Download PDF | Liturgical Subjects_ Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the Formation of the Self in Byzantium, By Derek Krueger, University of Pennsylvania Press 2014.
324 Pages
Shaping Liturgical Selves
Some time after the emperor Justinian’s death in 565, Eutychios the patriarch of Constantinople added a new communion hymn for the celebration of the eucharistic liturgy on Holy Thursday, the annual commemoration of Christ’s Last Supper. After a priest had consecrated the bread and wine and the Holy Spirit transformed them into the body and blood of Christ, a choir chanted, “At your mystical supper, Son of God, receive me today as a partaker, for I will not betray the sacrament to your enemies, nor give you a kiss like Judas, but like the Thief I confess you: remember me Lord in your kingdom.”1 In their song, the patriarch provided the laity with a ritual mechanism for identifying themselves as redeemable sinners.
This self-conception employed two models drawn from the biblical narrative: one strikingly negative, the other rather more complex. Congregants should hope to approach the body of Christ not like Judas, with the kiss of betrayal (Mt 26:27), but like the Good Thief who had been crucified next to Jesus, and who, the Gospel explained, would be with him in Paradise (Lk 23:43). The hymn thus prepared Christians to approach Good Friday and Easter, or Pascha, understanding themselves as culpable and deserving of punishment while pardoned through Christ’s sacrifice. Changes to liturgy often meet with resistance, but also come with rationales. Those rationales reveal indigenous theories of ritual. According to the contemporary historian John of Ephesus, a non-Chalcedonian sharply critical of Eutychios, this innovation caused controversy and even unrest. John complains that Eutychios attempted to change the antiphon “which by ancient custom was in use in all the churches,” mostly likely a verse from Psalm 148 that had served as the standard and fixed communion chant in the capital: “Praise the Lord from the heavens, praise him in the highest, Alleluia!” He circulated his new hymn, At Your Mystical Supper, “to all the churches,” ordering that the old hymn “be suppressed and that his own be used, threatening those who would dare still to use the old one and omit his own.” According to John of Ephesus, “The clergy of all the churches, the convents and monasteries of men and women” were alarmed and troubled and the whole city was in revolt. When Emperor Justin II himself demanded to know why Eutychios had made his innovation, “changing the ancient customs,” the patriarch responded, “Lord, what I composed is far more suitable than the old one.”2
This liturgical substitution reveals aspects of Eutychios’s view of the liturgy, namely that its texts should be “suitable,” that is, that they should respond to the liturgical moment, situating each Christian with respect to the biblical narrative commemorated in the rites of the liturgical calendar.3 To this end, the liturgy could be changed or augmented. The new hymn placed worshippers in the midst of the events of Holy Thursday and inserted them into the ritual drama. Eutychios’s innovation also reflects broader shifts in Christian self-understanding and liturgical formation in the course of the sixth century, toward a greater emphasis on ritual performance as biblical reenactment. The call to understand oneself in the role of the Thief reflects trends that transformed the Eastern Mediterranean Christianity of late antiquity into the Christianity of Byzantium. Between the sixth and the ninth centuries, the liturgical calendar increasingly brought the biblical narrative to life.
Ritual practice rendered biblical and saintly characters present in both song and image. And clergy encouraged lay and monastic Christians alike to understand themselves through biblical models as the subjects of divine judgment and mercy. Scriptural narratives afforded opportunities to recognize oneself among the biblical sinners, for whom there was hope even in their sinful flaws. Near the turn of the eighth century the monastic teacher Anastasios of Sinai was asked, “Given that we often hear the word of God, but do not put it into practice [cf. Mt 7:26; Lk 6:49], [how] is it possible that we shall not be condemned?” At once stern and compassionate, he answered, “Even if we do not put it into practice, still it is not possible not to blame ourselves, because we hear and fail to listen. And self-blame [τὸ μέμψασθαι] is part of the business of saving ourselves.”4 The hearing and contemplation of scripture instilled an Orthodox guilt, both biblically informed and inwardly directed. But biblical sinners also offered the promise of forgiveness and the opportunity to participate in God’s act of salvation. Anastasios was queried, “Is it possible to gain the remission of sins through one good work?”
He answered with respect to biblical exemplars, “Yes, since the prostitute, Rahab, was saved because she sheltered the spies [Josh 2 and 6:25], and the Thief because of his faith [Lk 23:40–43], and the Harlot [i.e., the Sinful Woman of Lk 7:37–50] because of her lamentation.”5 Over the course of the liturgical year, and particularly during Lent, Byzantine clergy would appeal to a large cast of biblical characters, both male and female, to provide models of salvageable sinners, including Adam, Eve, and David, from the Old Testament, and the Prodigal Son, the Thief, the Harlot, the Leper, and Peter from the New. Such figures— and not Jesus or Mary—offered icons of moral development. Unlike hagiography, which routinely compared holy men and women to Christ’s example, liturgy stressed the figures who needed and received his benefits. * * * In a 2006 book, liturgical historian Robert Taft explored how Byzantines saw the liturgy “through their own eyes,” considering what they saw and heard primarily during the eucharistic liturgy, and how they participated in it and might have experienced it.6 Liturgical Subjects shifts this investigation to consider how Byzantine Christians came to view themselves through the liturgy. My study begins at the height of the Byzantine Empire under Justinian I (527–565) and extends beyond the close of Iconoclasm in 843 to the turn of the eleventh century, around the year 1000, bridging the Christianity of late antiquity and medieval Byzantium. By highlighting major figures in the establishment and transformation of liturgical models for the self, and foregrounding ideas about interiority and identity, I trace continuities and developments across the so-called Dark Age.
The sixth century effected a synthesis of the liturgy as a forum for the forging, expression, and transmission of a model self, reflected in hymns, sermons, the emergence of iconographic styles for representing key events in the life of Christ, and even in imperial legislation. By 1000, Constantinopolitan clerics achieved another synthesis, having fleshed out the liturgical calendar and the lectionary and edited and compiled the service books necessary for conducting an elaborate ritual cycle. Despite the dramatic geographical and economic transformations of the Empire after the rise of Islam, the long decline through the seventh and eighth centuries, and the slow renaissance of Byzantine culture in the course of the ninth century, I proffer a reading of the self and theories about the formation of the self in a long trajectory, from the hymns of Romanos the Melodist to Symeon the New Theologian’s instructions for novice monks.7 This inquiry focuses on the ritual practice of the Byzantine Orthodox Church, by which I mean the developing Byzantine liturgy of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. This church adhered to the councils of Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451), and developed distinctive patterns for the liturgical calendar and its celebration. Many aspects of its processional liturgy were inextricably linked to the topography of the capital, as celebrants moved from station to station along prescribed routes. Four key figures provide useful lenses on liturgical innovations in the Byzantine traditions of the self: Romanos the Melodist, Andrew of Crete, Theodore the Stoudite, and Symeon the New Theologian. The major authors covered here were all active, at least for some phase of their careers, in and around the capital city. But the rites of Constantinople were nourished in successive waves by the liturgical practice of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem.
This influence affected both monastic and lay worship. The liturgical calendar of the Church of the Anastasis, or Resurrection, also known as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, in the holy city itself, offered a template for celebrating the life of Christ through the course of the year, and the innovations of the monasteries of the Judean Desert, especially the Monastery of Mar Saba, offered new prayers and new genres of hymns.8 Two of the Byzantine hymnographers whose poems help us chart the presentation of the self also came to Constantinople from the Levant. Romanos the Melodist was born in the Syrian city of Emesa, and served a church in Beirut before coming to the capital early in the sixth century. He perfected the chanted verse sermon, later known as the kontakion, which owed much to Syrian hymnographic styles. He composed during most of Justinian’s reign. Andrew, who later became the Metropolitan of Crete, was born in Umayyad Damascus around 660. He received his education and was tonsured at the Church of the Anastasis in Jerusalem. As a young man he made his way to Constantinople, where he became the head of the orphanage attached to Hagia Sophia and composed for its choir. He may have been responsible for bringing the tradition of the hymn form known as the kanon to urban parishes. The liturgical reforms of the ninth century brought additional Palestinian monastic disciplinary and worship styles to the capital. At the turn of the ninth century, Theodore the Stoudite and his companions introduced liturgies of the Judean desert monasteries to the Stoudios Monastery in the capital, and created a potent synthesis of Hagiopolite and Constantinopolitan liturgical forms that would endure through the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Among their many achievements, the Stoudites composed and assigned a repertoire of hymns, especially kanons, for the season of Lent. Furthermore, many of the artifacts and devotional objects that help us tell the story of the liturgical calendar disseminated from Syria and Palestine. To chart the history of the liturgical self in Byzantium, therefore, we must take an eclectic approach, considering the integration of words and images.
The scope of liturgy that concerns us also deserves remark. Although Chapter 4 addresses the celebration of the Eucharist, much of the evidence for the formation of subjectivity in Byzantine Christian ritual life derives from other services of the Church. Focusing on hymns means focusing on the services where they were sung. Our inquiry thus broadens beyond the Eucharist to consider the prayers of the daily office, both in churches serving the urban laity and in monasteries. Among all the services, the All-Night Vigil (pannychis, παννυχίς) of urban parishes and the celebration of Morning Prayer in the monastic office (observed also in lay parishes as the middle Byzantine centuries progressed) emerge as the most important occasions for the composition and performance of elaborate hymns. Over the course of the sixth through ninth centuries, Night Vigil and Morning Prayer developed by responding directly to the lectionary and liturgical season. Their structures reserved time for lengthy chants, and thus it was for these services that the most innovative composers created their most significant works. While the lives and religious experiences of monastics and laity certainly differed, nevertheless, the models for the self often converged. Not only did hymnography mediate monastic styles of self-presentation to the laity, most hymnographic forms moved between the monastery and the parish church. Initially, in the course of the fourth century, Christians in the East developed two distinct liturgical types: one for monastic communities and one for lay congregations. The monastic liturgy emphasized the recitation of the Psalter in its entirety and filled the monastic day with prayer and meditation on scripture. The secular, or non-monastic, liturgy of cathedrals or parishes, often simply called by scholars the cathedral liturgy, celebrated the progress of the day and the shape of the liturgical year, included excerpts from the Psalms appropriate to the time of day and liturgical season, and featured processions with candles and eventually incense.9 By the late fifth or early sixth century, on the eve of major festivals, the laity in Constantinople would gather for elaborate vigils that included the reading of scripture and its dramatic embellishment in lengthy sung sermons.
In these hymns the biblical stories would come alive, reenacted and explored by such virtuosos as Romanos the Melodist. Meanwhile, early on, in the deserts of Egypt and Sinai, some monks rejected hymnody as a practice more appropriate to the secular services conducted by urban clergy and attended by nonprofessionals.10 But Palestine was different, and by the last decades of the sixth century, monks there had adopted traditions of adorning the liturgical hours with hymns of the sort sung at the Church of the Anastasis in Jerusalem. By this time, the singing of the nine biblical canticles during Morning Prayer was common to both monastic and cathedral rites in the Holy Land, and by the end of the seventh century, monastic composers embroidered this service with new hymns, known as kanons, that refocused the tradition of the biblical canticles to the themes of the liturgical calendar. In effect, a hybrid of the earlier monastic psalmody and the urban cathedral rite arose for monasteries, an urban-monastic office, still distinct from the rites sung for lay people, but one that increasingly borrowed from and was nourished by it.11 That said, the two hymn forms at the center of this study moved between lay and monastic realms. The kontakion, written for lay vigils in the sixth century, entered the monastic service of Morning Prayer by the ninth century, although in truncated form, and the kanon, which originated in Palestinian monastic communities in the late seventh century, quickly found its way into cathedral services in the course of a generation.12 Mutual influence of monastic and lay services predated the pervasive monasticization of Byzantine parish liturgy in the course of the eleventh century. Laymen, including emperors, composed hymns that entered monastic service books.13 In short, the two liturgical systems, monastic and lay, often celebrated in close proximity, and sometimes even by the same clergy, inevitably influenced each other, and thus did not remain entirely distinct.14 Cantors and choirs sang hymns composed in monasteries during services for secular congregations, and lay people attended urban monastic churches.15 The self mediated in these hymns emerges from both the specific contexts in which these compositions were first performed and the new contexts into which they were transferred. In the final analysis, monastic and lay selves drew on the same biblical types and tropes, and always resembled each other. This was never truer than during Lent, which imposed a sort of temporary monasticism on the laity. Nevertheless, after the sixth century, better documentation survives for monastic practices. Working at the intersection of Byzantine Christian religious culture and contemporary critical approaches to the history of subjectivity, this book explores Orthodox liturgy as a mechanism for the formation of interiority.
As a contribution to a cultural history of the Christian self, I investigate hymns, prayers, sermons, works of art, and catechetical instructions through which Byzantine clergy and artisans mediated Christians’ approach to interiority, guiding how Christians might have access not only to God but to themselves. The turn to liturgy as a source for the self augments studies that treat subjectivity largely from the standpoint of intellectual history or as a philosophical problem or that treat self-consciousness or self-presentation in the literary works of prominent, elite men such as Gregory of Nazianzos or Michael Psellos.16 Liturgical models for selfhood, authored by clergy and disseminated among the faithful in the context of worship, coexisted in Byzantium with other discursive subjectivities, including military and imperial selves; expected familial and gender roles; selves dictated by social station, guild, or profession; the selves of narrative fictions—including hagiography and the novel; and even Christian discursive selves beyond the liturgy. The liturgical self was only one of many contending in the broader culture, although it arguably had the greatest impact on Byzantine Christian self-conceptions across society. We can say from the outset that access to the interior religious experience of Byzantine Christians proves difficult for two reasons. First, we lack direct evidence: no autobiographies exist explaining how Byzantine Orthodox Christians felt about themselves through their liturgical lives. Second, even if such sources existed, they would offer rhetorical constructs of piety, rather than incontrovertible evidence for the interior landscape of Byzantines at worship. And yet the Byzantine liturgy contains a good deal of first-person speech, either in the form of prayers offered in the first person plural, describing the moral condition and needs of the community or congregation, or the first person singular, particularly in hymns, that both expresses and inculcates appropriate habits of self-regard. Religious practices produce, articulate, and maintain norms for self-understanding and self-presentation.
In a manner analogous to theater, ritual activities involve playing and ultimately inhabiting the mythic roles of sacred narrative. The interior lives of Byzantine Christians remain elusive, but hymns, sermons, ritual spaces, and religious artifacts offered templates telling Christians who they were in relation to God, each other, the church, and the state. Attention to what lay and monastic congregants heard, said, sang, and did during liturgies, both the Divine Liturgy of the Eucharist, and the Liturgy of the Hours, sheds light on how participation in ritual events molded the worshipper by inculcating patterns of interior self-regard. Of particular interest are the psalms, hymns, and chants that the congregation sang, the prayers they recited, and the prayers said by the clergy to which the laity listened and to which they assented by saying “Amen.” Moreover, liturgical texts, their modes of performance, and Byzantine reflections on the meaning and work of liturgy reveal a sophisticated, if largely unarticulated, indigenous Byzantine theory of how liturgy was expected to work, especially to work in producing Christians. Such a theory of the formation of subjects through ritualization reaches fruition in the instructions of the late tenth- and early eleventh-century abbot Symeon the New Theologian for his novice monks. The lack in Byzantium of a text like Augustine’s Confessions, which too many readers have assumed provides unmediated access to a real fourthcentury Western Christian personage rather than a highly rhetorical literary portrait of one, is a much a boon as a burden. If we follow current trends in the history of subjectivity and understand the early Byzantine self as a rhetorical construct from the beginning, we can address the evidence that does, in fact, offer models for self-conception. We can also appreciate the role of clerical authors as the agents of liturgy. Liturgy was the place where Byzantine Christians learned to apply the Bible to themselves. Figures like Eutychios sought to frame and guide the formation of these selves. The greatest of the authorial voices of Byzantine hymnography, Romanos the Melodist in the sixth century, Andrew of Crete in the eighth, the poets of the Stoudios Monastery of Constantinople in the ninth, and others in their orbit such as the nun Kassia, scripted a typical Christian subjectivity in response to the lessons of the Bible. Exploring the “I” in their works thus involves the investigation not only of the persona of these poets but also of Byzantine models of the self. These poets produced a conception of the self that was at once distinctly penitential and grounded in a reading of scripture that emphasized a pattern of sin and redemption. In this sense, my project differs from those of modern scholars who might wish to understand personal or individual religion in Byzantium. Rather I seek to examine broadly disseminated and collective modes for constructing and expressing a common individuality that in its generic force is not quite individual at all.
Byzantium and the History of the Christian Self
The use of the term “self ” to describe the “I”-speech and its interior operations in Byzantine liturgical texts requires some clarification and nuance. As Patricia Cox Miller has explained, contemporary critical theory understands that the “self ” is “not an autonomous source of meaning but rather a construct, the product of systems of cultural convention.” She continues, “The discourses of a culture not only set limits to how a self may be understood but also provide models or paradigms that are used to classify or represent that culture’s understanding(s) of ‘selfhood.’ ”17 The selves on display in Byzantine Christian hymns, prayers, and sermons are neither historical selves nor transhistorical selves, but rather styles of self-presentation rooted in Byzantine religious culture. Moreover, even in their diversity, these selves tend toward a certain sameness, toward a generic vision of the Christian person, a typical Byzantine Christian. Rhetorical criticism in the study of Mediterranean late antiquity and the Middle Ages has challenged the idea that the textual record provides unmediated access to Christians’ interior realities. Indeed, it is now widely accepted that early Christian literature represents authorial visions of reality, refracted through a variety of ideological lenses.18 The hymns of Romanos the Melodist, Andrew of Crete, and the poets of the Stoudios Monastery display contingent selves, both the products of and paradigms for Byzantine cultural norms and values. The poems enact models for how listeners might understand themselves by presenting a culturally sanctioned image of the self, the subject of a particular style of self-regard, or subjectivity.19 The significance of this production of self-knowledge in the corpus of Byzantine liturgical poetry, for example, becomes apparent in light of scholarly study of the emergence of supposedly distinctive Christian styles of the self. Generalizing broadly about the Christian self in premodernity, Michel Foucault wrote, “Each person has a duty to know who he is, that is, to try to know what is happening inside him, to acknowledge faults, to recognize temptations, to locate desires, and everyone is obliged to disclose these things either to God or to others in the community and hence to bear public or private witness against oneself.”20 The obligation to an inner truth required ritualized operations on the part of the Christian. The first involved the recognition of oneself “as a sinner and penitent,” while the second involved the verbalization of one’s thoughts and desires to another. Foucault understood this second technique to have developed initially in fourth- and fifth-century monastic circles, where a disciple received spiritual direction from an elder.21 In later centuries, and in the West particularly, Foucault argued that these technologies spread to the laity in the sacrament of confession and penance. Byzantine Christianity did not develop formal sacramental rites for confession; however, monastic rules and instructions encouraged regular confession of sin to one’s spiritual father, and lay people were encouraged to confess major sins during the course of Lent.22 Consideration of Byzantine liturgy as matrix for the self reveals both the power and the limitations of Foucault’s genealogy of the Western Christian subject. The first-person monologues in the corpus of Byzantine hymnography display a similar introspective subjectivity, attesting that such styles of the self were also available in the East and, furthermore, beyond the monastery. In a late fifth- or early sixth-century hymn On Adam’s Lament, one of the earliest in a genre that would come in the ninth century to be called the kontakion, the anonymous poet imagines the first-created human’s speech as he sits beyond the gates of Paradise. Adam serves as a stand-in for all humanity, lamenting the human condition as a Byzantine reader of Genesis would understand it: fear, drudgery, and trouble. Indeed, joining in the refrain, the lay congregation of an urban parish shared in Adam’s voice, taking upon themselves his call for mercy and thus also his punishment in exile.
I am polluted, I am ruined, I am enslaved to my slaves; For reptiles and wild beasts, whom I subjected by fear, Now make me tremble; O Merciful, have mercy on the one who has fallen. No longer do the flowers offer me pleasure, But thorns and thistles [Gen 3:18] the earth raises for me, Not produce: O Merciful, have mercy on the one who has fallen. The table without toil I overthrew by my own will; And now in the sweat of my brow I eat My bread [Gen 3:19]; O Merciful, have mercy on the one who has fallen.23 Although the congregants did not share Adam’s specific deed of disobedience, the liturgical poet invited them to share his subjectivity and his perspective. Adam’s sin was typical, and Adam a type for all humanity. Like Adam, all humanity joined in lamentation, called for forgiveness, and became salvageable sinners. Popular hymnography mediated Foucault’s penitential subject even without a formal rite of confession and absolution. At the same time, the refrain invoked and constructed a God capable of a free act of mercy. As we shall see in Chapter 2, the hymns of Romanos offered a performance of the self engaging in precisely these technologies: self-accusation and verbal confession, not merely in the voice of a biblical archetype. Significantly, he did so not in a monastic sphere or for a monastic audience, but rather at the urban Night Vigil, displaying this interior self-recognition before a primarily lay audience. Within the texts of his hymn, Romanos models the formation of the Christian subject. In the singing of his hymns, Romanos divulges his knowledge of an inner truth through public display; he declares himself a sinner. God and congregation witness the performance and see, in Romanos’s expressions of conscience, something we might call a self. This Byzantine subject thus emerges in acts of confession, ritually articulated and liturgically performed. Moreover, this self forms in dialogue with constructions of biblical selves, a feature of Byzantine liturgical subjectivity perhaps most acute in the penitential masterpiece, the Great Kanon of Andrew of Crete, which works its way through the entire cast of biblical characters to create an abject Christian persona. The emphasis on the human capacity for sinfulness reinforced an image of a broken self, damaged by personal history and potentially alienated permanently from God. In another context, Stephen Greenblatt has defined the self as “a sense of personal order, a characteristic mode of address to the world, a structure of bounded desires.”24 In Byzantine hymnography one finds styles of expressing the self that through their reiteration constitute a “characteristic mode of address.” If, in his confession of inadequate bounds on his own desires, a hymnographer seems to present a sense of personal disorder, this is because sanctioned styles of self-display dictated the performance of a disordered self. Byzantine prayer engaged an aesthetics of subjectivity to display disappointment with the self. The discursive structure that we may regard as the Byzantine Christian self valued humility. It urged Christians to regard themselves as greater than no one and to attribute all virtuous action to the work of God. The script for the self required declarations of inadequacy and disarray.25 Most scholarship on subjectivity in premodern Christianity has described the making of the monastic self. Monastic subjectivities also figure prominently in the later sections of this book. The Byzantine evidence both confirms and challenges some of the trends in the academic trajectory. Following Foucault in Discipline and Punish and other works, scholars have stressed the place of the monastery in the history of the formation of Western subjects, particularly in the ritualization of obedience and the formation of the conscience.26 Ascetic rigor and strict discipline effected the self because the monk placed himself under constant surveillance. In addition to confessing to his superior or spiritual advisor, he remained under their watchful eyes and those of his fellow monks. Within the successful subject, this watchfulness ultimately became fully internalized and the monk became vigilant over himself. Attempting to account for the performative qualities of subject formation, Talal Asad has suggested that “The program is performed primarily not for the sake of an audience but for the sake of the performers.”27 In effect, the monk performs the spectacle of his asceticism for himself. In the process, “The monastic program that prescribes the performance of rites is directed at forming and reforming Christian dispositions.”28 Byzantine liturgical materials augment these insights in several ways. Such a program for the formation of subjectivity worked, in part, through the words of prayers and the singing of hymns, through the adoption of subjectivating speech as one’s own, that is, as a coherent description of the self. Our Byzantine evidence will show also that this ritualization to produce subjectivity functioned just as effectively for lay people as for religious professionals, or at least that clergymen believed this subjectivation could be similarly effective and so imposed it through their compositions and chanted performances. What did a Byzantine theory of religious practice look like? Within Byzantine liturgical thought, the subjectivation worked because of a strong confidence in an external witness. In indigenous Byzantine religious discourses, ritual repetition formed the conscience and shaped self-recognition because God was watching too. Byzantine theories of the formation—or reformation—of the self depended on basic theological claims about God’s omniscience and attention, claims that ultimately embedded the Christian in a narrative, fundamentally biblical in character, about the relationship between God and God’s people.29 To understand Byzantines as theoretically informed agents of their subjectivity, as Christians engaged in making and shaping themselves, we must study the theological contexts in which they theorized themselves. Symeon the New Theologian’s attempts to instruct his monks on the making of themselves, the subject of Chapter 7, make the centrality of such claims clear. Byzantine Orthodox subjectivities formed in a Byzantine Orthodox theological context.30 For various reasons, the history of the Christian self has bypassed or ignored Byzantium. Posing questions about Eastern Christian conceptions of the self present in Byzantine liturgy disrupts characterizations of Byzantines that distinguish them from the trend toward increased interior anxieties among Western Christians, especially in the wake of Augustine and John Cassian. That hymnographers such as Romanos, Andrew, and the Stoudites offer such a model of a guilty conscience as normative to Eastern Christian audiences, both monastic and lay, may come as a surprise. Many scholars have held that the “introspective conscience” developed primarily—or even exclusively—in the Latin West or that it was a distinct product of late antique monastic culture. More problematically, some scholars of the medieval West, such as Colin Morris and John F. Benton, claimed the twelfth-century as the moment for an emergent awareness of the self as an individual, a conception of interiority predicated on later Enlightenment accounts of individual consciousness.31 Within the New Testament, the conscience [συνείδησις] features as an introspective capacity for moral discernment that can be either clear or troubled. For the most part, the assumption is that the Christian conscience is clear. Hebrews 13:18 states: “We are sure that we have a clear conscience, desiring to act honorably in all things.” 1 Peter 1:14 calls on its readers, “Keep your conscience clear,” and assumes that they can and that their abusing enemies will be thus put to shame. A passage in Romans 7 provides the most significant exception. Here, Paul illustrates a state of guilt-ridden interiority. “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. . . . I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my innermost self [κατὰ τὸν ἔσω ἄνθρωπον], but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind [νοός], making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am!” (Rom 7:15, 18–24; NRSV). In a landmark essay entitled “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” Krister Stendahl argued that in this passage, Paul was not speaking in his own voice, but rather impersonating the interior life of a gentile convert to Jesus when confronting Torah, thus presenting a fictive “I.”32 Subsequent scholarship in New Testament studies has generally confirmed that, in this portrayal of interior moral turmoil, Paul employs the rhetorical technique of “speech-in-character,” that is, ethopoeia or prosopoeia, common in ancient rhetorical training.33 Indeed, many late antique exegetes were unwilling to accept that Paul was speaking of himself; they preferred to read this as a fictive “I.”34 Models for representing the self-convicted mind abound in ancient tragedy, and students strove for the eloquent vocalization of a character’s ēthos [ἦθος]. But while Paul could imagine the guilty conscience, he did not claim it for himself or assume it to plague his converts. In most of Paul’s writings, Paul exhibits what Stendahl called a “robust” conscience, confident that he was “blameless” with regard to righteousness under the law (Phil 3:6). Stendahl suggested that the introspective conscience, so typical of Roman Catholic and especially Protestant Christianity, did not originate with the letters of Paul, but rather with Augustine’s interpretation of Paul, particularly Augustine’s reading of Romans 7. Although in his conception of an “inner” human, Paul calls on traditions already present in Plato, for Stendahl and others, it was Augustine who “created from Romans 7 a normative model of the religious self that in Western culture has become the archetype for inquiry into the individual.”35 This genealogy of the self, the result of Augustine’s reading of Paul filtered through the Protestant Reformation, was not without consequence for views of Byzantium. Stendahl himself wrote that, “Judging at least from a superficial survey of the preaching of the Churches of the East from olden times to the present, it is striking how their homiletical tradition is either one of doxology or meditative mysticism or exhortation—but it does not deal with the plagued conscience in the way in which one came to do so in the Western Churches.”36 This view has persisted in histories of the Western self. Charles Taylor, in Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, located in Augustine the origins of an “inner person” and a concomitant “reflexivity” with respect to that inner person which he claims is “central to our moral understanding.”37 There are some problems with this account of the self. On the one hand, it is unclear whether Augustine’s characterizations of interiority accurately reflect his own self-understanding, or, for that matter, that of late ancient Latin-speaking Christians generally, or whether it too is a form of speech-in-character presented as normative.38 On the other hand, sufficient evidence survives in the Greek patristic tradition to depose claims of Western distinctiveness regarding the development of Christian ideas about conscience and the self. Byzantium has much to offer and to correct in the history of the self in Christian cultures. A less superficial survey of Greek Christian literature shows agony over a guilty state of mind. Public sermons and ascetic instruction encouraged Christians in the eastern Mediterranean to discern the movements of their souls and to develop a discourse within themselves about their desires. Significantly, Athanasios and John Chrysostom encouraged their audiences, monks and lay people respectively, to keep a written diary of their sins, revealing that the act of introspection was conceived as an act of representation, the representation of the self to the self.39 The role of the conscience (both συνειδός and συνείδησις) in the formation of Christian self-conception features prominently in John Chrysostom’s sermons and commentaries, where the preacher accords the conscience an authority second only to God’s for judging the Christian.40 A single passage from a sermon On Lazarus shows how vividly Chrysostom conjures the guilty conscience: Even before the punishment to come, those who practice wickedness and live in sin are punished in this life. Do not simply tell me of the man who enjoys an expensive table, who wears silken robes, who takes with him flocks of slaves as he struts in the marketplace: unfold [ἀνάπτυξον] for me his conscience [συνειδός], and you will see inside a great tumult of sins, continual fear, storm, confusion, his mind approaching the imperial throne in his conscience as if in a courtroom, sitting like a juror, presenting arguments as if in a public trial, suspending his mind and torturing it for his sins, and crying aloud, with no witness but God who alone knows how to watch [these inner dramas]. The adulterer, for example . . . even if he has no accuser, does not cease accusing himself within. The pleasure is brief, but the anguish is long lasting, fear and trembling everywhere, suspicion and agony. . . . He goes about bearing with him a bitter accuser, his conscience; self-condemned, he is unable to relax even a little. . . . There is no way to corrupt that court. Even if we do not seek virtue, we still suffer anguish when we are not seeking it; and if we seek evil, we still experience the anguish when we cease from the pleasure of sin.41 Opening and inspecting the conscience divulges secret torment. In Chrysostom’s juridical model, the conscience performs the work of informant, witness, juror, judge, and jailer. Although he describes this model in the third person, from the outside, his rhetorical performance encourages his audience to consider themselves within this model. The dramatization of the guilt-ridden conscience functions as an opportunity for his listeners’ self-recognition. The writings of late ancient Greek Christians also include first-person expressions of conscience, including sophisticated models for its operations within the self and in the formation of the self. In a study of the discourses of the self in the letters of Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Philip Rousseau has observed the fifth-century bishop’s use of the word syneidos in the literary display of the author’s inner world. Rousseau points to Theodoret’s “inherent capacity for self-criticism.”42 Although it is impossible to bridge with certainty the gap between the presentation of the self and its interior subjective experience, Rousseau shows how Theodoret’s conscience represented both his moral selfreflection and the knowledge derived from it. Conscience thus functioned as a tool for knowing the self. Conscience participated in his ruminations as a witness of his actions both external and internal, and participated in a dialogue with God in which God could see Theodoret thinking. As in Chrysostom, conscience doubles and interiorizes the divine gaze. One aspect of Paul’s portrayal of the self not particularly prominent in Byzantium is his configuration of the divided “I.” In Romans 7, Paul depicts an “I” that simultaneously knows what is right and fails to do it. Paul locates the struggle to do the right thing within the subject; and in some sense this struggle has split the subject.43 Without reference to the vocabulary of Romans 7, Byzantine liturgical authors preferred to set up a division in the subject between the “I” and the “soul (ψυχή),” where the “I” blames the soul for sin and laments its disobedience to divine command. Here the “I,” and not “the soul,” serves as the seat of the conscience. Andrew of Crete casts much of the Great Kanon as the “I”’s address to the sinful “soul,” although at other points, the “I” accepts responsibility for its own actions. The discourse with the soul—a dialogue within the self—thus ambiguates the dramatic trope, permitting internal dialogue and reproach. If this device attempts to shift or deflect blame, its abandonment constitutes an acceptance of blame and prompts another discourse of penitence, now a conversation between the “I” and God. The lack of a single, simple word for “the self ” in Byzantine Greek complicates but hardly foils an investigation of the self or selves emergent and displayed in Byzantine liturgical contexts. The pronouns autos (αὐτός) the “same” and thus the “self-same,” and heautos (ἑαυτός), “himself, herself,” almost always in oblique forms, establish linguistic identity with the subject or object of reference.44 Something quite analogous to the self occurs ubiquitously as the subject of active verbs, the agent of deeds, thoughts, and emotions; or as the subject of middle voice verbs, and thus the subject of reflexive thoughts or actions. Locutions for the “soul,” especially “my soul,” or “you, O soul,” provide a forum for discourses about interior life. And yet, as consideration of liturgical “I”-speech will reveal, Byzantine Christian models for the self tended toward conformity rather than individuation. Rather than being interested in how selves differed from each other, clergy promoted—and strove to inhabit—a model selfhood that recognized sin and called out for redemption. This self replicated itself through a biblical hermeneutic that read Adam, David, and various sinners of the New Testament in a consistent light. Even with various linguistic structures and varied biblical stories, liturgical subjects converged on a single liturgical type. Byzantine hymnography offered performances of the self where the singer modeled conscience-stricken interiority. In vocalizing such interiority, liturgical poets testify to a Byzantine Christian aesthetics of the self that proves to be relatively common. The corpus of Romanos, the subject of Chapter 2, helped develop an introspective conscience in Byzantium because it synthesizes the speech-in-character of the guilt-ridden Christian as normative speech. Romanos’s “I” voiced a generalized model for Christian selfunderstanding. Later poets, such as Andrew (Chapter 5) and the Stoudites (Chapter 6) revised and sharpened this model, and their work reflects evolving conceptions of Christian self-formation as, at least in part, the sharing of this penitent voice. Moreover, this subjectivity took the stage in other liturgical forums to define both the individual and the collective. The flow of the liturgical calendar (Chapter 3) and the Divine Liturgy of the Eucharist (Chapter 4) formed penitent congregations engaged in ritual celebration to define and recognize themselves.
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