Hymns, Homilies and Hermeneutics is the brainchild of Dr Andrew Mellas, who brought together a dozen scholars from across the globe to workshop these three themes and their intersection in Byzantine liturgical studies. The workshop, held at Macquarie University in August 2018, was funded by the Australasian Association for Byzantine Studies. Since then, co-editors Andrew Mellas and Dr Sarah Gador-Whyte have worked together to build a collection of papers that is at once coherent and reflects the breadth of early and middle Byzantine liturgies and their offshoots.
These essays reflect a growing interest in the social aspects of the liturgy, begun by pioneering scholars like Mary Cunningham, Pauline Allen, Susan Ashbrook-Harvey, and Wendy Mayer. The positive use of sung poetry for maintaining group identity is well known, but recent work on the early eastern liturgies has considered how they acted as tools of social exclusion as well as inclusion. A conference held in 2019 at the Sibiu Centre for Ecumenical Studies on The Byzantine Liturgy and the Jews (ed. A. Ioanita and H. Buchinger, Aschendorff, forthcoming) has highlighted the ambivalent attitude of eastern Christians towards their Jewish forebears as expressed in their liturgical rites even into the current era. Kosta Simić’s recent study of the hymnography of Germanos shows how hymns were used as part of the polemics of the day, with the names of Orthodox leaders of the church, past and present, being celebrated in the recital of the diptychs, while the heterodox were passed over in silence (PhD thesis, Australian Catholic University, 2018). Written sources on the early Byzantine liturgy are relatively scarce, and some effort of imaginative reconstruction is necessary to make sense of them. The authors of these essays make a critical examination of their sources, taking into account contemporary theological debates as well as factors like audience and provenance.
The research questions addressed within are vital for understanding the impacts of the liturgy on the lives and religious understandings of ordinary people, as well as the theologians and clerics of the Byzantine church. The studies of Andrew Mellas, Scott Johnson and Sarah Gador-Whyte, among others, bring to light how the emotions aroused in liturgical hymns increased the effectiveness of their message. The use of images and metre to evoke emotion in the poetry of Ephrem, Jacob of Serugh, Romanos the Melodist, Kassia, and Andrew of Crete, has made their poetical works of lasting impact. This is especially true of their vivid treatments of the first parents Adam and Eve, and the Theotokos. As Daniel Galadza writes in his chapter on mimesis and eschatology in Palm Sunday hymns from twelfth-century Jerusalem, “The role of hymnography as a privileged form of biblical exegesis that is sung and performed as part of a liturgical service makes its function in prayer and worship even more important than liturgical commentaries or mystagogies, which explain the liturgy either before or after it was celebrated”. By focussing on hymns and homilies, our authors pass over questions of liturgical restoration or reform to focus on the lively celebrations of worship in Christian communities of the fourth to twelfth centuries. They aim to recapture the lived experience of a liturgical calendar that reflected a way of living the faith in all aspects of life: work, marriage, birth, death, and commemoration of the dead.
It is a pleasure to introduce this collection and to thank the editors for their hard work and diligence in shaping the contents. I also want to acknowledge the creative efforts of the contributors, each a specialist in his or her own branch of homiletical or hymnographic studies. It is through collaborations such as this that we gain an idea of the impact of liturgy on the lives of Byzantine subjects. The contributions bear witness to the depth of past scholarship and all that remains to be done in this area of academic endeavour. I hope readers will find this a rich and satisfying collection of studies on the experiential as well as theological aspects of the Byzantine liturgy. We dedicate this volume to the memory of Robert F. Taft, SJ (d. 2 November 2018), an American Jesuit and Archimandrite of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, for his magnificent contribution to the field of Eastern Christian liturgical studies.
Bronwen Neil
Macquarie University