Saint Romanus the Melodist was born in the fifth century in the Syrian city of Emesa of Jewish parents. After moving to Constantinople, he became a church sacristan in the temple of Hagia Sophia. The monk spent his nights alone at prayer in a field or in the Blachernae church beyond the city.
Saint Romanus was not a talented reader or singer. Once, on the eve of the Nativity of Christ, he read the kathisma verses. He read so poorly that another reader had to take his place. The clergy ridiculed Romanus, which devastated him.
On the day of the Nativity, the Mother of God appeared to the grief-stricken youth in a vision while he was praying before her Kyriotissa icon. She gave him a scroll and commanded him to eat it. Thus was he given the gift of understanding, composition, and hymnography.
That evening at the all-night Vigil Saint Romanus sang, in a wondrous voice, his first Kontakion: “Today the Virgin gives birth to the Transcendent One...” All the hymns of Saint Romanus became known as kontakia, in reference to the Virgin’s scroll. Saint Romanus was also the first to write in the form of the Oikos, which he incorporated into the all-night Vigil at his places of residence
(In Greek, “oikos”).
For his zealous service Saint Romanus was ordained as a deacon and became a teacher of song. Until his death, which occurred about the year 556, the hierodeacon Romanus the Melodist composed nearly a thousand hymns, many of which are still used by Christians to glorify the Lord. About eighty survive.
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Today the Virgin gives birth to the Transcendent One, / And the earth offers a cave to the Unapproachable One! / Angels with shepherds glorify Him! / The wise men journey with a star! / Since for our sake the Eternal God was born as a Little Child!
With a view to the restoration of ancient practice, I will give a brief description of each collection; the list is very incomplete, but does give the principal texts, and as for the others, they will be listed in a future piece of this kind.
Firstly, the Homeric Hymns, certainly the oldest, and some of them the models of divine epic, as well (Demeter, Hermes). However, their hexametrical nature is not representative of cult hymns: the Homeric hymns were composed and used by the same class of poets that recited epic poetry, first as proems to a longer work, but later perhaps independently. They allow for more of the marvellous than does Homer. A hymn to Ares (Hymn 8) that is much later than the rest seems to have more affinities to the Proclean Hymns. The 34th poem is not a hymn but an appeal to hosts. It should be noted that the identity of any of the authors of works known as ‘by Homer’ is questionable and unproven.
The Orphic Hymns are the second large collection along with the Homeric Hymns, albeit from much, much later. They do not represent anything like early, original, ‘true’, hidden, or folk religion. They are recherché, learned, obscure, but not confused, as some would have had it. They should be used with the brain wide awake, because careless use will result in misunderstandings, and the glimpses of lost ‘genuine’ myth and religion should be distinguished from philosophizing, systematizing and speculation — if it were not impossible to completely distinguish them. They certainly preserve much that would otherwise be lost, and are composed in a cosmologically meaningful order (unlike the previous two collections).
The Hymns of Proclus are decidedly Neoplatonistic, and sometimes curious (as when mention is made of the Roman Janus), and they do not reflect folk religion, but philosophical religion; but it is true that philosophy, mythology, magic and religion had reconciled in the late pagan times, and could not be distinguished as clearly as before. The use of Proclean Hymn is smaller than that of the previous collections, I should think — except that Neoplatonist philosophy could well provide a gateway to pagan thought, if it were not buried in pricey scholarly editions that remain, for the most part, untranslated.
The final corpus of real ancient hymnography I will mention is that preserved within the Greek Magical Papyri; here, I think, the likelihood of erroneous interpretation is slight in comparison to the Orphic Hymns, because the material is employed in a very indiscriminate way in the first place. The principal deities addressed are Helios-Apollon and Selene-Artemis; Hekate, though frequently conflated with the latter, is also prominent and deserving of mention. Other divinities of various ranks are also addressed, in verse, prose, and truly poetic (because simply weird to us) ritual. These hymns are not chronologically after those of Proclus, but belong to a different strand of thought, deeply entangled with indigenous Egyptian religion. An obvious point of difference to ‘mainstream’ Greek mysticism is the all-but-complete lack of Dionysiac references. Nonetheless, the worth of the Magical Papyri can hardly be overstated. However, hymnic material is only a fraction of their content.
From a certain point in antiquity, writing poetry became something of an archaism (except for epigrams, I suppose). Prose replaced verse even in hymns, albeit highly rhetorical prose. This happened long before the time of Proclus, who was of course almost an anachronism in his time, anyway (if this is not said too much out of hindsight). Two treatises ascribed to Menander Rhetor give the rules, and some examples, for prose composition of hymns (and praises of people, a related enterprise). Renaissance scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger used him in his Poetices Libri Septem, a handbook for poets, but I don’t know whether he expands on him.
Two prominent examples of prose hymnography are those to Helios and the Great Mother by Julian, the last pagan emperor of the Roman empire. They will be mostly gibberish to anyone as unacquainted with Platonism as I was when I first came across them, and lack the precision and compression of the verse hymns, but are not without merit for the understanding of ‘late’ paganism and solar syncretism.
A final corpus of verse hymns, and the only in Latin among all these, is from the Renaissance: Michael Marullus wrote four books of Hymni Naturales in a variety of metres, which are not only put into a meaningful order, as with the Orphic Hymns, but are really composed to be read in this specific order, as a literary work. The nature of Marullus’ beliefs cannot be ascertained without doubt; but there seems to be little evidence to disprove the assumption of his neo-paganism.
Byzantine hymnographers made use of an extremely rich array of literary techniques since they spoke about that which the 'eye has not beheld, the ear has not heard and has not entered the heart of man' (1 Cor 2:9), about mysteries beyond the limits of human reason, but grasped only by faith. There are many mystical truths in Christianity which, being difficult to explain in prose, are better served by poetry to help the faithful understand.
Hilarion Alfeyev, Theological Popevki: Of the Fathers, Liturgy, and Music
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