“Words Tinctured with Passion”

St Gregory of Nyssa’s In Canticum Canticorum

and the Emergence of Affective Mysticism
in Byzantine Hymnography
Andrew Mellas
PhD Candidate, University of Sydney

Abstract: St Gregory of Nyssa’s allegorical interpretation of the Song

of Songs Christianised the Stoic ideal of apatheia and spiritualised
the erotic textuality of the Canticle. Nevertheless, far from eschewing
all emotion, his hermeneutics paved the way for a transfiguration
of the passions as a concept and the emergence of an affective
mysticism in Byzantine hymnography. Unlocking the text’s spiritual
sense, Gregory analogously read the lovers’ impassioned utterances
as embodying a passion transcending earthly corporeality and
touching divine eros. As allegory delves into the spiritual meaning
of the Shulammite and her lover, human passion is anagogically
immersed in divine passion and the mystical knowledge of the
eschaton. This paper investigates the significance of Gregory’s In
Canticum Canticorum for the history of emotions in Byzantium by
examining its affinity with hymnography. It will particularly explore
the nuptial metaphor in the Akathist Hymn and the transformation
of passion in an epektasis of desire in St Romanos the Melodist’s
kontakion on the harlot.

I
nviting his audience to enter the “holy of holies, that is, the Song of
Songs,” St Gregory of Nyssa enjoined an “erotic love” that desires the
“beauty of the divine nature” and “turn[s] passion into impassibility.”1
His allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs Christianised the Stoic
ideal of apatheia and spiritualised the erotic textuality of the Canticle,
paving the way for a transfiguration of the passions as a concept and the

1 St Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs, trans. Richard A. Norris, Jr.
(Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012) 29.

PHRONEMA, VOL. 30(2), 2015, 169-185

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emergence of an affective mysticism in Byzantine hymnography.2 Indeed,

Gregory’s notion of scriptural meditation as a mystical experience and
his portrayal of an endless kindling of erotic love, emboldened Byzantine
hymnography – in the sixth century and beyond – to adopt the Canticle’s
sensual language and dramatise the affective dimension of humanity’s
encounter with the divine.

This paper investigates the significance of Gregory’s In Canticum

Canticorum – and the notion of impassible passion therein – for
hymnography in Byzantium. It begins with the nuptial metaphor in the
Akathist Hymn3 and the kanon4 accompanying it in the Lenten Triodion,5
and then moves to the transformation of passion in an epektasis6 of desire
in St Romanos the Melodist’s kontakion7 on the harlot. The kinship
between the textual strategies of the Nyssen and Byzantine hymnography
is remarkable yet subtle. In the Song of Songs, Gregory read the story

2 For a more general overview of how the theology of the Cappadocian Fathers
shaped the Byzantine understanding of emotions against the backdrop of
Hellenism and classical philosophy, see Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient
and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004) 111-76. See also David
Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical
Literature (London: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Richard Sorabji,
Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
3 The Akathist Hymn (Ἀκάθιστος Ὕμνος) is an anonymous kontakion dedicated
to the Mother of God. According to tradition, it was first sung in thanksgiving
after the Avar siege of Constantinople was overcome in 626. However, it may
be that St Romanos the Melodist composed the Akathist in the sixth century.
See Egon Wellesz, ‘The ‘Akathistos:’ A Study in Byzantine Hymnography’
Dumbarton Oaks Papers 9-10 (1956).
4 A kanon is a set of eight or nine odes that rose to prominence during the eighth
century as the more popular form of Byzantine hymnography.
5 The liturgical hymnbook for the Lenten and pre-Lenten period, which begins
with vespers for the tenth Sunday before Easter and ends on Holy Saturday.
6 For Gregory, epektasis is the perpetual ascent of the human person towards God
in an unlimited progress.
7 An earlier form of Byzantine hymnography, a kontakion is a chanted sermon
that celebrated a major feast or commemorated a saint. It comprises a prelude,
a number of stanzas and a recurring refrain, which was repeated by the
congregation. Kontakia (pl.) became popular in the sixth century and are often
associated with the fame of Romanos.

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of human passion as an ever-intensifying desire for the Divine, which

can be felt when the yearning soul approaches and traverses the dazzling
darkness of the great mystery. Likewise, the hymnologic tradition of
Eastern Christendom performed a Biblical exegesis by enacting the
emotions of its protagonists, which in turn magnetised the emotions of
the faithful. This paper does not closely examine the manuscript tradition
of the homilies and whether it was transmitted to the hymn-writers
of Byzantium. Nor does it base its comparative approach on a purely
textual analysis of Gregory’s homilies and the hymns it has chosen. It
endeavours to show that there is an underlying exegetical and theological
affinity between the Nyssen’s homilies and Byzantine hymnography.
Some preliminary remarks on affective mysticism and Gregory’s legacy
in Byzantium will precede the main sections on the Akathist Hymn and
Romanos’ kontakion.

Affective Mysticism in Byzantium

Affective mysticism is often associated with St Bernard of Clairvaux’s

Sermons on the Song of Songs and the religious sensibility of the eleventh
and twelfth centuries in Western civilisation, which saw the loving union
with the person of Christ as a profoundly emotional event and mystical
marriage.8 This paper argues that Byzantine hymns also interwove
feeling and mystery. Although the mystical dimension of Christianity is
apparent from its very beginnings, the language of ‘mystery’ (μυστήριον)
was reserved for such things as the unknowability of God, the “hidden
mysteries”9 of Scripture and theology itself. However, mystical theology
in Byzantium also came to mean the liturgical experience of sacred
ritual, which escorted the faithful beyond an intellectual philosophy of
God to a transformative encounter and mysterious communion between
the human and the divine. Even before the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy and
other writings attributed to St Dionysius the Areopagite, the Nyssen’s
assorted homilies envisaged liturgical worship as a mystery replete with

8 Herbert Moller, ‘The Social Causation of Affective Mysticism’ Journal of Social

History 4:4 (1971) 305-38.
9 St Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs 307.

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divine action – psalmody, memory and drama – which restored the unity
of earthly and heavenly things and deified human nature.10

Hymnography became an integral part of this ritual. Hymns

created a space of participation for the faithful, “an inner space of
‘experience,’ ‘exploration’ and ‘amplification’ of the emotional as well
as sensory life of the soul.”11 They did not simply expound dogma but
dramatised how the emotional life of the soul experienced the Divine.
Of course, any exploration of emotions in Byzantium is inevitably
fraught with epistemological limitations. Therefore, the following
presuppositions will frame the approach of this paper. First, one does not
grapple with emotional experiences but the textualisation of emotions.12
Second, the experience of emotion in Byzantium is closely linked not
only to society and culture but also to theological discourse. Finally, one
must be mindful of emotions’ antecedent – passions.13

10 Jean Daniélou, ‘Le Mystère Du Culte Dans Les Sermons De Saint Grégoire De
Nysse’ in Vom Christlichen Mysterium, ed. Anton Mayer and Johannes Quasten
(Dusseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1951) 76. As a matter of fact, in the last chapter of
Clement the Alexandrian’s Exhortation, the terminology of mystery in relation
to the process of Christian initiation emerges. See Clement of Alexandria, The
Exhortation to the Greeks, the Rich Man’s Salvation, and the Fragment of an
Address Entitled to the Newly Baptised (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1919)
251-63.
11 Niklaus Largier, ‘Inner Senses–Outer Senses: The Practice of Emotions in
Medieval Mysticism’ in Codierungen Von Emotionen Im Mittelalter/Emotions
and Sensibilities in the Middle Ages, ed. C. Stephen Jaeger and Ingrid Kasten
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003) 5.
12 See Sarah McNamer, ‘Feeling’ in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to
Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007) 241-57.
13 Looking carefully at the history of emotions, it is not a case of false friends
to loosely equate the modern English word ‘emotion’ (from the verb emoveo,
to move, to change, to agitate) with the Greek word πάθος (passion). After
all, it was only in the nineteenth century that the former supplanted the latter.
See Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular
Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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The Nyssen’s Legacy

Although the Cappadocian legacy profoundly shaped the spiritual culture

of Byzantium, including its liturgical worship, the question of how the
Nyssen’s writings influenced posterity is a pregnant one.14 Despite
being in the shadow of his older brother and St Gregory the Theologian,
Gregory of Nyssa’s metaphysical genius is particularly made evident in
the writings of St Dionysius the Areopagite, St Maximus the Confessor
and even St Gregory Palamas.15 Palamas specifically cited him in his
Triads, alluding to the spiritual senses and Gregory’s interpretation of the
Canticle.16 Recent scholarship has also noted Gregory of Nyssa’s impact
on the sixth-century Sabaite monk Cassian.17

However, a systematic study of the importance of Gregory’s In

Canticum Canticorum for Byzantine hymnography has not been written.
Perhaps this is not surprising. The Song of Songs never formed an explicit
part of liturgical worship in Eastern Christendom – it was the Psalms that
permeated the Byzantine rite. And it has been difficult for scholars to
ignore the abundant parallels between Gregory the Theologian’s orations
and liturgical hymns.18 Despite some preliminary analysis of the Patristic
sources of Romanos the Melodist’s kontakia, Gregory of Nyssa has only
made a cameo.19 Yet Gregory’s homilies were extant well beyond his
death. Langerbeck traces the various codices in his preface to the sixth

14 David Bradshaw, ‘The Cappadocian Fathers as Founders of Byzantine Thought’

in Cappadocian Legacy: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Doru Costache and Philip
Kariatlis (Sydney: St Andrew's Greek Orthodox Press, 2013); Anthony Meredith,
Gregory of Nyssa (New York: Routledge, 1999) 139.
15 Andrew Louth, Maximus the Confessor (London: Routledge, 1996) 27; Paul
M. Blowers, ‘Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Concept of
‘Perpetual Progress’’ Vigiliae Christianae 46:2 (1992) 153.
16 St Gregory Palamas, The Triads, trans. John Meyendorff (New York: Paulist
Press, 1983) 34, 68, 123.
17 Panayiotes Tzamalikos, The Real Cassian Revisited: Monastic Life, Greek
Paideia and Origenism in the Sixth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2012) 378-83.
18 Peter Karavites, ‘Gregory Nazianzinos and Byzantine Hymnography’ The
Journal of Hellenic Studies 113 (1993) 81-98.
19 Riccardo Maisano, ‘Romanos’s Use of Greek Patristic Sources’ Dumbarton
Oaks Papers 62 (2008) 261-73.

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volume of Jaeger’s Gregorii Nysseni Opera. The tenth-century Suda

lists In Canticum as one of Gregory’s works and the twelfth-century
homilies on the life of the Mother of God by James of Kokkinobaphos
draws heavily on the Nyssen's homilies.20 Moreover, the homilies were
translated into Syriac and several other languages.21 Despite this data, it
is not the intention of this paper to show whether the homilies were a
‘bestseller’ in sixth-century Constantinople. Byzantine hymnography
echoed the Nyssen’s textual strategy far more than it did his text.

Early in his homilies, Gregory underlines the incredible paradox

of how “words tinctured with passion” and “impassioned utterances”
could communicate “a meaning that is undefiled,” thus “teaching and
legislating impassibility.”22 According to the Nyssen, a narrative that
ostensibly incites fleshly desire can – astonishingly – wield salvific
power and lead the soul to a nobler desiring of divine Beauty. Therefore
he exhorts his audience:
… since it is Wisdom who speaks, love her (ἀγάπησον) as much
as you are able, with your whole heart and strength; desire her
(ἐπιθύμησον) as much as you can. To these words I am bold to
add, Be in love (ἐράσθητι), for this passion, when directed to
things incorporeal, is blameless and impassible.23

As Anders Nygren declared, “the Eros motif” was the defining

characteristic of Gregory’s thought.24 This language of passion, with
all its emotive power, is a characteristic of hymns that begin to emerge
in sixth-century Byzantium. The performance of hymnography is
dynamic, impassioned and sensual, and yet it engenders a kind of
mystical synaesthesia, inflaming the heart’s desire for divine Beauty, and
ascending “the spiritual mountain of the knowledge of God.”25

20 Thomas Gaisford, Suidae Lexicon, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1834) 847.
21 Sebastian P. Brock, ‘Mingana Syr. 628: A Folio from a Revision of the Peshitta
Song of Songs’ Journal of Semitic Studies XL no. 1 (1995) 39-56.
22 St Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs 31.
23 Ibid. 25.
24 Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953) 431.
25 St Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs 27.

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Gregory envisaged liturgical life as leading the soul to the

mystical summit of “the divine and sober drunkenness,” where there
is no difference between the impassioned words of the Canticle and
the “mystagogic instruction given to [Christ’s] disciples.”26 Not unlike
Gregory’s interpretation of the Canticle, which moved from the sensual
and corporeal to the spiritual and mystical, highlighting the affective
interplay between human and divine, the performance of hymnography
wove together human and divine passions. Hymnography gave emotion
an intersubjective ground, laying out the entire realm of human passion
whilst affirming that the embodiment of affect in language and melody
manifests bodily, reverberates spiritually and is mediated by the divine.27
The mystical contemplation of God that was experienced liturgically in
the hymnologic performance of Biblical narrative, re-enacted, refracted
and interpreted the Christian drama of salvation – a drama that was
internalised by the faithful.

The Canticle’s Nuptial Metaphor in the Akathist Hymn

The figures of the bride and bridegroom in the Nyssen’s exegesis of

the Canticle have personal, ecclesiastical, and even cosmological
significance, yet it is the mystical dimension of the Shulammite and her
lover that weaves these meanings together and delicately resonates in
the Akathist Hymn. The subtle identification of the Theotokos as the
“unwedded bride” of Christ in the Akathist is surrounded by a litany
of metaphors and spectacular poetic imagery that allegorically narrate
the mystery of the Incarnation and the drama of human salvation.28
The Virgin is the “throne of the King,” she is a “bridal chamber of a
marriage without seed,” a “bridal escort of holy souls,” and the “gate
of salvation.”29 Indeed, the nuptial metaphor – as well as a raft of Old

26 Ibid. 325-27.
27 Niklaus Largier, ‘Medieval Mysticism’ in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and
Emotion, ed. John Corrigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
28 Kallistos Ware and Mother Mary, The Lenten Triodion (Boston: Faber, 1978)
419-46. For the Greek text of the Akathist see Leena Mari Peltomaa, The Image
of the Virgin Mary in the Akathistos Hymn (Leiden: Brill, 2001) 4-19.
29 Ware and Mary, The Lenten Triodion 423, 35.

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Testament typologies and New Testament images – are all the more
explicit in the kanon written in the ninth century by St Joseph the
Hymnographer and wedded with the Akathist in the Lenten Triodion.30

In the very first ode of the Akathist kanon, before hailing Mary
as the “Virgin bride of God, restoration of Adam and death of hell,” the
hymnographer gathers the recurring image of a sealed book (from Isaiah
29:11, Daniel 12:4 and Revelation 5:1), and presents the Annunciation as
heralding the second Eve alluded to in Genesis 3:15:

O pure Virgin, living book of Christ, sealed by the Spirit,

beholding you the great Archangel said to you: ‘Rejoice, vessel
of joy! Through you shall we be loosed from the curse of our first
mother.’31

Continuing this intricate Scriptural tapestry, the kanon then proclaims

the “bride of God” to be the “fiery throne of the Almighty […] fragrant
incense and precious oil of myrrh,” recalling Ezekiel 1:26-27 and the
Song of Songs 1:3.32 And this is only a sample of the hymn’s Biblical
tour de force. However, it is not altogether unexpected. Hymnography’s
performative hermeneutics shattered the boundary separating Old and
New Testaments by weaving together multifarious Biblical threads in
a cosmic drama that begins with creation and fall, and ends with the
crucifixion and resurrection.

Perhaps the most radical metaphor the Akathist and its kanon
employ in the exegesis they perform is the nuptial one. It was not without
precedent. The nuptial imagery in the Song of Songs was taken up by
Rabbinic commentary – interpreting the ostensibly erotic encounter as
the love of God for Israel – and by St John the Evangelist (John 3:28-29)
and St Paul the Apostle (Ephesians 5:23-25), whose writings presented
Christ as the bridegroom of the Church. Origen – to whom Gregory
alludes in the preface to his own homilies – went further, interpreting the

30 For the Greek text of the kanon see PG 105, 1020A-1028A.

31 Ware and Mary, The Lenten Triodion 427.
32 Ibid. 428.

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passion of the lovers in the Canticle allegorically, not only as the love
between Christ and the Church, but as the love between Christ and the
soul made in his image.33 Likewise, the bishop of Nyssa’s exploration of
the soul’s mystical experience of the Bridegroom occurs in parallel with
an ecclesiastical interpretation of the bride. But even the Nyssen did not
explicitly link the bride of the Canticle with the Theotokos. The Akathist
Hymn did, albeit ever so subtly and within the paradox of an “unwedded
bride.” And the kanon amplified this link with its rich imagery.

Although Gregory of Nyssa’s thirteenth homily on the Song once

again deploys the archery motif, identifying Christ the Bridegroom as
“love’s archer” and “the beautiful Lover of our souls,” who causes us
to be “wounded by the incorporeal and fiery arrow of love,” his brief
commentary on the Incarnation and the Annunciation is rich in its
implication.34 When pondering why the bride’s kinsman is “white and
ruddy” and “rightly named set apart in his birth from all myriads,”
Gregory comes to the mystery of Logos becoming flesh and the “joy” of
the archangel’s message to the “mother of life:”

The bridal chamber was “the power of the Most High”

overshadowing virginity like some cloud, the torch for the
wedding feast was the radiance of the Holy Spirit, the bed was
impassibility, and the marriage, incorruptibility.35

For Gregory, the union of human and divine natures is foreshadowed in

the nuptial language of the Song, which prefigured the Christian mystery
of salvation. Indeed, this hermeneutical approach enabled hymnography
to appropriate the nuptial metaphor, sensual language and dialogical
structure of the Canticle for the poetic discourse of Christianity.

The image of Christ as Bridegroom, which is implicit in the

Akathist Hymn and its kanon, permeated the wedding imagery of Holy

33 Origen, The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, trans. R. P. Lawson

(New York: The Newman Press, 1957) 21.
34 St Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs 399-411.
35 Ibid. 409, 11.

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Week – the climax of the Lenten Triodion – when the Bridegroom arrives
“in the middle of the night” and calls all to “the spiritual feast of [His]
bridal chamber.”36 Indeed, the moment of darkness that marks His arrival
is also reminiscent of the “divine night, in which the Bridegroom draws
near but is not manifest.”37 However, in the setting of the Akathist,
the nuptial metaphor became a historicised allegory, narrating the
biographical and mystical dimensions of the Archangel’s visitation,
the Virgin’s astonishment, and her conception without seed. The hymn
redeploys the affective stylistics of the Songs’ wedding imagery,
embedding its emotive utterances in the mystery of the Incarnation. The
Triodion then unlocks the nuptial metaphor so that all the faithful can
identify with the virgins who love the Bridegroom: “Brethren, let us love
the Bridegroom and prepare our lamps with care.”38

The sensuality of the Canticle’s opening lines, where “breasts are

better than wine” and young maidens are drawn to the fragrance of the
lover whose “name is perfumed ointment emptied out,” resonates in the
Akathist:

Rejoice, cup wherein is mixed the wine of mighty joy

Rejoice, scent of Christ’s fragrance:
Rejoice, life of mystical feasting […]
Rejoice, you who alone are blameless and fair among women
(Song 5:9)
Rejoice, vessel that has received the inexhaustible Myrrh,
emptied out upon you (Song 1:3).39

This interplay between the sensual and mystical echoes the bodily and
divine modes of perception that Gregory spoke of as an “analogy between

36 Ware and Mary, The Lenten Triodion 511, 28. There are some intriguing textual
parallels between this hymn and Gregory’s first homily, which dwells on being
“in love with the divine Beauty” and “a desire for Beauty.” See St Gregory of
Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs 22-25, 40, 41.
37 Homilies on the Song of Songs 343.
38 Ware and Mary, The Lenten Triodion 524.
39 Ibid. 435, 42.

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the sense organs of the body and the operations of the soul.”40 Based on
this notion of the inner and outer senses, the experience of God entails an
affective mysticism; not a disembodied one:

For the sense organs of the soul are truly touched with sweetness
by the Word when the apple tree’s shadow protects us from the
fiery blaze of temptations.41

The Nyssen’s conception of spiritual senses – the organs of divine

perception – did not overlook the realm of feeling that linked the
corporeal and spiritual. Rather, it presented the true realm of emotionality
as liberated from “the binding force of a determining object”42 and yet
unbridled in the intensity of its passion.43

Unlocking the text’s spiritual sense, Gregory analogously read

the lovers’ impassioned utterances as embodying a passion transcending
earthly corporeality and touching divine eros. In his exegesis, as allegory
delves into the spiritual meaning of the Shulammite and her lover, human
passion is anagogically immersed in divine passion and the mystical
knowledge of the eschaton. Therein, the erotic passion of the lovers in
the Song of Songs is sanctified and transfigured into an ever-growing and
all-consuming eros for the divine. For the Nyssen, impassible passion
and transfigured emotion were not theoretical ideas but considerations
intimately connected to the interpretation of Scripture.

As we have seen, the author of the Akathist echoed the Nyssen’s

40 St Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs 37.

41 Ibid. 131.
42 Largier, ‘Inner Senses–Outer Senses: The Practice of Emotions in Medieval
Mysticism’ 9.
43 Gregory posited that humanity’s passible nature was a gift from God in prevision
of the exile from Eden. See Paul M. Blowers, ‘Hope for the Passible Self: The
Use and Transformation of the Human Passions in the Fathers of the Philokalia’
in The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, ed. Brock Bingaman
and Bradley Nassif (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) 220. Cf. the
analysis of the ‘garments of skin’ in Panayiotis Nellas, Deification in Christ: The
Nature of the Human Person, trans. Norman Russell (New York: St Vladimir's
Seminary Press, 1997) 43-91.

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reconfiguration of the lover’s dialogue in the Canticle, which provided a

model for the dialogue between the soul and the Bridegroom. Gregory’s
hermeneutics also paved the way for hymnology’s Marian interpretation
of the Song of Songs.44 This extended beyond the narrative of the hymn,
creating a space of interaction within the affective field of liturgical
performance:

O Bridegroom, surpassing all in beauty […] clothe me in the

glorious robe of Your beauty, and in Your compassion make me
feast with joy in Your Kingdom.45

It invited the faithful to enter the sacred drama unfolding before them
and draw near to the mystery. As with the nuptial metaphor and as we
will see in Romanos’ kontakion, the human-divine encounter is framed
in dialogical terms, amplifying “moments of desire and distance,
familiarity and alienation,” experiences that unfold in the aesthetic and
contemplative experience of the Biblical event the hymn dramatised.46

Romanos’ Kontakion on the Harlot

Dramatic dialogue is a hallmark of Romanos’ kontakia, which are

meditations on Biblical characters’ personal thoughts and hidden
actions, evoking their reflections, emotions and sensory perceptions.
In the kontakion on the harlot, the Melodist even uses an invented
character that does not appear in the Bible – the perfume seller who
argues with the penitent prostitute. And Romanos himself becomes an
interlocutor, acting as an unrepentant counterpoint for the repentance of
his protagonist. Georgia Frank and Derek Krueger have analysed this
aspect of Romanos’ kontakia.47 And Mary Cunningham has explored

44 The Fifth Ecumenical Council’s endorsement of the Canticle also helped. See
Frances M. Young, Lewis Ayres, and Andrew Louth, The Cambridge History of
Early Christian Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press 2004) 347.
45 Ware and Mary, The Lenten Triodion 528.
46 Largier, ‘Inner Senses–Outer Senses: The Practice of Emotions in Medieval
Mysticism’ 10.
47 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,

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the cross-pollination of dramatic dialogue in Romanos’ poetry and the

Byzantine homiletic tradition, noting the Greek, Syriac and Near East
influences on the Melodist.48

Romanos’ kontakia represent a unique fusion of classical

rhetoric inherited from the Greek world of antiquity, the Syriac poetry
of St Ephrem and the Christian discourse of the Cappadocian Fathers.
However, as important as dramatic dialogue was for the Melodist and in
the “emergence of Biblical epic in the context of Christian worship,”49
and although there are echoes of the Canticle’s impassioned dialogue
in Romanos’ kontakion on the harlot, this paper will focus more closely
on how the Nyssen’s conception of epektasis resonates in the chanted
sermon.

In his commentary on the Canticle, this continual ascent towards

God is presented as a never-ending desire for divine Beauty:

…the passion of erotic love is set as a figure at the very fore of the
guidance that [the Song of Songs] gives: so that by this we may learn
that it is necessary for the soul, fixing itself steadily on the inaccessible
beauty of the divine nature, to love that beauty as much as the body
has a bent for what is akin to it and to turn passion into impassibility.50

M. L. Satlow and S. Wetzman (Indianapolis: Bloomington, 2005) 163-79; Derek

Krueger, ‘Romanos the Melodist and the Early Christian Self’ in Proceedings
of the 21st International Congress of Byzantine Studies: London, 21-26 August
2006, ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) 255-74.
48 Mary Cunningham, ‘Dramatic Device or Didactic Tool? The Function of Dialogue
in Byzantine Preaching’ in Rhetoric in Byzantium: Papers from the Thirty-Fifth
Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Exeter College, University of Oxford,
March 2001, ed. Elizabeth Jeffreys (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001) 101-13; ‘The
Reception of Romanos in Middle Byzantine Homiletics and Hymnography’
Dumbarton Oaks Papers 62 (2008) 251-60. Cf. William L. Petersen’s essays on
Romanos in Jan Krans and Joseph Verheyden, eds., Patristic and Text-Critical
Studies: The Collected Essays of William L. Petersen (Leiden: Brill, 2012) 50,
153.
49 Georgia Frank, ‘Romanos and the Night Vigil in the Sixth Century’ in Byzantine
Christianity: A People's History of Christianity, ed. Derek Krueger (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 2006) 76.
50 St Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs 29.

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In his sixth and eighth homilies this epektasis of desire, if it ever reaches
the object of its yearning, is rekindled – the “desire of the soul that is
ascending never rests content with what has been known […] mounting
upwards by way of one greater desire toward another that surpasses it
[…] always journeying toward the infinite by way of higher things.”51
Epektasis shapes the transformation of erotic passion in a desire mediated
by the divine.

Romanos, who in his kontakion on the harlot declares his

interest in “search[ing] the mind of the wise woman and to know how
Jesus came to shine in her,” similarly explored the interiority of his
protagonist, dramatising her repentance through the narrative of her
emotional experience and the transformation of her passions.52 Often, it
is dramatic and affective dialogue – or even a soliloquy – that engenders
a phenomenology of her emotions:

“How may I, who have trapped all with my glance, gaze on you?
How may I, who have enraged you, my Creator, entreat you, the
Compassionate?”53

But it is also the language of mystical synaesthesia that reveals how the
harlot is able to see “Christ’s words like sweet drops of fragrance raining
down everywhere, and granting the breath of life to all the faithful” –
how she feels the “fragrance of Christ’s table breathe gently on her.”54

Not unlike the Bride, who says to the south wind: Blow through
my garden, “it is because the voice of the Bridegroom, her Creator,
constituted her mother of the gardens” that she wants her garden’s

51 Ibid. 261.
52 Romanos the Melodist, On the Life of Christ: Chanted Sermons by the Great
Sixth-Century Poet and Singer St. Romanos, trans. Archimandrite Ephrem
Lash, Sacred Literature Series (AltaMira Press, 1998) 78. For the Greek text
see volume 3, hymn 21 in José Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos Le Mélode:
Hymnes, 5 vols. (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1964) 20-43.
53 Romanos the Melodist, On the Life of Christ: Chanted Sermons by the Great
Sixth-Century Poet and Singer St. Romanos 77.
54 Ibid. 78.

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fragrances to flow out.55 Before the harlot’s repentance, the expensive

perfume was a tool of her trade. After her repentance, it is transformed
into the fragrance of salvation. As Gregory propounded, “it may be that
that perfume is not different from the perfume that provides the Bride
with the scent of the Bridegroom […] in the Gospel the sweetness that
then filled the house becomes the ointment of the whole body of the
church in the whole cosmos.”56 Ostensibly an olfactory experience, the
transformation of licentious perfume into euodic repentance manifests
the harlot’s interiority and the metamorphosis of her passion. Her desire
for beauty and erotic fulfilment is redefined and reconfigured when she
encounters Jesus: “the loveliest and creator of what is lovely, whose
form [she] longed for before she saw him.”57 In Christ, her longing is
stretched and expanded in the “ever-available opportunity of a yet nobler
desiring.”58

There is almost a dialectical relationship between the sensorium

and the passions. The honing of the harlot’s senses, her transfigured
olfactory experience, accompanies a metamorphosis of her passion,
which is dramatised with the affective stylistics of Nyssenesque epektasis.

I am going to him, because it is for me that he has come.

I am leaving those who were once mine,
because now I long greatly for him.
And as the One who loves me, I anoint him and caress him,
I weep and I groan and I urge him fittingly to long for me.
I am changed to the longing of the One who is longed for,
and, as he wishes to be kissed, so I kiss my lover […]
I break with my past lovers, that I may please my new love.59

The resonance of this strophe with the opening lines of the Canticle is

55 St Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs 319.

56 Ibid. 103.
57 Romanos the Melodist, On the Life of Christ: Chanted Sermons by the Great
Sixth-Century Poet and Singer St. Romanos 78.
58 St Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs 33.
59 Romanos the Melodist, On the Life of Christ: Chanted Sermons by the Great
Sixth-Century Poet and Singer St. Romanos 79.

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palpable – the bride experiences similar moments of divine and sober

intoxication. Likewise, the harlot’s longing for “the One who is longed
for” only intensifies after her epiphany and the scent of salvation
engenders a more ardent desire. For Romanos, as for Gregory, it is not
simply the harlot’s ascetic effort, but the call and lure of divine Beauty,
which magnetise the desire of the soul.

He is the Son of David, and therefore fair to look on,

Son of God and God, and therefore wholly lovely.
I have not seen him, but I heard and was wounded
by the vision of the One whose nature is invisible.60

Romanos did not ignore the apophatic dimension of theology; he sang of

it as an anagogical immersion of human passion into divine passion and
the mystical knowledge of the eschaton – an immersion that refracted the
eros of the Shulammite and her lover within the lens of allegory.

A Few Concluding Thoughts

The kinship between the textual strategies of Gregory and

hymnography discloses an underlying affinity between his exegetical
approach to the Canticle and the Biblical exegesis performed by
liturgical hymns within sacred ritual. These homologous exegeses seem
more than a mere coincidence in the evolving liturgical life of
Constantinople. The transfiguration of the passions and epektasis of
desire that marked Gregory’s exegesis resonated in the affective
mysticism of hymns, although the influence of other classical, Biblical
and patristic texts on hymnography is more palpable. Through the
aesthetic, sensual and dialogical dimensions of hymns, with all their
pathopoeia, the faithful grasped the intelligible, spiritual and mystical.
As in the Song, feeling and the desire for salvation escorted the
mystical experience of the dazzling darkness.

The singing of hymns was a sacramental act wherein the text

mirrored the passions of the singer’s soul. Hymns unveiled passions

60 Ibid. 81, 82.

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that were honed and transfigured. They presented the hidden desires
of Biblical characters and invited the faithful to become part of the
sacred drama unfolding before them. In hymnography, desire was not
abolished but reoriented so that it could be united with the otherness of
the divine and then – as in the Canticle – be invited again into an ever-
intensifying, all-consuming and perpetual participation. Like the Nyssen,
who associated epektasis with the eschatological horizon of the age to
come, hymnographers wrote a new chapter in the Byzantine history of
emotions. Like Gregory, who read the lovers’ impassioned utterances as
embodying a passion transcending earthly corporeality, hymns immersed
emotions in divine passion and the mystical knowledge of the eschaton.

Gregory presented impassibility as a freedom from passion, not

its obliteration. Epektasis was not capricious desire but the “beautiful
passion of insatiability”61 for divine things. When a soul is wounded by
love, emotions are rampant and tremendous. Yet by showing the true
realm of emotions to exist in the soul’s ever-intensifying desire for the
Divine, which can only be felt when the yearning soul is “surrounded by
the divine night” and experiences the “mystical kiss,”62 the Nyssen began
cultivating an affective mode of mysticism that flourished in the hymns
composed after his death.

61 St Gregory of Nyssa, De Mortuis Oratio, quoted in Lucas Francisco Mateo-Seco,

‘Apatheia’ in The Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa, ed. Lucas Francisco
Mateo-Seco and Giulio Maspero (Leiden: Brill, 2010) 51.
62 St Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs 341, 43.

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