Performing Repentance in the Kontakia of Romanos the

Melodist

Sarah Gador-Whyte

Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 28, Number 1, Spring 2020, pp.
89-113 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/earl.2020.0003

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/750937

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]
Performing Repentance in
the Kontakia of Romanos
the Melodist

SARAH GADOR-WHYTE

This article examines the performative nature of repentance in the kontakia of

the sixth-century hymnographer Romanos the Melodist. As liturgical perfor-
mances, Romanos’s compositions create penitent communities situated in a
larger drama of repentance. This article charts the contours of the emotional
community the kontakia seek to establish, and draws attention to liturgically
enacted and physically habituated penitence. Listeners are individually and
collectively written into biblical narratives, experience characters’ humility
and performances of humble grief, and make them their own. As witnesses
and through emotional involvement in penitential displays, they perform their
own repentance. The liturgy is the place where the community comes together
to perform its penitence, and Romanos crafts his kontakia to make baptism
and eucharist central to his community’s identity. This communal penitential
identity is enacted physically, through bodily postures and fasting, and is situ-
ated in places given meaning through the kontakia. Romanos’s performative
repentance creates a new identity for individual worshippers, whose internal
and external dispositions and behaviors are shaped and disciplined as they are
drawn into the performance. Ultimately, his account of repentance moves from
individuals to his whole congregation, which is constructed as a penitent com-
munity which joins the whole historical community of repentant Christians.

Have compassion even now on your people and city.

With your powerful hand, strike down those who are against us.
Through the intercessions of the God-Bearer,
Accept our repentance.1

1. Σπλαγχνίσθητι καὶ νῦν ἐπὶ λαὸν καὶ πόλιν σου, / παλάμῃ κραταιᾷ τοὺς καθ’ ἡμῶν
κατάβαλε / πρεσβείαις τῆς Θεοτόκου, / προσδεχόμενος ἡμῶν τὴν μετάνοιαν (Rom., Kon-
takia 52.Pr.4–7 [eds. Paul Maas and Konstantinos Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi
Cantica: Cantica Genuina (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 447]). The numbering

Journal of Early Christian Studies 28:1, 89–113 © 2020 Johns Hopkins University Press
90    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

With this plea the sixth-century hymnographer, Romanos the Melodist,

opens his hymn (kontakion) on the story of the Ninevites, On Repentance.
Just as the Ninevite king called for compassion on his people, so Romanos
asks for God to take pity on his community and the whole city of Con-
stantinople. It is a community partly formed in opposition—the enemies
he fears are “against us”—but they are not helpless or isolated: Romanos
invokes the help of Mary the God-Bearer (Theotokos). The refrain, which
concludes each stanza and was sung by the assembled congregation, asks
for God to accept “our repentance.” In this article, I argue that Romanos
creates and performs a community of repentance through his kontakia.
I will explore the relationship between individual and communal repen-
tance, and develop an account of how Romanos understands the concept
of repentance.
Recent scholarship on Romanos has opened up new avenues into his
thought and literary qualities, and demonstrated the utility of the konta-
kia for studies of liturgy, theology, self-formation, lay religious practice,
and the Christian literature of the sixth century. As liturgical texts of the
cathedral rite, the kontakia provide a window into lay religious life in
sixth-century Constantinople. They were probably performed as part of an
all-night vigil of readings and psalm-singing, a liturgical event we know to
have been popular with women as well as men, and one which no doubt
attracted catechumens and potential converts as well as baptized Chris-
tians.2 Some vigils included processions through the city, often on the eve
of a feast day, culminating in the celebration of the festal liturgy in the
church itself. The use of a refrain and the dialogic nature of the kontakia,
as well as the popular liturgical setting, made this form of hymnography
particularly participatory. The congregation takes on different roles as the
refrain is spoken by the various characters and is thereby woven into the
fabric of the narrative.
The kontakia range both in style and content and there is debate about
the extent to which one should call them “sung sermons” or simply

used throughout the article is from this edition. I have also consulted the SC edition:
Hymnes, ed. and trans. José Grosdidier de Matons, vols. 1–5, SC 99, 110, 114, 128,
283 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1964–1981). All translations are mine unless otherwise
stated.
2. On the kontakion as part of the vigil, see Georgia Frank, “Romanos and the
Night Vigil in the Sixth Century,” in Byzantine Christianity, ed. Derek Krueger, A
People’s History of Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 61–63; Alexan-
der Lingas, “The Liturgical Use of the Kontakion in Constantinople,” Byzantinoros-
sica 1 (1995): 50–57.
 GADOR-WHYTE / PERFORMING REPENTANCE IN THE KONTAKIA    91

“hymns.”3 Many are dialogic, expanding on biblical narratives through

dialogue between characters, and in these the dialogue is often a scrip-
tural exegesis as well as an engaging dramatization. Such hymns not only
expounded difficult biblical passages using authoritative speakers, but also
facilitated greater audience participation through emotional characteriza-
tion and dialogue. The vivifying effect of the dialogues also contributed to
the sense of liturgical time in which biblical events were seen to happen on
the day they were commemorated.4 Biblical stories came to life through the
kontakia and sixth-century listeners became part of first-century events.
Other kontakia develop on a theme: some reflect eschatological concerns
brought on by recent events, some are heavy with christological concerns.
Still others are more prayerful and inward-looking, focusing particularly on
the individual’s relationship with God and modeling personal introspection.
Romanos also creates a penitential persona, using the poetic “I,” to engage
his listeners and to help them develop their own Christian penitential self,
and this technique makes the kontakia a significant moment in the devel-
opment of subjectivity in Byzantine religious literature for the laity.5 The
kontakia are not autobiographical; rather the penitential persona Roma-
nos uses is a rhetorical tool to engage listeners: it is a means of creating a
subjectivity with which they may identify, a model for penitent behavior.
Given that Romanos’s kontakia were performed liturgical texts, their
performative nature and their liturgical setting are central to understand-
ing them.6 As Christian ritual performances, the kontakia are a means of

3. See Thomas Arentzen, The Virgin in Song: Mary and the Poetry of Romanos
the Melodist, Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 11.
4. Sarah Gador-Whyte, Theology and Poetry in Early Byzantium: The Kontakia
of Romanos the Melodist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 147–52.
See also Georgia Frank, “Sensing Ascension in Early Byzantium,” in Experiencing
Byzantium, ed. Claire Nesbitt and Mark Jackson (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 209.
5. Derek Krueger, Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the
Formation of the Self in Byzantium, Divinations: Rereading Late Antique Religion
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 29–65; Krueger, “The Inter-
nal Lives of Biblical Figures in the Hymns of Romanos the Melodist,” Adamantius
19 (2013): 290–302.
6. Many scholars of Romanos have recently drawn attention to the importance of
liturgical setting and performativity. See Krueger, Liturgical Subjects; Thomas Arent-
zen, “Struggling with Romanos’s Dagger of Taste,” in Knowing Bodies, Passionate
Souls: Sense Perceptions in Byzantium, ed. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Margaret
Mullett (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2017);
Arentzen, The Virgin in Song; Frank, “Romanos and the Night Vigil”; Frank, “Sensing
Ascension in Early Byzantium”; Gador-Whyte, Theology and Poetry in Early Byzan-
tium. Recently, scholars of late antique Jewish and Syriac liturgical poetry have also
92    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

explaining and performing theological concepts. They enable audience

participation in biblical narratives and, by expounding their arguments,
create a deeper understanding of the faith in listeners. Ultimately, the kon-
takia attempt to shape the audience’s orthodox beliefs and influence how
they live their faithful Christian lives.
One central concern for Romanos throughout his kontakia is the sin-
fulness of humans and their need to repent and be forgiven. Individual
introspection, which enables a person to reflect on their personal sinful-
ness and emphasizes the interiority of penitential prayer, is a significant
part of Romanos’s program of penitence for his listeners and has been
the focus of some excellent recent scholarship.7 In this article, I aim to
build on this work by concentrating specifically on the community iden-
tity which Romanos also wants to create and perform. I therefore aim to
develop Derek Krueger’s insight that “While liturgy shaped interiority, it
also formed collective identity.”8 Repentance in late antique orthodoxy
was not only about individual salvation but also about the salvation of the
community as a whole, and further exploration of this aspect of Roma-
nos’s thought can shed light on the religious life of lay communities like
those addressed by the kontakia.9 My emphasis, then, is on communal
formation. Much ancient philosophy, and much late antique philosophi-

employed ­performance theory to analyze their texts. See, for example, Susan Ash-
brook Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagina-
tion, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2006); Laura S. Lieber, “The Rhetoric of Participation: Experiential Elements
of Early Hebrew Liturgical Poetry,” JR 90 (2010): 119–47. On performance theory,
particularly in relation to ritual and liturgy, see Richard D. McCall, Do This: Lit-
urgy as Performance (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Joseph J.
Schaller, “Performative Language Theory: An Exercise in the Analysis of Ritual,”
Worship 62 (1988): 415–32.
7. See, for example, Krueger, Liturgical Subjects; Krueger, “Romanos the Melodist
and the Christian Self in Early Byzantium,” in Proceedings of the 21st International
Congress of Byzantine Studies: London, 21–26 August 2006, ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys,
F. K. Haarer, and Judith Gilliland (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006); Krueger, “The
Internal Lives of Biblical Figures”; Georgia Frank, “Dialogue and Deliberation: The
Sensory Self in the Hymns of Romanos the Melodist,” in Religion and the Self in
Antiquity, ed. David Brakke, Michael L. Satlow, and Steven Weitzman (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2005), 163–79.
8. Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 67.
9. John Chryssavgis, “A Spirituality of Imperfection: The Way of Tears in Saint
John Climacus,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 37, no. 4 (2002): 364. On the collec-
tive (and not merely individual) experience of time through the liturgy, see Andrew
Louth, “Experiencing the Liturgy in Byzantium,” in Experiencing Byzantium, ed.
Claire Nesbitt and Mark Jackson (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 79, 83.
 GADOR-WHYTE / PERFORMING REPENTANCE IN THE KONTAKIA    93

cal, ethical, and religious thought seems focused on the improvement of

the individual. A distinctive element of Romanos’s teaching, I argue, is its
emphasis on communal transformation.
The creation of a penitent community through the kontakia can be best
interpreted broadly under the three categories of emotion, liturgy, and
embodiment. I argue that Romanos creates an emotional community by
modeling humility and its performance through lamentation, through his
penitential persona, by eliciting emotional responses to biblical charac-
ters and events through the use of vivid dialogue, and through the perfor-
mance of the right sort of penitent grief. This community is grounded in
the liturgical rites of the eucharist and baptism and enacted in the liturgy
of the day. Finally, it is also an embodied community, which performs its
penitence through gestures, physical postures, and fasting, and is situated
in places constructed through imagery and metaphor, and thereby made
significant by the kontakia. I argue that Romanos’s kontakia create a Chris-
tian community characterized by certain emotional states and responses,
and shaped by embodied liturgical practices. Romanos’s kontakia thus
form individual subjectivities and communal identities through creating
emotional communities and by constructing particular temporalities and
places for his audience to inhabit.

AN EMOTIONAL COMMUNITY

Medieval historian Barbara Rosenwein has championed the concept of

“emotional communities,” in which a group of people are joined by their
shared expectations of emotional expression.10 Rosenwein argues that
emotional communities are constructed and held together through shared
values, aims, teachings, texts, and ideologies.11 Emotional communities

10. Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” The Ameri-

can Historical Review 107, no. 3 (2002): 842; Emotional Communities in the Early
Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 2 and passim. Rosenwein’s
account of emotions may be usefully augmented and extended by theorizations such as
those of Monique Scheer. Scheer’s theorization of practice links this section on emo-
tion to the categories of liturgy and situated embodiment explored in the next two
sections of the article. See Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is
That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understand-
ing Emotion,” History and Theory 51 (2012): 193–220.
11. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, 24–25. On the
textual communities of late antique Christianity, see Kim Haines-Eitzen, “Textual
Communities in Late Antique Christianity,” in A Companion to Late Antiquity, ed.
Philip Rousseau (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), 246–57. See also notes
82 and 83 below.
94    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

may overlap, various smaller emotional communities may exist within a

larger overarching one, and one person usually belongs to several. In the
context of repentance, I argue that Romanos creates such an emotional
community amongst his listeners, a collective bound by the sort of outward
displays of emotion and internalized feelings he thinks are important for
true penitence. He wants to shape their expectations so that certain emo-
tional responses become normative and others are progressively avoided.
Primarily, Romanos’s ideal penitent community is one which exhibits the
virtue of humility through the emotion of grief.12
We begin at the end of On the Prodigal Son, a kontakion set down for
the second Sunday in Lent. Final stanzas often draw together key aspects of
Romanos’s textual reflection in emotionally charged communal addresses
to God. In this case, Romanos models a joint humble petition for pity:
Son and Word of God, creator of everything,
we, your worthless slaves, beg and pray you,
have pity on all those who call on you.13

Plural forms allow the listeners to be part of this address, and take
on its emotional contours, although they do not literally speak it. They
acknowledge both the power and authority that God the Son and God
the Father have over humanity and their own position as errant creatures
appealing to their creator. Praise is combined with petition. By referring
to themselves as “your worthless slaves,” they acknowledge their lowly
status and confess their need of God. Humility is the virtue espoused here,
drawing on similar ideas (but not identical terminology) in Luke (17.10):
So you also . . . say, “We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we
ought to have done!” The prodigal son humbled himself and begged his
father to be treated as one of his slaves, and Romanos’s congregation is
encouraged to join this group of “worthless slaves” by practicing humil-
ity as part of their penitence.
In this case, the emotional community is formed through open address
to God and loud acknowledgement of sin. Often, however, Romanos
makes his characters model humility through internal transformation
made vocal for the audience:

12. This is not to say that Romanos does not encourage other emotional states in
his kontakia—his compositions also frequently exude joy and hope—but grief is the
key emotion for penitence.
13. Υἱὲ καὶ λόγε τοῦ Θεοῦ, δημιουργὲ τῶν ἁπάντων, / αἰτοῦντες δυσωποῦμεν οἱ ἀνάξιοί
σου δοῦλοι· / ἐλέησον πάντας τοὺς σὲ ἐπικαλουμένους (Rom., Kontakia 49.22.1–3 [Maas
and Trypanis, Cantica, 430]).
 GADOR-WHYTE / PERFORMING REPENTANCE IN THE KONTAKIA    95

She came to you to be saved, silent in sound,

but crying out to you fervently with her hand:
“Savior, save me.”14

The hemorrhaging woman’s action is performative: a speaking action.

In this silent speech, heavily punctuated by sibilance which might give the
auditory impression of whispering, Romanos demonstrates the hiddenness
of prayer, the humility required for repentance, and the inner reflection
necessary alongside the more overt display.15
The best example of this sort of humble subjectivity in the corpus is
On the Sinful Woman.16 Romanos emphasizes that the harlot “was not
redeemed by shouting, but rather saved by silence.”17 Romanos probes her
mind and presents her monologue audibly for the benefit of his listeners,
but her penitent speech is internal. She predicts the disapproval of Simon
the Pharisee and prepares a silent prayer in her own defense (10.8.6–8),
drawing on biblical precedents much like those Romanos uses for his lis-
teners. Even when she does speak aloud to the perfume seller (10.9–11),
she reinstates silence for her approach to Jesus (10.12.1). Romanos’s Jesus
accentuates the importance of silence when he tells Simon to be silent so
that he might be forgiven (10.17.2). Just like the hemorrhaging woman,
the harlot’s penitence is silent and yet audible to God. Romanos accentu-
ates the importance of silence as a marker of humility and penitence while
enabling his listeners to hear and therefore imitate the internal repentance
and prayers of these two women.
Although silent to some other characters, the personal reflections of
these two women are performed audibly in the kontakia, and the congre-
gation becomes part of them. Listeners journey with the penitent women
as they hear and participate in the hymn. Their emotional involvement in
the story through the vivid monologues and dialogues is heightened by

14. Σοὶ προσῆλθε σωθῆναι σιγῶσα φωνῇ, / τῇ παλάμῃ δὲ κράζουσα σοὶ ἐκτενῶς· /
Σῶτερ, σῶσον με (Rom., Kontakia 12.2.4–6 [Maas and Trypanis, Cantica, 89]). On
the silent but speaking action of the hemorrhaging woman, see Krueger, Liturgical
Subjects, 56–59.
15. Krueger, “The Internal Lives of Biblical Figures,” 299–302.
16. On the “mind of the harlot,” see Krueger, Liturgical Subjects, 46–48. On the
eroticism of this kontakion and the harlot’s desire, see Arentzen, The Virgin in Song,
50–51. On the sinful woman as the “icon of repentance,” see Hughes Oliphant Old,
The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church,
Vol. 2: The Patristic Age (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 1998), 17–19.
17. . . . Οὐ κραυγῇ ἐλυτρώθη, σιγῇ δὲ μᾶλλον ἐσώθη (Rom., Kontakia 10.3.9 [Maas
and Trypanis, Cantica, 75]).
96    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

their vocal participation in the refrains.18 And in this way the individual
introspection of the women becomes a communal performance of humility:
throughout On the Sinful Woman they humbly confess with her “the filth
of my deeds,”19 and with the hemorrhaging woman they cry out “Savior,
save me!”20 These are, of course, individual cries; but in the communal
context of the performance, the whole community together also takes on
the characteristics of each biblical exemplum.
Alongside the biblical characters who are used as models of humility,
Romanos also creates a penitential persona which humbly addresses God,
exhibiting the humility and recognition of sinfulness which Romanos wants
his community to enact. In On the Mission of the Apostles, a kontakion
which could have reflected triumphantly on the divine authority given
to the apostles and the success of their mission of conversion, Romanos
chooses to focus on humility and repentance. Romanos has Christ repeat-
edly instruct the apostles to “sow the seed of repentance and water it in
with instruction.”21 This kontakion relates the story of Jesus’s commission
of the apostles to “go out to all nations,”22 but the first stanza is about
Romanos’s speaker. He is set up as a successor to the apostles,23 a move
which naturally endows him with authority, but the focus is on his sins.
The speaker humbly and self-consciously reflects on his own faults both
as a preacher and as an ordinary Christian:
Enlighten my tongue, my Savior, open wide my mouth, and,
       having consecrated it, spur on my heart,
so that I might follow what I say and, from now on, do first what I teach.
For the one who does and teaches everything, they say, is great.

18. Andrew Mellas, “Feeling Liturgically: Reflections on Byzantine Hymnography

and Compunction,” in Creating Liturgically: Hymnography and Music, Proceedings
of the Sixth International Conference on Orthodox Church Music, ed. Ivan Moody
and Maria Takala-Roszczenko (Joensuu, Finland: The International Society for Ortho-
dox Church Music, 2017), 410.
19. Τοῦ βορβόρου τῶν ἔργων μου (e.g., Rom., Kontakia at 10.Pr.1.11 [Maas and
Trypanis, Cantica, 73]).
20. Σῶτηρ, σῶσον με (e.g., Rom., Kontakia 12.Pr.5 [Maas and Trypanis, Cantica,
88]). On the “communal sonic spaces” created by refrains such as these, see Thomas
Arentzen and Ophir Münz-Manor, “Soundscapes of Salvation: Refrains in Christian
and Jewish Liturgical Poetry,” Studies in Late Antiquity 3, no. 1 (2019): 36–55.
21. Μετανοίας τὸν σπόρον / ἐμβαλόντες τῇ γῇ διδασκαλίαις ἀρδεύσατε (Rom., Konta-
kia 31.5.1, 14.1, 20.1 [Maas and Trypanis, Cantica, 243, 246, 248]).
22. Ἄπιτε οὖν εἰς πάντα τὰ ἔθνη (Rom., Kontakia 31.5.1, 14.1, 20.1 [Maas and
Trypanis, Cantica, 243, 246, 248]).
23. Grosdidier de Matons, Hymnes, vol. 5, SC 283:91n2.
 GADOR-WHYTE / PERFORMING REPENTANCE IN THE KONTAKIA    97

For if I speak without acting, let me be considered a clanging gong.

Therefore, grant me to say what is needful and to do what is fitting,
You who alone know what is in [my] heart.24

Romanos uses his persona to create an authoritative model of introspec-

tion. The speaker uses language reminiscent of the Sermon on the Mount
(line 5, Matt 5.19) and of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (line 6, 1 Cor
13.1) to lend his speech authority. The kontakion continues and various
apostles are addressed in their own stanzas, and in retrospect the speaker
appears akin to them. His internal confession is that he does not always
act as he tells others to act. This may not be the sin most applicable to his
listeners, but Romanos models the required method of humble address
to God. And it is also the way the apostles themselves are instructed to
behave. The apostles must practice self-reflection and demonstrate humil-
ity: Christ commands Peter to have compassion on everyone, reminding
him of his own sinful denial of Christ (stanzas 5–6). Each of the other
apostles is individually instructed by Christ, who reminds them of their
particular weaknesses.
The need for internal reflection is reinforced in this kontakion by the
refrain: “You who alone know what is in [my] heart.” Each time the con-
gregation recited this line they were reminded that their inner thoughts
are not hidden from God. This is an example of the kontakia encourag-
ing personal introspection. Romanos hopes that each individual listener
will be spurred on to self-reflection and humble confession through this
kontakion. But he uses the apostles and his own persona to demonstrate
that each listener is also part of a wider penitent community.
Humility, as the most fundamental virtue for true penitence, is performed
in the kontakia through loud grief. Tears can be a means of mediation
between the sinful human and God, as Romanos demonstrates in his role
as the penitent:25 “Lord, I will stir up my tears as intercession to you.”26

24. Τράνωσον μοῦ τὴν γλῶτταν, σωτήρ μου, πλάτυνόν μου τὸ στόμα / καὶ πληρώσας
αὐτὸ κατάνυξον τὴν καρδίαν μου, / ἵνα οἷς λέγω ἀκολουθήσω καὶ ἃ δῆθεν διδάσκω ποιήσω
πρῶτος· / πᾶς γὰρ ποιῶν καὶ διδάσκων, φησὶν οὗτος, μέγας ἐστίν· / ἐὰν γὰρ λέγων μὴ
πράττω, ὡς χαλκὸς ὁ ἠχῶν λογισθήσομαι· / διὸ λαλεῖν με τὰ δέοντα καὶ ποιεῖν τὰ συμφέροντα
δώρησαι, / ὁ μόνος γινώσκων τὰ ἐγκάρδια (Rom., Kontakia 31.1 [Maas and Trypanis,
Cantica, 242]).
25. Mary too is susceptible to human tears. When she sees her ancestors weeping
and hears their cries for pity she is resolved to act as an ambassador for them (Rom.,
Kontakia 2.8.7; 2.10.2; 2.11.7).
26. Κύριε, τὰ δάκρυά μου εἰς πρεσβείαν κινήσω σοι (Rom., Kontakia 18.Pr.2.3 [Maas
and Trypanis, Cantica, 132]).
98    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

In On Elijah, the hard-hearted prophet (45.3.3) knows God’s love for

humanity and how quickly he is moved by human tears.27 Elijah fears
God will be touched by human grief and will not allow him to punish the
impious in the way he wishes. Romanos emphasizes God’s susceptibility
to human tears, putting these words in God’s mouth:
But I cannot bear all the lamentation and affliction of humanity, which
I crafted.
How can I bear either the screaming and the tears of the infants,
or the inarticulate bellowing coming from the beasts?28

Tears in this passage are wordless, suggesting that the deep sadness one
feels about sin can be beyond words, and highlighting again the interior-
ity of repentance. God is touched by the weeping and howling of infants
and beasts, who are each incapable of speaking. (The word Romanos uses
of children [νήπιος] particularly refers to a child who has not learnt to
speak). Just as the sinful woman’s silence and the hemorrhaging woman’s
actions “spoke” to Christ, so the tears appear to be inarticulate and yet
they communicate repentance to God.29 By figuring the sinner as an inno-
cent infant or domestic animal, Romanos again emphasizes the virtue of
humility. Penitent tears must be humbling tears, enabling God to see the
sinner as a helpless child in need of love and forgiveness. Elijah refused to
understand the lamentations of the people, but to God they revealed the
truly penitent grief of his creation.
The king of the Ninevites calls on his people to shout and weep and beg
God for forgiveness, concerned that his own private penitence is insuffi-
cient to save the whole city (On Repentance, 52.10.1–4). The weight of
the sin is too great for the king to carry alone; God is calling for the whole
city to act out its repentance. The king goes on:
So because of this cry out! Perhaps he will be persuaded by your cries
and be moved more by your tears.
Weep, O maiden. Weep, youths,

27. There are many other examples. For instance, in On Peter’s Denial, God is
moved by Peter’s tears and those of the thief (18.20.1, 7); in On the Resurrection 6
Mary Magdalene reports to the other women that she wept and Christ had pity on
her (29.13.12).
28. Οὐ δύναμαι δὲ φέρειν ὀδυρμὸν καὶ θλῖψιν πάνδημον ἀνθρώπων ὧν ἔπλασα· / τῶν
δὲ νηπίων τὴν κραυγὴν πῶς ἐνέγκω καὶ τὰ δάκρυα, κτηνῶν δὲ τὸν ἄσημον / μυκηθμὸν
ἐπερχόμενον (Rom., Kontakia 45.11.4–6 [Maas and Trypanis, Cantica, 371]).
29. Tears speak to God here, and elsewhere Romanos emphasizes the revelatory
power of tears. For example, in Egypt Joseph’s brothers do not recognize him when
he speaks, but he fears that his tears will reveal him (Rom., Kontakia 43.27.8).
 GADOR-WHYTE / PERFORMING REPENTANCE IN THE KONTAKIA    99

weep, young man with your wife, old men and babes,
before the face of the Lord
offer him your repentance.30

The king singles out particular people as well as groups. He addresses

a single “maiden” and the group of “youths,” one married couple, and a
group of “old men” and “babes.” Romanos’s kontakia draw on exempla
which will resonate with different parts of the congregation, while also
stressing the importance of particularly communal grief. And while the
individual can of course stand for the general category, we see here Roma-
nos urging the necessity of harmony between individuals and collectives
in a truly repentant community.
The disciple Peter similarly howls and weeps when he realizes that he has
fulfilled Jesus’s prophecy by denying him (18.18–19). He cries out “alas,
alas” (οἴμοι, οἴμοι)31 and fills the air with hopeless questions about what
he should do now (18.2–5); he puts his hands over his head in despair as
he cries out again (19.3). As Georgia Frank has noted, Peter’s weeping is
loud and sensual and styled as a threnos, the traditionally female form of
lament of the dead.32 It is hard to know the extent to which Romanos’s
audience would have been shocked by this feminizing of Peter. It was not
the way virtuous Christian men were expected to behave, and various
theologians even argued against women performing the threnos, as such
excessive grief was essentially a denial of the resurrection.33 The episode is

30. Διὰ τοῦτο οὖν κραύγασον· τάχα τοῖς σοῖς πείθεται / καὶ τοῖς δάκρυσί σου
μᾶλλον ἐπικάμπτεται· / κλαῦσον, ὦ νύμφη, κλαύσατε, νέοι, / κλαύσατε, νεανίσκος σὺν
παρθένῳ, πρεσβῦται καὶ νήπια, / ἐνώπιον κυρίου / προσενέγκωμεν <αὐτῷ> τὴν μετάνοιαν
(Rom., Kontakia 52.10.5–10 [Maas and Trypanis, Cantica, 451]).
31. Rom., Kontakia 18.18.2 (Maas and Trypanis, Cantica, 139).
32. Frank, “Romanos and the Night Vigil,” 75. On the three-part form of the
threnos, see Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1974), 133. See also Darja Sterbenc Erker, “Gender
and Roman Funeral Ritual,” in Memory and Mourning: Studies on Roman Death,
ed. Valerie M. Hope and Janet Huskinson (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2011), 69. On
Greek visual depictions of male and female mourning, see Anthony Corbeill, Nature
Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 72.
33. John Chrysostom labeled the threnos both self-indulgent and blasphemous:
Alexiou, The Ritual Lament, 28; Gail Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices: Women’s
Laments and Greek Literature (London: Routledge, 1992), 138. See also Basil of
Caesarea, Hom. 4 (PG 31:229c); Alexiou, The Ritual Lament, 28. Augustine also
saw tears of grief as opposed to the hope of immortality: Susan Wessel, Passion and
Compassion in Early Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016),
105. The Romans also disliked such intense expressions of grief at funerals: Corbeill,
Nature Embodied, 75.
100    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

certainly complex. The portrayal does seem to be somewhat jarring and its
shocking nature may have been aimed at eliciting a full-bodied repentance
from the audience of the kontakion. The discordance the audience may feel
represents the depth of sin. In this reading, vocal, embodied, and culturally
unacceptable grief is the only possible human response to sin and separation
from God given the chasm sin creates between creatures and their creator.
But, as Georgia Frank argues, Peter’s performance of an essentially
feminine lament form also makes his grief inclusive: all penitents, male
and female, can join him in lamenting.34 I agree with the conclusion here,
but I wonder if the inclusivity comes about partly through genre as well
as through gender. Byzantine participants in hymn-singing were accus-
tomed to performing the roles of different characters in hymnody, both
male and female.35 In this kontakion Peter plays the role of leader to the
people, drawing all people into his performance of grief to perform their
own. Romanos’s congregation participates in this performance, men and
women both enacting penitent grief as they face Peter’s and thereby their
own sinfulness. By sharing Peter’s grief, they perform their inclusion in the
community of disciples and the wider community of penitent Christians.
Nor were such deep expressions of grief universally admonished.
Although not condoning worldly grief, monastic sources, for example,
show monks desiring to express grief of the same intensity as the threnos.
A monk witnesses a grieving widow and wishes he could be filled with the
same depth of sorrow, not about the death of a loved one, but rather over
his own sinfulness and the great abyss between humanity and God.36 But
although each person individually needs to weep, Romanos argues that
community support is key to repentance. After his threnos-like lamenta-
tion, Peter addresses his friends:
. . . “Alas, servants of Christ,
I have already fulfilled Christ’s prophecy
concerning my triple denial.
So, weep with me, and as you mourn say to me,
‘Where are your love and your zeal? Where are your faith and vigilance?
How did you distract your mind, Peter, and not cry out,
“Hurry, Holy One, save your flock”?’”37

34. Frank, “Romanos and the Night Vigil,” 75.

35. Ashley Purpura, “Beyond the Binary: Hymnographic Constructions of Eastern
Orthodox Gender Identities,” JR 97, no. 4 (2017): 544–45.
36. John Wortley, trans., The Book of the Elders, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers:
The Systematic Collection (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2012), sections 24 and 25.
37. . . . “Οἴμοι, δοῦλοι Χριστοῦ· /  ἤδη ἐπλήρωσα Χριστοῦ τὴν προφητείαν  /  ἐπὶ τῇ
ἀρνήσει ἐμοῦ τῇ τριπλῇ· / συγκλαύσατέ μοι οὖν καὶ θρηνοῦντες λέξατε μοί· / ‘ποῦ ὁ πόθος
GADOR-WHYTE / PERFORMING REPENTANCE IN THE KONTAKIA    101

The reproof of his fellow disciples will keep Peter contrite and their tears
will join with his in recognition of and sadness at his sin and their shared
brokenness which can only be healed by the “Holy One” who saves his
flock. The right sort of grief is communal, which laments personal sin with
the simultaneous acknowledgement of the sinfulness that is the general
human condition. Peter’s communal lament is, of course, being performed
within Romanos’s congregation, so that the act of repentance becomes an
act of liturgical lamentation, set within the wider narrative of human sin
and divine salvation. The biblical character’s sin and mourning become,
within the liturgy, the community’s acknowledgement of human sinful-
ness and divine mercy.
Two of Romanos’s most apocalyptic hymns refer to this sort of com-
munal weeping. Fear produces grief throughout the earth in On the
Second Coming (34.14.2) and hope seems to be rather thin. Romanos’s
vision of the eschaton urges people to repentance through fear of eternal
punishment. The prayer at the end of this kontakion is for time to repent
(24.6). By contrast, in On Earthquakes and Fires (54.18–19) the cries of
the emperor and empress and the grief of the whole city (19.8) elicit a
compassionate pity in God, who saves the city. In both hymns, Romanos
emphasizes the need for communal repentance, acknowledging not only
individual sinfulness but general human transgression.
Romanos helps his listeners perform their own repentance through par-
ticipation in Peter’s and the Ninevite king’s divinely sanctioned penitent
grief. He also plays out their membership of a community apprehensively
awaiting the eschaton and crafts the communal response. In these ways, his
listeners learn how to weep properly, exhibiting the sort of “joy-­bearing”
grief God desires and not the kind of worldly grief which widens the chasm
between humanity and God.38 But Romanos is also able to make use of
apparently unacceptable grief to coax his listeners to true penitence. In On
Mary at the Cross, Mary weeps almost continually as she tries to under-
stand her son’s death. But rather than being moved by her tears, Christ
repeatedly tells her to stop weeping:39

καὶ ζῆλος; ποῦ ἡ πίστις καὶ νῆψις; / ποῦ τὸν νοῦν, Πέτρε, μετεώρισας καὶ οὐκ ἔκραξας· /
σπεῦσον, σῶσον, ἅγιε, τὴν ποίμνην σου’” (Rom., Kontakia 18.19.4–10 [Maas and Try-
panis, Cantica, 140]).
38. On “joy-bearing” grief, see Hannah Hunt, Joy-Bearing Grief: Tears of Contri-
tion in the Writings of the Early Syrian and Byzantine Fathers (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
39. Similarly, in On the Nativity 2 the Christ-child tells Mary not to weep about
his future death to save humanity. See Rom., Kontakia 2.17.9–10.
102    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

Put away, Mother, put away your grief.

It is not fitting for you to mourn, for you were named Full of Grace.
Do not obscure your title with weeping.
Do not make yourself like those women without understanding,
                    all-wise Maiden.
You are at the heart of my bridal chamber.
So do not, as though you stood outside, waste away your soul.40

In contrast to some monastic sources, in which Mary’s grief is seen as a

model of deep penthos (the right sort of grief),41 Romanos’s Jesus links her
weeping with ignorance and lack of wisdom; Mary expresses the wrong
sort of grief. Mary’s weeping lessens who she is; it is not fitting for someone
chosen by God to behave this way. Her lament aligns her with the fool-
ish virgins who were unprepared and found themselves locked out of the
bridal chamber (6).42 This sort of grief is associated with (other) women:
“Do not make yourself like those women . . .” (4). Jesus has pity on such
women in other kontakia (e.g., 19.13.12), but his mother should be in a
different class. Mary’s grief hides rather than reveals: “Do not obscure
your title with weeping” (3). Mary’s title is “full of grace” (κεχαριτωμένη)
and it may be intended as a play on words between “grace” (χάρις) and
“joy” (χαρά).43 Mary’s grief obscures the joy she should feel for humanity
who will be saved because of Jesus’s crucifixion.
Although Mary’s grief is not the right sort of grief, not penitential grief
but rather mourning over a lost loved one, Romanos uses it to help his
listeners perform true repentance. Her authority as the mother of Jesus
Christ and her heart-wrenching maternal mourning enable him to create
an emotional response in his listeners which will draw them into penitent
grief. Mary’s vivid lament is painfully believable for any mother and indeed

40. Ἀπόθου, ὦ μῆτερ, τὴν λύπην ἀπόθου· / οὐ γὰρ πρέπει σοι θρηνεῖν, ὅτι κεχαριτωμένη
ὠνομάσθης· / τὴν οὖν κλῆσιν τῷ κλαυθμῷ μὴ συγκαλύψῃς· / μὴ ταῖς ἀσυνέτοις ὁμοιώσῃς
ἑαυτήν, πάνσοφε κόρη· / ἐν μέσῳ ὑπάρχεις τοῦ νυμφῶνος τοῦ ἐμοῦ· / μὴ οὖν ὥσπερ ἔξω
ἱσταμένη τὴν ψυχὴν καταμαράνῃς (Rom., Kontakia 19.5.1–6 [Maas and Trypanis,
Cantica, 143–44]). Translation adapted from Ephrem Lash, trans., On the Life of
Christ: Kontakia, The Sacred Literature Series (San Francisco: HarperCollins Pub-
lishers, 1995), 145.
41. For example, Abba Poemen in Apophth. Patr. 144 (PG 65:357B). See Douglas
Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in
Early Christian Monasticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 189. Unlike
the monastic sources, Cyril of Alexandria also puts Mary’s grief in negative terms,
saying that the passion was so unexpected that even the mother of God “fell”: Cyr.
Jo. 12 (PG 74:661B–664A).
42. Matt 25.1–13.
43. I thank my colleague Jonathan Zecher for alerting me to this potential play
on words.
GADOR-WHYTE / PERFORMING REPENTANCE IN THE KONTAKIA    103

for any person in the congregation. It is estimated that half of the children
born in Byzantium died before they reached five years old.44 The average
lifespan was only thirty-five years: half of all men died before they reached
forty, and many women died in childbirth (often aged between fifteen and
twenty-four).45 So it is likely that all Romanos’s congregation members had
experienced the death of someone close to them and about half of them
may have lost a child. The threnos theotokou Romanos crafts engages his
listeners emotionally with Mary; it heightens their involvement in the dia-
logue and so concentrates their minds on Jesus’s responses.46 In response
to Mary’s authoritative questions,47 Romanos’s Jesus explains the signifi-
cance of the crucifixion for the salvation of the world. The congregation,
drawn into the dialogue through emotional involvement in Mary’s grief,
comes to learn why they themselves should grieve. Not over the death of
a man, as in a mother’s threnos for her son, but for the reason he is dying:
their own sinfulness.
Romanos thus draws his listeners into penitent grief through the depth of
Mary’s emotion and Jesus’s hard-hitting responses. At other times, though,
Romanos uses a direct plea for God’s assistance rather than an emotional
rollercoaster as a means of encouraging penitent grief. He acknowledges
that truly repentant grief is a gift from God and asks God to send him (and
his listeners) the right sort of tears: such deep grief as the sinful woman
expressed:48 “Grant us tears, as you did the sinful woman, / and forgive-
ness for the sins we have committed.”49
Such a petition fits with the views of earlier theologians on penitence.50
Evagrius Ponticus, for example, recommends praying for the “gift of tears”
first to soften the hardness of the soul through compunction (πένθος) and
then to repent and be forgiven (Or. 5 [PG 79:1168D]).51 The Sayings of
the Desert Fathers records various stories in which one monk witnesses

44. Marcus Louis Rautman, Daily Life in the Byzantine Empire (Westport, CO:
Greenwood Press, 2006), 54.
45. Rautman, Daily Life in the Byzantine Empire, 9.
46. On the threnos theotokou, see Gregory W. Dobrov, “A Dialogue with Death:
Ritual Lament and the ‘Threnos Theotokou’ of Romanos Melodos,” GRBS 35, no. 4
(1994): 385–405.
47. For Arentzen’s excellent analysis of this hymn and his arguments about Mary’s
authority, to which I am indebted, see Arentzen, The Virgin in Song, 141–63.
48. See also A Prayer (56.1).
49. Δὸς ἡμῖν δάκρυα ὥσπερ τῇ πόρνῃ / καὶ τὴν συγχώρησιν ὧνπερ ἡμάρτομεν (Rom.,
Kontakia 49.22.7–8 [Maas and Trypanis, Cantica, 430]).
50. Tears are a gift possessed by only few (Ps-Ath. Virg. 17 [PG 28:272C]). See
also Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert, 185.
51. See Hunt, Joy-Bearing Grief, 45. On penthos in the desert tradition more
broadly, see Hunt, Joy-Bearing Grief, 41–49.
104    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

the penitent weeping of another person and is filled with compunction

himself.52 Romanos’s plural “grant us” again emphasizes the communal
nature of penitence. Having witnessed the penitent grief of the harlot,
Romanos prays that he and his listeners may be granted similar tears.
Romanos shapes his penitent community through the performance
of humble grief. Congregation members listen to the models of humble
introspection and penitent weeping presented by biblical characters and
Romanos’s own penitent persona, and their emotional involvement in the
stories and vocal participation in the refrain help to ensure their member-
ship of Romanos’s emotional community.

A LITURGICAL COMMUNITY

This emotional community also comes together regularly to perform the

rituals of the church, and their identity as a Christian community is impor-
tantly defined also through this liturgical performance. At the end of On
the Prodigal Son, Romanos appeals to God that his congregation might
be admitted to the eucharist:53 “Proclaim us partakers of your supper, as
you did the prodigal son, / Master and Lord of the ages.”54
Throughout this kontakion there is an emphasis on worthiness to par-
take of God’s feast, figured through clothing imagery. The sinless state
of the newly baptized is represented by the “first robe of glory” (49.Pr.2;
4.4–7), which both the penitent narrator and the prodigal son have lost by
their subsequent sins.55 Nakedness, or the loss of the glory robe, denotes
sinfulness and separation from God.56 The robe of glory is “God-given”
and symbolizes forgiveness and restoration to proper communion with
God. The prodigal son repented and was forgiven—he was re-clothed in

52. For example, Apophth. Patr. 24 and 25 (Wortley, The Sayings of the Desert
Fathers, 52).
53. On this kontakion as a Eucharistic metaphor, see J. H. Barkhuizen, “The Par-
able of the Prodigal Son as a Eucharistic Metaphor in Romanos Melodos’s Kontakion
49 (Oxf.),” Acta Classica 39 (1996): 39–54.
54. Μετόχους τε τοῦ δείπνου σου ἀνάδειξον ὡς τὸν ἄσωτον, / ὁ τῶν αἰώνων δεσπότης
καὶ κύριος (Rom., Kontakia 49.22.11–12 [Maas and Trypanis, Cantica, 430]).
55. This image recurs in the kontakia on baptism (5 and 6) and may have its ori-
gins in Syriac theology and poetry. See Sebastian P. Brock, “Clothing Metaphors as
a Means of Theological Expression in Syriac Tradition,” in Typus, Symbol, Allego-
rie bei den östlichen Vatern und ihren parallelen im Mittelalter, ed. Margot Schmidt
(Regensburg: Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 1982), 11–38.
56. On clothing and nakedness metaphors in Romanos, see Gador-Whyte, Theol-
ogy and Poetry in Early Byzantium, 84–88.
GADOR-WHYTE / PERFORMING REPENTANCE IN THE KONTAKIA    105

fine clothes, shoes, and adornments—before he could enter the celebratory

feast. Taking the prodigal as his model, the narrator begs to be pardoned
also—to be re-clothed in the first robe of glory—and so be considered
worthy to receive the eucharist.
The clothing in this kontakion is also a symbol of community. Christians
are said to receive this robe at baptism, making the robe an identifying
feature of baptized Christians. It is only “robed” (i.e., baptized) Chris-
tians who are able to receive the eucharist, the most important liturgical
expression of the community’s union with Christ. Those who were not
yet baptized, and here the implication is also those who have lost their
robe through sin, were sent out before the eucharist. Perhaps there is some
resonance with Matt 22.11–14, in which a wedding guest is discovered
without a wedding gown and is thrown into “the outer darkness.” The
speaker does not want to be excluded, but to be welcomed into the inner
community of Christ. He urges his congregation to repent in order to be
ready to partake of the Lord’s supper,57 and his fervent prayer, which uses
plural verbs to include them, helps perform that repentance. The kontakion
becomes the liturgical preparation for communication at the eucharist,
and only at the end of it are they ready to receive.
This plea to be admitted to the feast also draws attention to the impor-
tance of place in repentance in the kontakia (to which we will return
shortly). The prodigal son was outside, excluded, homeless, but when he
repents, he is welcomed home and brought inside by his forgiving father.
His penitence and forgiveness are figured by his restored place in the fam-
ily home. Repentance gives Romanos’s congregation a place too, but this
time it is a liturgical one: through penitence they are able to take their
place at the Lord’s table.
The repentance and forgiveness of the harlot in On the Sinful Woman
is situated both in the eucharistic liturgy and a baptistery. At the start
of the kontakion Jesus’s meal with the Pharisee “reveals that the table
is an altar,”58 where Jesus himself lies and forgives all debts (8–9). Now
all sinners can be brave enough to approach Christ (and the altar) and
acknowledge their sins (9–11): the eucharist is the location of penitence
and forgiveness. This eucharistic setting then changes to a baptismal one.
The sinful woman enacts the role of initiate in the baptismal rite when

57. Romanos shares this view with John Chrysostom, Hom. in Mt. 10.6 (PG 57:190).
See Alexis Torrance, Repentance in Late Antiquity: Eastern Asceticism and the Fram-
ing of the Christian Life c.400–650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 86.
58. Καὶ δείκνυσι τὴν τράπεζαν θυσιαστήριον (Rom., Kontakia 10.2.7 [Maas and
Trypanis, Cantica, 74]).
106    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

she says, “by blowing I renounce the filth of my deeds.”59 And then, in
the following stanza, she says:
I will make the Pharisee’s house a baptistery,
for there I will wash away my sins,
and there I will be cleansed of my transgressions.
I will add tears, oil, and perfume to the font,
and I will wash and cleanse and flee from
the filth of my deeds.60

Simon’s house becomes the place of purification, and Christ himself the
font to whom the harlot will add her tears, oil, and perfume. And by her
words and actions, Romanos’s listeners are drawn into the baptistery to
witness (and perhaps partake in, through memory and imagination) the
redemptive baptism of the sinful woman.61
Baptism is also figured by tears in the kontakia. In On Noah, Noah
instructs humanity in repentance before the flood, calling upon them to
wash away the filth of their sins with tears and to call out to God for sal-
vation (40.6.6–13).62 The implication, unheeded by the sinful people in
the story, is that unless you weep to wash yourself clean of sin, you will be
washed away in the terrible flood. The choice is between baptismal repen-
tance and destruction. Romanos uses this fear to spur people to repen-
tance, but he also situates the flood liturgically, as a symbol of the bap-
tism which will purify and restore humanity to God. Tears of repentance,
which Noah wants the people to shed, are likewise a baptism. Clement
of Alexandria similarly uses tears as a purification in his The Rich Man’s

59. . . . Ἀποτάσσομαι ἐμφυσῶσα / τῷ βορβόρῳ τῶν ἔργων μοι (Rom., Kontakia

10.5.10–11 [Maas and Trypanis, Cantica, 75]). On this rite of “blowing” on Satan,
see Bryan D. Spinks, Early and Medieval Rituals and Theologies of Baptism: From
the New Testament to the Council of Trent (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 96. On
the baptismal imagery of this kontakion, see Gador-Whyte, Theology and Poetry in
Early Byzantium, 167–68; Krueger, “The Internal Lives of Biblical Figures,” 294;
J. H. Barkhuizen, “Romanos Melodos, Kontakion 10 (Oxf): ‘On the Sinful Woman,’”
Acta Classica 33 (1990): 38.
60. Φωτιστήριον ποιήσω τὴν οἰκιὰν τοῦ Φαρισαίου· / ἐκεῖ γὰρ ἀποπλύνομαι τὰς ἁμαρτίας
μου, / ἐκεῖ καὶ καθαρίζομαι τὰς ἀνομίας μου· / κλαυθμῷ, ἐλαίῳ μαὶ μύρῳ κεράσομαι
κολυμβήθραν / καὶ λούομαι καὶ σμήχομαι καὶ ἐκφεύγω / τοῦ βορβόρου τῶν ἔργων μου
(Rom., Kontakia 10.6.6–11 [Maas and Trypanis, Cantica, 76]).
61. On the importance of memory for Christian collective identity, see Elizabeth A.
Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making, Gender, Theory,
and Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 10–32.
62. On Romanos’s distinctive characterization of Noah, see Laura Lieber, “Portraits
of Righteousness: Noah in Early Christian and Jewish Hymnography,” Zeitschrift für
Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 61.4 (2009): 341–45.
GADOR-WHYTE / PERFORMING REPENTANCE IN THE KONTAKIA    107

Salvation: the young robber weeps and is “baptized a second time through
his tears” (PG 9:649).63
Weeping and baptism are again linked in On the Baptism of Christ and
On the Epiphany, but here weeping is not the baptism itself but rather
a symbol of pre-baptismal sinfulness and need of redemption. Romanos
refers to the “robe of mourning” (ὁ πενθήρης χιτών, 6.12.1) which humans
wear after the fall and which is removed at baptism.64 Post-lapsarian exis-
tence is clothed in grief: sorrow-clad humans are called to turn back to God
(to repent) through the expression of mourning. Once they have repented
they may be baptized; baptism enacts the restoration of humanity to God
through Jesus Christ. Just as we saw in On the Prodigal Son, repentance
restores the sinner to the redeemed (i.e., clothed) state. In these two kon-
takia penitent initiates put aside their mourning and are re-clothed with
the God-woven robe, the robe of glory, which was lost at the fall (5.2.1–2;
6.12.1–2).65 Their clothing is a symbol of their acceptance by God. Like
the prodigal son, they are clothed and welcomed into the feast.
By situating the drama of his kontakia within the liturgical settings of
the eucharist and baptism, Romanos crafts his community around the lit-
urgy. Listeners’ participation in the kontakia—a liturgical performance—­
reinforces their inclusion in the liturgical community, a community which
is performed at baptism and re-performed at every eucharist and reminder
of baptism. These rituals are inherently penitential: baptism includes a
renunciation of sin and the devil, and confession forms a key part of the
eucharistic liturgy.

AN EMBODIED COMMUNITY

We have explored the centrality of tears in detail in the context of emo-

tional community formation and liturgical practice. We now turn to ana-
lyze further physical, embodied enactments of his community’s peniten-
tial identity, including prostration, fasting, medical health, and physical
location. Prostration performs an acknowledgement of sins by physically
lowering the penitent. We cannot know if Romanos actually enacted pros-
tration during the singing of the kontakia, but at the very least his words
would call to mind times in the liturgy when the priest and congregation

63. Claudia Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Lead-
ership in an Age of Transition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 84.
64. Brock, “Clothing Metaphors,” 11–38.
65. See Gador-Whyte, Theology and Poetry in Early Byzantium, 84–88.
108    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

kneeled or prostrated themselves. In On the Ten Virgins 1, Romanos says,

in his penitential persona:
Release me, release me, Savior, who am condemned by all people.
For I do not do what I tell and advise the people to do.
For that reason I fall down before you. Grant compunction, Savior, to me
and to those who hear me,
So that we might keep all your commandments in life
and not remain groaning and crying out outside the bridal chamber.66

This final stanza performs prostration through words.67 The speaker

becomes the lowest of the low—condemned by all people (1) and unable
to follow his own preaching (2). In this apocalyptic kontakion, fear of the
final judgment is the major motivator to penitence. Personal fear seems
paramount, but in line 4 he includes his listeners and the fear (but perhaps
not the full weight of his sin) becomes communal. The speaker’s prostra-
tion is enacted (partly) on behalf of his listeners, but earlier in the hymn
the actions are corporate: “So, falling down before Christ the Savior, we
cry out eagerly . . . .”68 Such actions create a “faithful virgins” type of
community which properly anticipates and is ready for the eschaton, and
for whom the door to the bridal chamber is therefore open.
The Lenten hymn On Fasting ends by a physical dedication of spiritual
worship to God: “Savior of the world, kneeling down before you we offer
you this spiritual worship.”69 In this kontakion (and elsewhere) Romanos
uses fasting as a way of marrying the physical and spiritual. This union,
necessary for true repentance, is played out in fasting. The hymn opens by
addressing the soul: “Devote yourself, my soul, to repentance. Be united
with Christ in thought.”70 But then the story of the temptation of Eve
unfolds to focus on the evils of greed and gluttony and the virtues of fast-
ing and self-control. Fasting is the means of attaining eternal life (51.2).

66. Ἄνες μοι, ἄνες μοι, σωτήρ, τῷ κατακεκριμένῳ παρὰ πάντας ἀνθρώπους· / οὐ πράττω
γὰρ ἃ λέγω καὶ συμβουλεύω τοῖς λαοῖς· / ὅθεν σοι προσπίπτω· δὸς κατάνυξιν, σωτήρ, κἀμοὶ
καὶ τοῖς ἀκούουσιν, / ἱνὰ τὰς ἐντολάς σου φυλάξωμεν πάσας ἐν τῷ βίῷ / καὶ μὴ μείνωμεν
θρηνοῦντες καὶ κράζοντες ἔξω τοῦ νυμφῶνος (Rom., Kontakia 47.31.1–5 [Maas and
Trypanis, Cantica, 409]).
67. On the use of gesture in Romanos’s kontakion On the Ascension, see Frank,
“Sensing Ascension in Early Byzantium.”
68. Χριστῷ οὖν τῷ σωτῆρι προσπίπτοντες κράξωμεν προθύμως (Rom., Kontakia 47.2.4
[Maas and Trypanis, Cantica, 396]).
69. Σῶτερ τοῦ κόσμου, σὲ προσυνοῦντες λατρείαν λογικήν σοι προσφέρομεν ταύτην
(Rom., Kontakia 51.24.1 [Maas and Trypanis, Cantica, 447]). For λογικὴ λατρεία
(spiritual worship), see Rom 12.1.
70. Σχόλασον, ψυχή μου, ἐν μετανοίᾳ, ἑνώθητι Χριστῷ κατὰ γνώμην (Rom., Kontakia
51.Pr.1 [Maas and Trypanis, Cantica, 438]).
GADOR-WHYTE / PERFORMING REPENTANCE IN THE KONTAKIA    109

Like personal introspection, fasting may seem to be an inherently indi-

vidual means of embodying penitence, and individual transformation is
clearly one desired outcome of the performance of this kontakion. But
Romanos also carefully situates the Lenten fast within a wider biblical
context. Moses and Elijah, who each saw God face to face, still fasted (2).
And the length of the Lenten fast was prefigured by the Jews, who gave a
tithe of their wealth to God (22): Christians should fast for a tithe of the
year (23). Romanos’s congregation not only support each other in their
fast, but are also part of the wider community of God’s chosen people
who offer God their repentance through fasting.71
One way in which Romanos uses the physical as a way into the spiri-
tual is through medical metaphors. Sin is a wound and repentance the
curative drug in On the Second Coming: “For the wound of sin we may
quickly heal / with the medicine of repentance.”72 Medical metaphors are
not unusual for Romanos and attest to the close relationship of physi-
cal and spiritual sickness and healing in Byzantium.73 In On Repentance
Romanos calls his listeners to rush to the “clinic of repentance” (τὸ ἰατρεῖον
τῆς μετανοίας, 52.1.1), so that their souls may be strengthened (1.2).74 He
repeatedly uses hortatory subjunctives, calling for his listeners to join him
as they rise up, approach the doctor’s surgery, show their wounds, and
are healed (1.2, 7–8). They must be proactive in their own healing. The
clinic is one of pedigree—Romanos lists some former patients (Peter, the
harlot, David, Nineveh, 1.3–6)—and, amazingly, it is completely free of
charge (2.1).75 Tears are the only payment required (2.5), but they must be

71. On the corporate nature of fasting in this period, see Caroline Walker Bynum,
Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women,
The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1987), 35, 39–40.
72. Καὶ γὰρ τὸ τραῦμα τῆς ἁμαρτίας φαρμάκῳ μετανοίας / ἰατρεύσομεν συντόμως . . .
(Rom., Kontakia 34.23.5–6 [Maas and Trypanis, Cantica, 275]).
73. On the interwoven nature of medicine and spiritual healing in Byzantium (and
Romanos), see Derek Krueger, “Healing and the Scope of Religion in Byzantium: A
Response to Miller and Crislip,” in Holistic Healing in Byzantium, ed. John T. Chirban
(Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2010). Schork lists all Romanos’s uses
of the medical motif: R. J. Schork, “The Medical Motif in the Kontakia of Romanos
the Melodist,” Traditio 16 (1960): 363.
74. See also the “hospital of souls” in On Earthquakes and Fires (54.1.1–8).
75. The wealth and greed of doctors is a well-known topos. See, for example, Mir.
Artem. 36, in which a woman’s doctor demanded she give him a golden icon (which
she did not own) in exchange for curing her son: translated in The Miracles of St.
Artemios, trans. Virgil S. Crisafulli and John W. Nesbitt (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 188–
93. On the wealth differential between various strata of the profession, including the
extreme wealth of some physicians, see Vivian Nutton, “From Galen to Alexander,
Aspects of Medicine and Medical Practice in Late Antiquity,” DOP 38 (1984): 10–12.
110    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

tears from the heart (3.7).76 Much could be said about these passages. For
our purposes though, the key is that Romanos is creating a metaphorical
space and bringing it to life for his listeners.77 They are encouraged to see
this clinic as a real, physical place, just like the doctors’ clinics they would
attend if they were physically sick, and by bringing the listeners with him
in his appeals to action (“let us . . .”), Romanos creates the community
which checks itself in to the surgery of repentance.
Romanos also uses physical location to create his community’s identity.
In the kontakion On Judas, Romanos goes to great lengths to emphasize
Judas’s self-exclusion from his communities: Judas is described as sub-
human,78 a wild animal (stanzas 4, 12, and 21), and the devil (13, 14).
His actions revolt the natural world (14.6; cf. Matt 27.45, 51), his lack of
faith prevents him from true participation in the liturgical community at
the Last Supper (12), his betrayal of Jesus excludes him from his friends
(14), and he eventually rejects the relationship with the high priests as
well (22). His only real location is one of despair and loneliness: the tree
on which he hangs himself (22).
In stark contrast, Romanos carefully situates his congregation within a
biblically and liturgically shaped topography. The first proem, after briefly
setting out the sin of Judas, introduces the refrain thus:
But, from such inhumanity,
redeem those who in the house of the Theotokos chant
“Be merciful, merciful, merciful to us,
you who are patient with all and wait for all.”79

Romanos’s church in Constantinople was a suburban one dedicated to

Mary the Theotokos.80 Romanos positions the singers in their physical

76. J. H. Barkhuizen, “Romanos Melodos, ‘On Repentance’ (Oxf. 52: 8b SC),”

Ekklesiastikos Pharos (n.s.) 4 (1993): 47.
77. Of course, Romanos may mean his listeners to think of the physical space of
the church or the liturgical place of the eucharist as the “surgery.” John Chrysostom
used the language of “spiritual surgery” for the church, which heals the spiritual
sickness of sin: Michael G. Azar, Exegeting the Jews: The Early Reception of the
Johannine “Jews,” ed. D. Jeffrey Bingham, The Bible in Ancient Christianity (Leiden:
Brill, 2016), 110–11n40.
78. Eva Catafygiotu Topping, “Romanos on Judas: A Byzantine Ethopoeia,”
Βυζαντιακά 2 (1982): 11–27.
79. Ἀλλὰ τοιαύτης ἀπανθρωπίας / λύτρωσαι τοὺς ἐν τῷ οἴκῳ τῆς θεοτόκου ψάλλοντας·
/ Ἵλεως, ἵλεως, ἵλεως γενοῦ ἡμῖν, / ὁ πάντων ἀνεχόμενος καὶ πάντας ἐκδεχόμενος (Rom.,
Kontakia 17.Pr.1.4–7 [Maas and Trypanis, Cantica, 122]).
80. For the biographical texts on Romanos, including information on his deacon-
ate, see José Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos le Mélode et les origines de la poésie
religieuse à Byzance (Paris: Editions Beauchesne, 1977), 160–65.
GADOR-WHYTE / PERFORMING REPENTANCE IN THE KONTAKIA    111

space, using their locality, and here also its dedication to the Virgin Mary,
to create the community of believers on whom God will have mercy. Lis-
teners would also be reminded of the appeals Romanos frequently makes
to Mary as intercessor and ambassador with the divine. The community
identity is defined partly by their physical location and their particular
devotion to Mary, Theotokos.
In the final stanza Romanos once again refers to the singing of the refrain:
Holy, holy, holy, God of all, thrice-holy,
save your servants from sin
and stir up your creation to escape such danger.
So, brothers, knowing these things
and seeing the fall of the seller, let us make firm our own feet.
Let us place our feet on the ascending steps of the Creator’s commandments
and let us flee the way to Hades, crying to the Redeemer,
“Be merciful, merciful, merciful to us,
you who are patient with all and wait for all.”81

This final stanza invites listeners to renew their community of repen-

tance in response to Judas’s self-exclusion. The community is reinforced
as a liturgical one through the opening threefold “holy” which recalls the
sanctus. This re-voicing of the sanctus is paralleled by the threefold “merci-
ful” at the conclusion of the stanza, which itself highlights the importance
of humility in communal repentance. Romanos uses physical imagery to
emphasize the horror of Judas’s path and to make the path to repentance
a joint physical venture: “let us make firm our feet,” “let us flee the way
to Hades.” The action of Romanos’s congregation is corporate and taken
in response to the horrific sins they have just witnessed.

CONCLUSION

I have argued that Romanos uses his compositions to create a community

of repentance for his listeners which shares emotional norms, is liturgically
situated in place and time, and distinctively embodied through ritual action
and social practices. They are drawn into his fictionalized biblical accounts

81. Ἅγιε, ἅγιε, ἅγιε, ὁ θεὸς τῶν πάντων ὁ τρισάγιος, / τοὺς δούλους σου ῥῦσαι τοῦ
πτώματος, / καὶ τὸ πλάσμα σου ἀνάστησον τοῦ φυγεῖν τοιοῦτον κίνδυνον· / ταῦτα
οὖν, ἀδελφοί, γινώσκοντες / καὶ τὴν τοῦ πράτου πτῶσιν βλέποντες τοὺς ἑαυτῶν πόδας
στηρίξωμεν· / στήσωμεν οὖν τὰς βάσεις ἐπὶ τὰς ἀναβάσεις τῶν ἐντολῶν τοῦ κτίστου / καὶ
τὴν τοῦ Ἅιδου φύγωμεν πορείαν βοῶντες πρὸς τὸν λυτρωτήν· / Ἵλεως, ἵλεως, ἵλεως γενοῦ
ἡμῖν, / ὁ πάντων ἀνεχομένος, καὶ πάντας ἐκδεχόμενος (Rom., Kontakia 17.23 [Maas and
Trypanis, Cantica, 131]).
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where they experience the penitence of biblical characters, witness their

self-reflection and the mode of their repentance, and are encouraged to
imitate their actions, both at an individual and communal level. As such,
they may be said to be shaped into a sort of textual community through
the performance of the kontakia. It is not quite the same sort of textual
community that Brian Stock has seen in certain later Byzantine monastic
communities82 or that Dirk Baltzly has recently identified in late antique
Neoplatonic circles,83 but it is a community created through the liturgy,
and through the liturgical performance of biblical texts in the kontakia,
and held together by emotion, place, practice, and physicality. It is directed
towards the transformation of individuals and communities by promoting
emotional norms, and images, ideas, and metaphors drawn out of creative
presentations and expansions of biblical texts and liturgical practices, all
intended to shape how people experience the places they inhabit.
Wendy Mayer has recently drawn attention to a turn in liturgical studies
in which scholars are increasingly approaching liturgy from a wider range
of viewpoints, including considering (amid a myriad of others) the social
contexts in which liturgies were performed, the performative and experi-
ential aspects of liturgy, the involvement of the senses, and the impact of
the physical spaces in which they were enacted.84 Recent scholarship on
Romanos has been part of this trend, by focusing on (among other things)
the liturgical context of his hymns,85 their interactive nature,86 Romanos’s
use of the “penitential self,”87 and the sensory experience of listeners.88 One

82. Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of
Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1983), 88–240, especially 90–92.
83. Dirk Baltzly, “Plato’s Authority and the Formation of Textual Communities,”
CQ 64, no. 2 (2014): 793–807.
84. Wendy Mayer, “The Changing Shape of Liturgy: From Earliest Christianity to
the End of Late Antiquity,” in Liturgy’s Imagined Past/s: Methodologies and Materi-
als in the Writing of Liturgical History Today, ed. Teresa Berger and Bryan D. Spinks
(Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2016), 275–302.
85. See, among others, Derek Krueger, “The Unbounded Body in the Age of Litur-
gical Reproduction,” JECS 17 (2009): 267–79; Krueger, Liturgical Subjects; Gador-
Whyte, Theology and Poetry in Early Byzantium.
86. For recent work on the refrain and other participatory aspects of the kontakia,
see Arentzen and Münz-Manor, “Soundscapes of Salvation”; Arentzen, “Voices Inter-
woven: Refrains and Vocal Participation in the Kontakia,” JbOB 66 (2016): 1–11.
87. For example, Derek Krueger, “Romanos the Melodist and the Christian Self
in Early Byzantium,” in Proceedings of the 21st International Congress of Byzan-
tine Studies: London, 21–26 August 2006, ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys, F. K. Haarer, and
Judith Gilliland (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 255–74; Krueger, Liturgical Subjects.
88. For example, Frank, “Sensing Ascension in Early Byzantium”; Arentzen,
“Romanos’s Dagger of Taste.”
GADOR-WHYTE / PERFORMING REPENTANCE IN THE KONTAKIA    113

significant contribution that Romanos scholars have made to this “litur-

gical turn” has been to investigate how Romanos constructs individual
subjectivities and encourages personal transformation. This article aug-
ments this scholarship by arguing that these performative and liturgical
elements result also in community formation. It draws out key contours
of Romanos’s account of repentance, and identifies ways in which the
whole Christian community, shaped by the kontakia, performs, and just
so comes to embody, a distinctively penitent community.
To conclude, I return to the hymn on the Ninevites with which we began,
and in which Romanos makes the kontakia explicitly part of his (and his
congregation’s) repentance:89
Son of the one God, our only God, you fulfil the will of those who love you.
In your compassion, rescue us from impending doom, O Perfect One.
Just as you once pitied the Ninevites
and instructed Jonah in the secrets of your wisdom,
so too now deliver from judgment those who sing your praise.
Grant me forgiveness as the reward for my speech.
I know how to speak; I don’t know how to act.
Since I do not have deeds, Savior, that are worthy of your glory,
so then on account of my speeches, deliver me,
you who cherish repentance.90

As throughout the texts we have analyzed, song becomes a performance

of repentance for whole communities: “deliver from judgment those who
sing your praise.” Once more we see Romanos using the personal as a
way into the communal: he uses his penitent persona as an example for
individual transformation which is made to stand for the transformation
of the community, as in the case of the Ninevites. The speaker’s voice
becomes the voice of the congregants as they perform their individual and
collective penitence through the kontakia.

Sarah Gador-Whyte is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Religion

and Critical Inquiry at the Australian Catholic University

89. See also Rom., Kontakia 29.24.

90. Υἱὲ τοῦ μόνου καὶ μόνε Θεέ, ὁ θέλημα ποιῶν τῶν φιλούντων σε, ῥῦσαι / ὡς
εὔσπλαγχνος ἐκ τῆς μελλούσης ἀπειλῆς, ἀναμάρτητε· / ὡς ποτὲ Νινευίτας ᾠκτείρησας /
καὶ τῶν μυστηρίων σου Ἰωνᾶν κατηξίωσας, / οὕτω νῦν τοὺς ὑμνοῦντας σε λύτρωσαι τῆς
κρίσεως / καὶ ἐμοὶ μισθὸν τοῦ λόγου δὸς τὴν ἄφεσιν· / λέγειν γὰρ οἶδα, πράττειν δ’ οὐκ οἶδα,
/ ἐπειδὴ οὖν οὐκ ἔχω ἔργα, σῶτερ, τῆς σῆς δόξης ἄξια· / ἀλλ’ οὖν διὰ τοὺς λόγους / ἐξελοῦ με
<ὡς> φιλῶν τὴν μετάνοιαν (Rom., Kontakia 52.17 [Maas and Trypanis, Cantica, 453]).