DOBROV, GREGORY W., A Dialogue with Death: Ritual Lament and the "threnos Theotokou" [Greek] of Romanos Melodos , Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 35:4 (1994:Winter) p.385 A Dialogue with Death: Ritual Lament and the 8pllvo<; 8£0161(oU of Romanos Melodos Gregory W. Dobrov "This disease of females still persists." John Chrysostom I N HER RECENT STUDY of women's laments and Greek litera­ ture, Gail Holst-Warhaft writes: "The female lamenter artic­ ulates the inarticulate, forming a bridge between the living and the dead that is recognized by the community .... But as it is articulated by male poets removed from a ritual context, it loses its functional q uali ty as a communal expression of grief." 1 Were we to compose an index locorum to this fine book, however, we would find ourselves lisiting a rich variety of passages extending from the present-Yannis Ritsos' Epitaphios and Kostis Palamas' Thanatos Pallikariou -back through Athenian tragedy to Homer. Unless we narrowly restrict the definition of cultural production and its contexts, however, most entries in our index would turn out to have quite a bit to do with ritual after all. Recent scholarship on Greek drama, for example, has shed light on the manifold connections between the ceremonial context of the City Dionysia and the wider fields of ritual.2 Similarly, modern writers continue to engage the Orthodox 1 Dangerous Voices: Women's Laments and Greek Literature (London 1992: hereafter 'Holst-War haft') 9. 2 See e.g. N. Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, tr. A. Sheridan (Cambridge [Mass.] 1986); J. J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin, edd., Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context (Princeton 1990); A. M. Bowie, Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy (Cambridge 1993); A. H. Sommerstein et at., edd., Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis (Bari 1993), esp. H. P. Foley, "The Politics of Tragic Lamentation," 101-43; R. A. S. Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State (Oxford 1994); and C. Sourvinou­ Inwood, "Something to Do with Athens: Tragedy and Ritual," in R. Osborne and S. Hornblower, edd., Ritual, Finance, Politics: Athenian Democratic Accounts Presented to David Lewis (Oxford 1994) 269-90. 385 DOBROV, GREGORY W., A Dialogue with Death: Ritual Lament and the "threnos Theotokou" [Greek] of Romanos Melodos , Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 35:4 (1994:Winter) p.385 386 8PHNOI 8EOTOKOY OF ROMANOS MELODOS Epitaphios (Requiem) tradition in both its official and popular manifestations. Least of all removed from a ritual context are the poetic and homiletic works of the Eastern church that served to negotiate-and in some cases continue to negotiate-the dramatic conflict between demotic and institutional responses to death. An important early Byzantine contribution to Greek sacred and popular culture is the protagonist of this discourse, the 8£O'tOKOC; ~OlPOAoYlcr"tpa, so to speak, the rather aggressive mater dolorosa who makes her dramatic entrance in the kontakion of Romanos Melodos known as 8pftvoc; 8£O'tOKO'U or "Mary at the Cross" (Mass­ Trypanis 19). In this paper I shall suggest that we read Romanos' 8pftvoc; not simply as the beginning of the "ap­ propriation" of lament by the church or the "symbolic substitution" of one form of lament for another,3 but as a dialogical negotiation, within the contexts of community and ritual, between various responses to death: Christian and non­ Christian, physical and spiritual, demotic and institutional, political and devotional, male and female. Viewed in this light, the male composer may occupy a 'third' position as an interpreter or mediator of a conflict between the community, on the one hand, and a given institution-political, ecclesiastical, or intellectual-on the other. In the case of Romanos this mediation appears conciliatory, although later transformations of the Orthodox Epitaphios are often confrontational and unsettling. Ristsos' political use of tradition has made his Epitaphios a modern classic-a historical crisis mythologized in terms of the Virgin's lament. The 8pftvoc; 8£O'tOKO'U illustrates well the eagerness on the part of the 'male literary lament' to engage other texts and traditions in a display of its socio-political purpose. Marjorie Carpenter's ingenious interpretation of Romanos' miracle-his poetic initiation by the Virgin who appeared on Christmas Eve to feed him a scroll-would 3 "Perhaps by transforming the folk laments into an integral part of the Christian ritual, the church thought to appropriate for itself the role of official mourner" (Holst-Warhaft 172); "Similarly, the early Christian fathers may have diverted the subversive potential of private mourning, controlled by women, into the central focus of a ritual controlled by male priests in which the Virgin's lament for her dead son becomes a symbolic substitution for the worshippers' personal grieving" (6). DOBROV, GREGORY W., A Dialogue with Death: Ritual Lament and the "threnos Theotokou" [Greek] of Romanos Melodos , Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 35:4 (1994:Winter) p.385 GREGORY W. DOBROV 387 connect the intertextuality eloquently revealed by La Piana with a basic feature of the Saint's iconography and legend.4 1. Dialogic Imagination and the Kontakion The fourth chapter of Margaret Alexiou's ground-breaking work 5 is largely devoted to the rich medieval tradition of the Virgin's lament, which the author traces from Romanos through a variety of examples down to the current text and practice of the E1tt'taqnoc; 8pl1voC; of Holy Week. Alexiou's discussion is impressive in its illustration of the broad reciprocity between the various registers of discourse: official, literary, and popular. "It is this dynamic interaction," she notes (xi), "between learned and popular poetry which makes the study of Greek tradition so rewarding and exciting when seen as a whole." Reflecting this interaction, the kontakion, as perfected by Romanos, came to be thoroughly 'dialogized', i.e., characterized by a variety of interacting and responding elements. Beginning with the antiphonal aspects of the original delivery-e.g. the annual performance of the nativity kontakion by two choirs in the place of the emperor6-there can be no doubt that dialogue, generally understood, and antiphony are the defining characteristics of the genre, i. e., the vigorous, 4 M. Carpenter, "The Paper that Romanos Swallowed," Speculum 7 (1932) 3-22; G. La Piana, Le Rappresentazioni sacre nella letterature bizantina (Grot­ toferrata 1912), and "The Byzantine Theatre," Speculum 11 (1936) 172-211. 5 The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge 1974: hereafter' Alex­ iou'). Other important work in this field includes Alexiou's "The Lament of the Virgin in Byzantine Literature and Modern Greek Folk Song," ByzMGrSt 1 (1975) 11-40, and "Reappropriating Greek Sacrifice: Homo Necans or Civ8pomo<;, 8u(Jtuswv?" ] MGrSt 8 (1990) 97-124; D. de Martino, Morte e pianto nel mondo antico: dal lamento pagano al pianto di Maria (Turin 1958); B. Bouvier, Le Mirologue de la Vierge (Geneva 1976); and C. Sourvinou-Inwood, 'Reading' Greek Culture: Texts and Images, Rituals and Myths (Oxford 1991). 6 Apparently an especially elaborate ceremony: see P. Maas and C. A. Try­ panis, Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica (Oxford 1963) xf. "From the surviving texts," notes Trypanis, "we gather that the main body of the metrical sermon was chanted from the pulpit by the preacher himself after the reading of the gospel, while a choir, or even the whole congregation, probably joined in the refrain." For the Greek text of Romanos I have consulted the editions of Maas­ Trypanis and Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos Ie Melode: Hymnes (= SC 99, 110, 114, 128 [Paris 1964-67J). DOBROV, GREGORY W., A Dialogue with Death: Ritual Lament and the "threnos Theotokou" [Greek] of Romanos Melodos , Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 35:4 (1994:Winter) p.385 388 8PHNOE 8EOTOKOY OF ROMANOS MELODOS antithetical give-and-take at the levels of meter, language, characterization, strophic structure, and theme. Romanos presents his players as eloquent and independent stage-figures in urgent conversation. The social, moral, and theological issues of each composition, moreover, are articulated throughout by means of incessant and highly varied verbal and thematic antitheses, the stock-in-trade of the kontakion. Such sermons, notes MacCormack, were not "actual ceremonies carried out, but the events of the redemption viewed as events which recur each year in such a way as to fuse time and eternity into one."7 Having used the terms "dialogism" and «dialogical" several times I have implicitly engaged an important term of Bakhtinian criticism that trades in large and flexible-often quite 'fuzzy'­ concepts such as «carnival," "chronotope," and "memory." Dialogical interaction, argues Bakhtin in his influential study of Dostoevsky,8 is the authentic realm of living discourse [podlinnaya sfera zhizni yazyka].All human discourse [again, zhizn' yazyka] is permeated with dialogical relations .... Since they lie in the realm of the word which is by nature dialogical, these relations are the province of metalinguistic study that transcends the boundaries of linguistics and has an independent agenda [predmet i zadachiJ. Dialogical relations are, thus not limited to whole utterances: We may, in fact, take a dialogical approach to any [seman­ tically] significant clement of an utterance, even to a single word, if [such a word] is perceived not as an impersonal lexical item, but as a sign belonging to another's system of signification,9 as a representative of another's utterance; that is, if we hear in [this word] the voice of another. The often problematic application of Bakhtin's notions of "carnival" to ancient genres and authors has been much advanced in the scholarship of the last decade and a half.lo 7 S. MacCormack, "Christ and Empire: Time and Ceremonial in Sixth Cen­ tury Byzantium and Beyond," Byzantion 52 (1982) 287-309. 8 M. Bakhtin, Problemy Poeliki Dostoevskovo4 (Moscow 1979) 212ff. 9 Literally "a sign of the semantic position of another" (znak chuzhoi smyslovoi pOZilsii). 10 See e.g. ].-c. Carriere, Le carnaval el La politique (Paris 1979); W. RosIer, "Michail Bachtin und die Karnevalskultur im antiken Griechenland," Quad Urbin 23 (1986) 25-44; K. Reckford, Aristophanes' Old-and-New Comedy: DOBROV, GREGORY W., A Dialogue with Death: Ritual Lament and the "threnos Theotokou" [Greek] of Romanos Melodos , Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 35:4 (1994:Winter) p.385 GREGORY W. DOBROV 389 "Dialogism" has come to the fore more recently and has Its own bibliography. II Particularly relevant to my discussion of Romanos is the recent study of lyric by Paul Allen Miller that emphasizes the need to distinguish between different types of dialogism when working across ancient genres. Miller suggests the terms "primary dialogism" to refer to "that interplay of voices and concepts, which is found in realist fiction and daily life [as well as drama and the kontakion, I might add]. It designates that set of relations that governs the exchange of complete 'utterances' between individuals, social groups, and/or their fictional representatives .... » Secondary dialogism, on the other hand, "represents that more subtle level of dialogical interaction which occurs not only within utterances, but within individual words.» This phenomenon is dialogical in a deeper sense as it "results from the speaker's simultaneous response to past and anticipation of future utterances ... For every word we use carries with it the sights, sounds, and smells, the social and rhetorical contexts of its previous uses" (em­ phasis added).12 Miller argues persuasively that ancient lyric, whose realization was oral and public, was profoundly dialogical in this 'secondary' sense: an apparently monological text whose clements, neverthess, were dialogized by the performance situation.13 Six Essays in Perspective (Chapel Hill 1987); D. F. Sutton, Self and Society in Aristophanes (Washington 1980); A. Edwards, "Historicizing the Popular Grotesque: Bakhtin's Rabelais and Attic Old Comedy," in R. Scodel, ed., Theater and Society in the Classical World (Ann Arbor 1993) 89-117. 11 The starting point for this line of inquiry (and most any other) must be the work of Caryl Emerson, Michael Holquist (not least their translations of, and introductions to, Bakhtin's work), and Gary Saul Morson. A particularly influential work has been C. Emerson, tr., and M. Holquist, ed. and tr., The Dialogic Imagination (Austin 1981), esp. the essay "Discourse in the Novel," 258-422. See e.g. M. Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London 1990); G. S. Morson and C. Emerson, Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges (Evanston 1989), and Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford 1990); C. Emerson, "Irreverent Bakhtin," Arethusa 26 (1993) 123-40. 12 P. A. Miller, "Sappho 31 and Catullus 51: The Dialogism of Lyric," Arethusa 26 (1993) 183f. 13 Miller (supra n.12: 186) notes that "utterances are always other-directed, and this is particularly so in the case of public artistic performances where the audience is immediately present. Such poems are of necessity communal events, rather than closed confessions. Each new performance is a separate utterance, indissolubly linked to the moment of enunciation and so forever reinforcing the radically occasional nature of archaic lyric." The dialogue of a DOBROV, GREGORY W., A Dialogue with Death: Ritual Lament and the "threnos Theotokou" [Greek] of Romanos Melodos , Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 35:4 (1994:Winter) p.385 390 8PHNOI 8EOTOKOY OF ROMANOS MELODOS II. Invention of the Theotokos The narrative contribution of the kontakion evolved in a sphere contiguous with imperial ceremonial and the cult of icons that, as Averil Cameron and others have argued, were instrumental in redefining sixth-century society.14 Theological­ ly, the epftvo~ kontakion studies the tensions attendant on the political promotion of Mary as Theotokos during Romanos' lifetime. The bare outline that we have of his career begins wi th his birth, midway between the Council of Chalcedon and the accession of Anastasius I, in Syrian Emesa, and includes a sojourn in Constantinople, perhaps even at the court of Anastasius, around the turn of the century.15 Given the likelihood that the kontakia On the Ten Virgins (II) and On Earthquakes and Fires are authentic, Romanos appears to have been in Constantinople to witness the Nika riots Qanuary 532), the earthquakes of the mid-fifties Quly 552, August 555),16 and perhaps even the collapse and rebuilding of Hagia Sophia (May 558-December 562).17 Particularly relevant to the kontakion narratives is the fidelity with which Romanos defends the poet in this genre is "with both the (oral) poetic tradition and the collective ideological and social world in which it is performed" (195). 14 See MacCormack (supra n.7: 308) on the "perhaps deliberate abandon­ ment of classical culture and philosophy which characterize the empire between the death of Justinian and the rise of Islam [and, as she argues, somewhat earlier as well]. As everyone knows, this was not the end of classical culture and philosophy in Byzantium. But henceforth, they rubbed shoulders with quite unclassical ideas which became as ingrained in Byzantine mentalities as the classical tradition itself"; see also 287f and Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity (Berkeley 1981); A. Cameron, "Images of Authority: Elites and Icons in Late Sixth Century Byzantinum," PaP 84 (1979) 3-35. 15 See P. Maas, "Die Chronologie der Hymnen des Romanos," BZ 15 (1906) 1-44; J. Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos Ie Melode et les origines de La poesie religieuse a Byzance (Paris 1977) 178-89. S. P. Brock's recent work on Syriac verse has important implications for the evolution of the kontakion: see esp. "Two Syriac Verse Homilies on the Binding of Isaac," Museon 99 (1986) 61-129, and «A Syriac Verse Homily on Elijah and the Widow of Sarepta," Museon 102 (1989) 93-113. 16 On the tradition of incorporating natural disasters into the liturgical cycle see B. Croke, "Two Early Byzantine Earthquakes and their Liturgical Com­ memoration," Byzantion 51 (1981) 122-47, esp. 123f with n.1l. 17 The evidence is internal: see Maas (sup ra n.15) 9; see also Maas and Trypanis (supra n.6) xvff. DOBROV, GREGORY W., A Dialogue with Death: Ritual Lament and the "threnos Theotokou" [Greek] of Romanos Melodos , Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 35:4 (1994:Winter) p.385 GREGORY W. DOBROV 391 official position on the important theological issues of his day, especially the anti-monophysitism of Chalcedon and the establishment of Mary as Theotokos, between the extremes of Nestorius and Eutyches, at Ephesus.18 The passionate treatment of these great themes in the kontakia, however, reflects their overwhelming importance in political and social life and is far from the mere reiteration of the dead letter. The SPllvos kontakion, like the Akathistos, whose icono­ graphic expression has attracted scholarly attention recently, 19 is largely devoted to a conversation that dialogizes the very term S£o'tOKOs. The refrain of the hymn, "my son and my God," as well as its structure are informed by the polarity of the human and divine aspects of Mary's relation to Christ. The theological program of the kontakion, as usual, is framed by the prooimion and concluding strophe. In the former Mary simultaneoulsy asserts her 'natural' motherhood and reluctant acquiescence in the crucifixion as having transcendent significance. We note that the clause concluding the proem places the first statement of the refrain in this ambivalent context: E l KCt. t mau POY {moflEY ElS, au 1.m:uPXElS o UlC)(; KU18Eos 1l0U.20 In the final strophe, similarly, the kontakion apostrophizes Christ as UtE 'tlls 1tUpS£vou, SEE 'tlls 1tUpS£vou ("Son of the Virgin, God of the Virgin"), both to summarize the doctrine of redemption and underscore that, as a woman and mother, Mary required supernatural support to find the confidence (1tUP­ PllO'tu) to accept the harsh paradox of Golgotha. Between these bookends is a series of direct exchanges of increasing frequency framed by the pious narrator's commentary into symmetrical groups of strophes. Mary holds forth for the fi rst three strophes Clff) and is answered in as many (4ff). Mary speaks 18 See Grosdidier de Matons (supra n.15) 263-84, who makes the important point, however, that Romanos' philosophical strength lies much more in the area of "economy" (dispensation) than in pure theology. 19 See e.g. A. A. Grabar, "L'illustration de la premiere partie de L'hymne Akathiste," Byzantion 54 (1984) 648-702; E. Voordeckers, De Akathistos­ hymne 7)an de Byzantijnse Kerk (Bonheiden 1988); ]. Vereecken, "L'hymne Acathistc: iconc chantee et mystere de I'incarnation en nombres," Byzantion 63 (1988) 357-87; J. Lafontainc-Dosogne, "Nouvelles remarques sur I'illus­ tration du prooimion de L'hymne Akathiste," Byzantion 6 (1991) 448-57. 20 "Despite the fact that you endure the cross, you remain my son and my God." DOBROV, GREGORY W., A Dialogue with Death: Ritual Lament and the "threnos Theotokou" [Greek] of Romanos Melodos , Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 35:4 (1994:Winter) p.385 392 8PHNOr 8EOTOKOY OF ROMANOS MELODOS again for two strophes (7f, not including the second sixth) to which Christ responds in two (9f). Mary then has a single strophe (11) that inspires the poem's climax: a theological speech in which Christ presents the redemption by means of an extended medical metaphor (12ff). There follows a final single-strophe exchange between mother and son (IS£) capped by the concluding prayer. This dramatic symmetry is strictly articulated by the strophic unit-clearly the basic module of performance-which is, in turn, asserted throughout by means of a melodic and metrical responsion matched only by classical choral lyric in complexity and variety. If the "theo-" part of Mary's relation to Christ is institutional­ ly and politically determined, the specifics of the second morpheme, i.e., "-tokos" "giver of birth," are more available to the poet for creative manipulation. In our kontakion, I submit, Romanos situates the paradoxical and synthetic figure of the Theotokos wi thin an archetypal structure of ritual lament involving a mother, in the company of other women, lamenting her dead son. The traditional funerary context of ritual lamentation is cleverly modified on the basis of a few poignant moments in the Gospels to acknowledge the traditional female management of burial and to place it, as it were, in dialogue with evolving theology. As we shall see, the epilvo~ kontakion represents the irreconcilable conflict betrween 'natural' grief in the context of traditional (extra-ecclesiastical) ritual, on the one hand, and the Orthodox doctrines of redemption, resurrection, and Mary's motherhood of God, on the other. At the poem's end, moreover, it becomes clear that Romanos' Virgin asserts her 'natural' right to mourn in an implicit rejection of any artificial theological resolution of this conflict. III. En Route to the Cross There can be little doubt that it was a bold innovation on the part of Romanos to assimilate the Virgin-otherwise absent from the passion narratives 21-to the women who followed Christ along the via dolorosa. These women, as well as those 21 A single reference (John 19:25) locates Mary on Calvary as a silent char­ acter. The Synoptic Gospels, of course, have much more to say about Christ's female followers than about his mother. The liturgy, as a rule, eschews material from the apocryphal gospels. DOBROV, GREGORY W., A Dialogue with Death: Ritual Lament and the "threnos Theotokou" [Greek] of Romanos Melodos , Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 35:4 (1994:Winter) p.385 GREGORY W. DOBROV 393 who come to be celebrated as the yuvalKE<; IlUpO no8cp Kat ou (n£yO) aATJ8wc;, 'tV' EYro /lEV EV 8aAu1lCP, ou 8' EV ~UACP Kat EYro IlEV EV otKl~, ou 8' EV IlVTJIlE1CP' 22 The full significance of a sacred fable can only be appreciated against the backdrop of social reality. for lament-specific material Alexiou has not been superceded. More general ground is covered in the accessible bibliographical overview of recent work in L. Garland, "The Life and Ideology of Byzantine Women," Byzantion 58 (1988) 361-93, esp. nn.1-4. DOBROV, GREGORY W., A Dialogue with Death: Ritual Lament and the "threnos Theotokou" [Greek] of Romanos Melodos , Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 35:4 (1994:Winter) p.385 394 8PHNm: 8EOTOKOY OF ROMANOS MELODOS acpfS ouv OUV£ASw' SfPCUtfUEt yap Ef.lE .0 SECOPflV Of .23 It is tempting to see here a hint of the death-wish theme that becomes so prominent in the later vernacular 8PllVOl 8EO'tOKO'U. 24 Students of funerary ri tuals across a variety of cultures have suggested that the lamenter approaches the apparent madness of the shamanic function by engaging the dead in direct dialogue-"ritual dialogues with death,» in Holst­ Warhaft's phrase (26f)-and the format of the kontakion provides an ideal literary medium for the "antiphonic construc­ tion of pain» in the performance of lament. 25 The Gospels, then, have provided an ingenious way for Romanos to stage this very aspect of ritual lament and, thereby, to contribute an important feature to the subsequent threnos tradition: the moirologhistra may still engage the 'deceased' on this side of eternity! The force of this stark dramatization is to enact, as a process, the irreconcilable conflict between the mourning mother and her son's death, which may still be challenged as an imminent event. Throughout the kontakion Mary asserts her failure to un­ derstand Christ's sacrificial death, and her words in the second strophe, 1tw<; 'to ta: /l11 'ta'i~ aouv£1ol'; o/lolwall<;; Eal)''[TtV, 1to.VaoCj>£ KOPT) (5.4). That this ouv£O"~ ("understanding") is technical and theological is made clear later (13.8ff), when Mary is encouraged to subscribe to doctrine of "salvation through suffering." Christ presents himself as a healer whose remedies will bring her und.:::rstan­ ding: /lTl'tEP, 'tva 'l'o.AAn~ OUVE'tW';' "1t(lOXWV 1[0.80<; EAUOEV 0 u\.O<;; Kat 8£0<;; /lOU" ("That you might sing with understanding, mother, 'Suffering, my son and my God has ended suffering' "). The discomfort and contempt with which church spokesmen regarded traditional lament rituals is evident from the writings of the famous fourth-century fathers Basil of Caesarea and John Chrysostom. In the homily De gratiarum actione, the former asserts that "neither men nor women should be permitted too much lamentation and mourning."32 The outlines of contem­ porary practice emerge in his next comment: "They should show moderate distress in their affliction, with only a few tears, shed quietly and without moaning, wailing, tearing of clothes, and groveling in the dust, or committing any other indecency commonly practiced by the ungodly." A passage that must be juxtaposed with the 'theological' voice of our kontakion is Chrysostom's famous outburst (PC LIX 346): 31 What are you doing, woman? Tell me, would you shame­ lessly strip yourself naked in the middle of the marketplace, you, who are a part of Christ, in the presence of men and in the very marketplace? And would you tear your hair, rend your garments and wail loudly, dancing and preserving the image of Bacchic women, without regard for your offense to God? "Lay aside your grief, mother, lay it aside. Lamentation does not befit you who have been called "Blessed." Do not obscure your calling with weeping. Do not liken yourself to those who lack understanding, all-wise maiden. You are in the midst of my bridal chamber." 32 PC XXXI 229c. This and the Chrysostom passage below are cited in the translation of Alexiou 2Sf. DOBROV, GREGORY W., A Dialogue with Death: Ritual Lament and the "threnos Theotokou" [Greek] of Romanos Melodos , Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 35:4 (1994:Winter) p.385 398 8PHNm: 8EOTOKOY Of ROMANOS MELODOS Alexiou notes in this connection: It is significant that he objects not only to the more violent practices, such as laceration of the cheeks, tearing of the hair, and rending of garments, roundly condemning a widow bereaved of her only son for her wild desire to bury herself alive with him in the tomb, but also to the very essence of the dirge, which he describes as self-centered and self-indul­ gent (emphasis added). The theme of a mother who would follow her son in death and who has little concern for the Christian 'calling' finds power­ ful-and very persuasive-expression in Romanos' dramatic character. Mary continues to weep, and Christ is forced to repeat his rhetorical questions again and again (4.4, 8): rl Oa.KPUW;. 1.l:frtllP; ti o-ov KAa.in<;, Ilft'tllP; ("Why are you crying, mother?"). It is important to emphasize that, on the dramatic plane, both Christ's arguments and his rhetorical displays remain ineffective and that the Theotokos' position remains theoretical. Mary weeps at the end as she does in the beginning, a disconsolate j.lOlPOAO,,{l(J'tpa. who will not be assuaged by promises of salvation or resurrection. The programmatic nature of Romanos' introductory verses throughout the corpus 33 should alert us to the special significance of the brief prooimium 'tOY Ot' 1Wo.<; (Ha.upw8£v'ta. that announces the disjunction between ritual lament and the official interpretation of the crucifixion scenario-and all subsequent 'deaths in Christ', for that matter. 34 Mary asserts the bond of kinship despite the apparent theologi­ cal absurdum, a spectacle that Romanos summons the com­ munity to witness and to celebrate in song: Let us, then, all of us sing a hymn of praise for the One crucified on our behalf, for Mary saw him on the cross and said: "Despite the fact that you endure crucifixion, you remain my son and my god." J3 See Grosdidier de Matons (supra n.15) 40ff. 34 The Onhodox Requiem Service emphasizes the link between the redemp­ tive death of Christ and the death of the faithful. As I discuss below, Ro­ manos explores this idea by means of the retrieval, or "calling up," of Adam and Eve (0: VaJWA£(J), "to invoke the dead to rise again," is a technical term; see Alexiou 59, 109f). DOBROV, GREGORY W., A Dialogue with Death: Ritual Lament and the "threnos Theotokou" [Greek] of Romanos Melodos , Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 35:4 (1994:Winter) p.385 GREGORY W. DOBROV 399 The dialogical conflict between the 'theological' and 'ritual' voices is deep and arises, ultimately, from fundamentally different, and competing, approaches to the realm of the dead. IV. The M oirologhistra and the Shaman: an Agon Mary's implicit assertion of her ritual right to a dialogue with death meets with a direct challenge on what I would call the 'shamanic' level. Just as the 'official' or 'theological' voice would transform the popular metaphor of separation (funeral=wed­ ding) into one of union, i. e., "This is a wedding and you are my bride," so it attempts to diffuse the subtle anger of Mary's subsequent questions by dramatizing a counter-shamanic exploit of soul-retrieval (katabasis and spiritual healing). Basic functions of the shamanic quest to other realms include mediumistic dialogues with the dead and their outright retrieval from the beyond. 35 Homer's Nekyia (Od. 11) is a poetic presentation of the former, and the various 'harrowings of hell' by Heracles, Theseus, Orpheus, Isis, etc. are narrative reflections of the latter. The early medieval mythology of Christ's katabasis is, of course, part of a very old tradition. "Heracles remained the great helper against the horror of death down to the sarcophagi of the late empire," writes Burkert in this connection, and "It has even been suggested that the last word of Jesus Christ according to the Gospel of St John, telelestai, is taken over from Heracles."36 Romanos, I would argue, stages an eschatological contest for the dead between the female 'medium' and the male hero who undertakes the ultimate quest. This agon between mutually exclusive positions is not fair, however, as it pits traditional social practice against slippery, symbolic invention in the service of theology. Mary's expression of ritual lament confronts the real death of a single family member, while Christ usurps the ancient scenario of 35 For an interesting contemporary example (Coast Salish Indians of Puget Sound) of shamanic travel to the realm of the dead, see ]. Miller, Shamanic Odyssey: The Lushootseed Salish Journey to the Land of the Dead (Menlo Park 1988); for shamanic elements in Greek mythology see W. Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (Berkeley 1979) 88-97. 36 Burkert (supra n.35) 94 n.2; cf. ]. Kroll, Der Mylhos vom Descensus­ kampfe (Leipzig 1932); ]. A. MacCullough, The Harrowing of Ilell (Edin­ burgh 1930); M. Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell (Philadelphia 1983); and A. D. Kartsonis, Anastasis: The Making of an Image (Princeton 1986). DOBROV, GREGORY W., A Dialogue with Death: Ritual Lament and the "threnos Theotokou" [Greek] of Romanos Melodos , Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, 35:4 (1994:Winter) p.385 400 8PHNOI 8EOTOKOY OF ROMANOS MELODOS katabasis to fabricate a new myth of a potential, general redemption. In this strange concretization of doctrine, the redemptive sacrifice of Golgotha mutates to become a quest to 'retrieve' humanity from 'Hades'. In the spirit of folk laments that mingle cries of revenge and imprecations with bitter and confrontational question, Mary wants to know why Christ's followers have abandoned him (3) and why a man who bestowed health and life is being put to death (7f). An early twentieth-century Peloponnesian lament, for example, includes the following outburst in the third person on the part of the Ligourou, sister of the murdered Vetoulas:37 Kt £0KOU~ 'lj Arnopou CP(()vTj o 'tono.:; v' ava'tptaAt0'tfl: -f\EV dx' 0 BhouAa.,:; Kacpo, OEV rixf np(()'to~aofpcpo; 'E X