα· ‘Οἴμοι τῆς βασιλείας·
τοῦτο νῦν ἐστι τὸ παλάτιον;’ Καὶ ἔκραξε·
Μέγας μόνος Κύριος ὁ σωτὴρ ἡμῶν.Footnote 50
‘Welcome to the king’, they said.
‘Let us dip his purple garment in blood.
He will begin his palace procession to the gates of the dead!’
However, Reuben felt pity and persuaded them to throw him
in the cistern, he who cried: ‘Alas,
is this now my royal palace?!’, and he cried out:
‘Only the Lord, our Saviour, is great!’
First, the brothers also call Joseph’s mantle purple. Second, they use a term not attested before Byzantine times, προκένσον, which denotes a solemn procession from one royal palace to another. As Grosdidier de Matons notes in his edition, ‘it is a Byzantine who speaks this way, not a shepherd from biblical times’.Footnote 51 Finally, Joseph compares – not without irony – the cistern into which he is cast with a royal palace (παλάτιον). For the biblical characters inside the storyworld the words do not have the same meaning as they do for the Byzantine audience in the sixth century. This last example also connects the phenomenon of ‘double relevance’ with tragic or prophetic irony, where the audience outside the storyworld know more than the characters in the storyworld, namely that Joseph will become king and ruler of his brothers. Throughout the kontakion ‘On Joseph’ – and in many other instances in Romanos’ kontakia – this form of tragic or prophetic irony is exploited to the fullest, not only to entertain, but also to merge the time of what is told with the time of the telling.
Night of the living dead
Uthemann’s question nevertheless remains pressing: ‘what consciousness of God and biblical figures a speech delivered at that time in a liturgical context presupposed’. Were biblical characters understood and believed to still be alive somewhere and able to listen and speak? What about the biblical characters Romanos addresses, who seem not to respond or hear the address? Were they thought of as existing in some way? Judas does not reply, whereas Hades does, but the latter case is very rare.
Romanos’ hymn ‘On All Saints and Martyrs’ may provide a clue to the ontological status of saints and martyrs. In the opening stanza of the hymn, Romanos invites his audience to envisage the martyrs as simultaneously present in the heavenly realm and gathered together with the congregation on earth in the here and now of the liturgy:
Οἱ ἐν πάσῃ τῇ γῇ μαρτυρήσαντες καὶ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς μετοικήσαντες,
οἱ τὰ πάθη Χριστοῦ μιμησάμενοι καὶ τὰ πάθη ἡμῶν ἀφαιρούμενοι
ἐνταῦθα σήμερον ἀθροίζονται πρωτοτόκων δεικνύοντες ἐκκλησίαν
ὡς τῆς ἄνω τὸν τύπον ἐπέχουσαν
καὶ Χριστῷ ἐκβοῶσαν· ‘Θεός μου εἶ σύ,
πολυέλεε.’Footnote 52
Having borne witnessFootnote 53 in the whole world and residing in heaven,
having imitated the sufferings of Christ and taking away our sufferings,
they gather together here today, showing that the church of the Firstborn
holds on to the heavenly archetype
and cries out: ‘You are my God,
All Merciful!’
The martyrs do not only reside in heaven, they have also gathered ‘here today’ (ἐνταῦθα σήμερον) in the church, where they cry out the same refrain as Romanos and the audience: ‘You are my God, All Merciful’.
That the martyrs are indeed present is clear when Romanos switches from speaking about the martyrs to speaking to them in stanza five:
Οἱ ἀγῶνες ὑμῶν καὶ οἱ στέφανοι, οἱ ἱδρῶτες ὑμῶν καὶ τὰ θαύματα
οὐδὲ λόγῳ ἑνὶ ὑπογράφονται, οὐδὲ τόπῳ ἑνὶ περιγράφονται·Footnote 54
Your [the martyrs’] fights and victory crowns, your sweat and wonders
cannot be written in one speech, nor be outlined in one place.
Romanos addresses the martyrs in the second person and praises their struggles and victories, which he says – ironically – cannot be written down (yet he writes them down); in the last stanza he shows how their stories become important for him and his congregation as the martyrs and saints through their sufferings have received a special position in heaven where they can intercede on behalf of believers on earth:
Ὑπομείναντες ὄντως ὑπέμειναν καὶ νομίμως ἀθλήσαντες ἤθλησαν·
τὸν ἀγῶνα καλῶς ἠγωνίσαντο καὶ τὸν δρόμον εἰς τέλος ἐτέλεσαν·
τὴν πίστιν ἄμωμον ἐτήρησαν, ἀντὶ πάντων δὲ τούτων τῶν ἀλγεινῶν
παρὰ σοῦ τοὺς στεφάνους ἐκδέχονται·
ταῖς εὐχαῖς αὐτῶν ἵλεως γενοῦ ἡμῖν,
πολυέλεε.Footnote 55
Enduring, they endured truly, and struggling, they struggled lawfully.
They fought the fight well and ran the race to the end.Footnote 56
They kept their faith unblemished, and because of all these sufferings
they receive victory crowns from You.
Through their prayers be merciful to us,
You the All Merciful.
The saints and martyrs are clearly heavenly beings who can be addressed and who engage silently with Romanos and his audience. As many of the biblical characters were saints in Romanos’ lifetime, it is safe to assume that, however fictitious and playful apostrophes to biblical characters were when used by Romanos, there nevertheless was a reality behind the play.Footnote 57 To rephrase Klooster, apostrophe to God, biblical characters, and saints is indeed an address to eternal entities, who straddle the storyworld and the world of the telling. By using apostrophe and double relevance, these characters are not only talked about, but they are also, in a certain way, invoked during the narration, and, as we have seen, on some occasions, do answer. Dead but nevertheless still living eternally, they are invisibly present and listening during the night vigil, in which the kontakion was performed.
Conclusion
In religious narratives like hymns, metalepsis and apostrophe do not function in the same way as they do in rhetoric and fictional narrative. In postmodern fiction, these devices create ‘an effect of strangeness’ and function as a deliberate game played by the author with the reader or viewer. Although metalepsis purports to break the illusion of fiction, it remains within the realm of fictionality and, in fact, intensifies it. In religious narratives, by contrast, metalepsis and apostrophe are not only fictional devices but also means of creating a revelatory encounter with the divine. The characters addressed are not inventions of the poet but heavenly beings invisibly present using the poet as their mouthpiece. They listen and sometimes respond.
In Christian hymns and homilies, narrative techniques such as metalepsis and apostrophe therefore do not signal pure fictionality as inventedness but direct attention towards a higher reality. One might even say that in Christian narratives, especially in hymns, fictional devices and imagined discourse become instruments of revelation in the hands of a poet-preacher – or simply put, baptized fictionality. This expression is a deliberate play on the title of Karla Pollmann’s book The Baptized Muse, which explores how late antique Latin Christian poets appropriated and transformed ancient poetry in the form of centos or biblical narratives in hexameter – effectively baptizing the pagan past. Her overall characterization of Christian poetry in Late Antiquity works for Byzantine hymns (and hymns in general) as well. As Pollmann states, Christian poetry in Late Antiquity is ‘a genre that partakes in both earthly conditions and divine truth’ and which ‘anticipates God’s final coming at the end of time and is simultaneously able to instil truth and freedom in its readers already in the present’.Footnote 58 By retelling biblical stories in a liturgical setting, Romanos merges the past of the biblical events with the present of the audience and the eschatological future, applying fictional techniques in the service of revelation. Metalepsis, such as apostrophe to God and biblical characters as well as moments of ‘double relevance’, becomes a baptized means of Christian persuasion and praise.
Acknowledgements
This article was first presented in a draft version at several workshops. I wish to thank the participants at these workshops for giving me food for thought and highly valuable feedback. The writing of this article has been undertaken within the frame of the research programme Retracing Connections (https://retracingconnections.org/), financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (M19-0430:1). I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Ingela Nilsson, Baukje van den Berg, and Judith Ryder for helping me improve and clarify the arguments in this article.
Uffe Holmsgaard Eriksen (PhD, Aarhus University, 2014) is an independent scholar affiliated with the project Retracing Connections (https://retracingconnections.org/), financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (M19-0430:1), at Uppsala University. His main research interests are Byzantine hymnography, late ancient Christianity, and narratology. He is currently working on a narratological commentary to the Life of Theodore of Edessa together with Ingela Nilsson, as well as a monograph on storytelling in the kontakia of Romanos the Melodist.
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