Kassia's Hymn on the Sinful Woman and the Biblical Mosaic Of

chapter 7 The Tears of a Harlot: Kassia’s Hymn On the Sinful Woman and the Biblical Mosaic of Salvation Andrew Mellas Stories of harlots who transformed their lives and transfigured their eros were powerful images of conversion in Byzantium.1 One of these stories was most poignantly experienced during the liturgical journey through Holy Week, where the performance of hymns, Scripture and homilies devoted to the theme of the sinful woman who anointed Jesus, enshrined the harlot in the Christian imagination as a paragon of repentance and an exemplar of how human desire could become divine passion.2 This chapter will explore how hymnody expli- cated and amplified the biblical reading associated with Holy Wednesday.3 One of these hymns in particular—On the Sinful Woman—a sticheron idiomelon4 composed by the ninth-century hymnographer Kassia5 and sung on Holy Wednesday, evokes a curious tension between paradisal nostalgia and the es- chaton, enacting the transformation of the woman who had fallen into many sins. The tears of the harlot who is the protagonist of the hymn, her repentance at the feet of Christ and her elevation to a myrrhbearer, open a liminal space where Creation, Fall, Incarnation and Passion are glimpsed. Although Kassia’s hymn echoes the biblical story associated with Holy Wednesday, the liturgical performance of her song extends beyond this tale, evoking a visual and sonic intertextuality. Kassia begins with a moment in the history of salvation but her textual strategy steps beyond this, giving her audience a panoramic view of the divine 1 On this theme, see Ward 1987; Karras 1990, 3–32; Krueger 2014, 46–48, 152–158. 2 For an exploration of liturgical emotions, particularly compunction, see Mellas 2020. 3 Although Matthew 26:6–16 is prescribed by rubrics such as the Typikon of the Great Church (Mateos 1963, 70), the Typikon of Monastery of Christ the Saviour (Arranz 1969, 233) and the Synaxarion of the Monastery of the Theotokos Evergetis (Jordan 2005, 470), the hymns also draw on Luke 7:36–50. 4 A sticheron idiomelon is a hymn sung after a verse of a psalm and characterised by a unique melody. 5 Kassia was born around the year 810 in Constantinople and died around 865. Several of her hymns were enshrined in Eastern Christendom’s liturgical books. For further background on Kassia, see the three extant letters Theodore the Stoudite wrote to her: letters 217, 370, 539 (Fatouros 1992). See also Silvas 2015, 53–68. © Andrew Mellas, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004439573_009 The Tears of a Harlot 125 economy. Although she dramatises repentance from a woman’s point of view, she also destabilises the identity of her protagonist. The woman who anoints Jesus is a porous figure of repentance who reminds the faithful of how Adam and Eve wept. Kassia’s hymn enacts the fall and exile from paradise and, with the focus on Christ’s imminent Passion, the text calls to mind Jesus’ own tears in the Garden of Gethsemane and the empty tomb the myrrhbearers encoun- ter. This chapter will explore how Kassia’s hymn collapses the biblical past and future into the liturgical present, inviting the faithful to meditate on the biblical mosaic of salvation and identify with the protagonist of the hymn. It probes how liturgical hymns were not simply a remembrance of scriptural events but the enactment of a holy drama that created a space for the participation of the faithful in the mystery of salvation. The liturgical world of Byzantium and its sacred songs embodied “the harmonious habitus that was ordered toward divine things” and it was there that heaven and earth converged in the hearts of the faithful.6 While this chapter will chiefly explore the hermeneutics of Kassia’s hymn, it will also allude to its liturgical, hymnologic and homiletic context. Manuscripts of the Triodion7 and Kontakarion8 contain other hymns that weave to- gether voices and moments in the story of the repentant harlot, which are absent from the Gospels. As well as singing and hearing these hymns, the faithful would have listened to the sermons of John Chrysostom and Ephrem the Syrian on this biblical figure.9 While we can only reimagine how these homilies were performed in the Middle Byzantine period, their emergence in the ninth and tenth centuries as recurring texts that were ritually and liturgically experienced alongside the anthology of hymns assembled at the Monastery 6 Dionysius the Areopagite, The Celestial Hierarchy 1.3 (Heil and Ritter 2012, 9). The English translation is my own. 7 The Triodion is the liturgical hymnbook for the Lenten cycle that contains the hymnography for the pre-Lenten period, Great Lent and Holy Week. I will confine myself to the earliest extant manuscript of the Triodion, the tenth-century Sinai Graecus 734–735. 8 A liturgical book containing a collection of hymns known as kontakia (sing., kontakion) that were performed during the vigil on the eve of a feast. In the tenth-century Kontakarion, Patmos 213, there is a kontakion by Romanos the Melodist entitled On the Harlot, which the manuscript designates for Holy Wednesday (fol. 77v). 9 The evidence for the reading of these sermons is in extant Byzantine liturgical collections of sermons and rubrics such as the Typikon of Monastery of Christ the Saviour and the Synaxarion of the Monastery of the Theotokos Evergetis. See Ehrhard 1936–1939, passim; Arranz 1969, 232; Jordan 2005, 468. The first homily, On the Harlot and the Pharisee (CPG 4199) is a pseudo- Chrysostomic homily. See de Aldama 1965, 396. For the text of the homily, see PG 59, 531–536. Ephrem’s homily On the Harlot (CPG 3952) belongs to the Ephrem Graecus corpus and can be found in Phrantzoles 1998, 86–111..

Load more