All the (Ancient) World’s a Stage

SBL 2023 Review Panel | Staging the Sacred: Theatricality and Performance in Late Ancient Liturgical Poetry, by Laura Lieber

One of the most beloved images within Syriac literature is the treasury. Writers such as Ephrem (d. 373 CE) and Jacob of Serugh (ca. 451-521 CE) invoke this image to impress upon their listeners the magnitude and inexhaustibility of divine largesse.[1] I would suggest that the language of treasury fittingly describes the remarkable book that brings us together today. Staging the Sacred is a scholarly treasury, brimming with erudition and insight. The liturgical poetry of the late antique Levant and the eastern Mediterranean comes to life within its pages as Prof. Lieber draws Jewish, Christian, and Samaritan sources into conversation, setting a new standard for comparative study. First, I will offer those who have not had the pleasure of reading Staging the Sacred a foretaste of its salient themes before reflecting on how this publication has raised the curtain on a new chapter in the study of late antique liturgical poetry.

Performed within liturgical and “paraliturgical” settings (eg. the study circle or monastery), verse compositions provide manifold avenues for studying the late antique world.[2] Varied in form, subject matter, and tone, these sources intertwine biblical storytelling with theological discourse and moral exhortation. Some recount the lives of saints or stage imagined theological debates. Other examples contain oblique references to historical events or recount experiences of communal trauma, inflected by the writer’s rhetorical aims. Occasionally, we catch glimpses of the communities who heard these works as poets break into direct address. Staging the Sacred guides readers both familiar and unfamiliar through these literary archives. At the outset, Lieber foregrounds the capacious scope of her inquiry as essential to the project:

It is precisely because the differences – linguistic, confessional, and ritual – among these works are so readily apparent that the deep structural, societal commonalities are so easily overlooked. By reading late antique hymnody in the matrix of the wider culture – by teasing out these subtle, deep points of contact among varieties of performance – we not only appreciate overlooked aspects of these poems, facets that barely leave traces in the written record, but also begin to understand performance-oriented culture itself. While this volume is about hymnody, it is also about much more than hymns (p. 15).

Each chapter features challenging writers and distinctive poetic forms embedded within historical critical analysis. The oeuvre of any one of the authors examined may be likened to an ocean, but Lieber navigates a steady course oriented by the central theme of theatricality. As the book unfolds, our vision of the shared cultural horizon of the period grows ever clearer. In my own work translating and analyzing the writings of Jacob and Narsai, I am often lured to dive ever deeper, pursuing the significance of a single word or biblical allusion, pulled by the irresistible tow of capturing some tantalizing detail. Such sustained attention performs a particular type of historical work, in this case, understanding better the poem at hand. But, as Lieber affirms, this book is about more than the individual literary artifacts, it is a reconstruction of the larger ecosystem surrounding them. This historical narrative carries the reader along, flowing from detailed analysis of individual poems to broader surveys of various aspects of theatre, oratory, and embodied performance. The resulting account is immersive, allowing the reader to recognize the larger currents beneath the surface of each hymn or “poetic manifestation of broader aesthetic or performative possibilities” (p. 16).

Staging the Sacred transports modern readers to ancient cosmopolitan cities such as Antioch, Edessa, and Constantinople, urban landscapes resonant with sung hymns and intoned poetic speech. As Lieber reminds us, these locales thrummed with the boisterous energy of theatrical performances and spectacles. Within these ancient cityscapes, the profane and the sacred jostled side by side, much to the chagrin of bishops and moralists. The material conditions of performance, the venues and liturgical spaces, form a critical component of Lieber’s historical reconstruction alongside the content of the literary evidence. By focusing on the theatrical qualities of these compositions, Lieber illustrates the interdependence of various modalities or genres of performance. The category of “theatricality” encompasses the “dynamic of self-consciousness between a performer and his audience, particularly an author or performer’s awareness of his audience’s gaze” (p. 11). While oratory enjoyed higher cultural esteem, orators and actors shared common strategies for enhancing delivery. The appropriate gesture or lilt of the voice could intensify the dramatic effect of one’s words. Movement and bodily comportment defined skillful acting, amplifying the mimetic quality of the performance.

While our sources often register misgivings about the potential duplicity of stagecraft and the artifice of the theater, this moralizing discourse masks shared expertise in effective communication. As the chapters progress, Lieber investigates how liturgical poets adapted familiar stories, highlighting the compositional techniques employed to engage listeners. One critical node of contact between orators and liturgical poets emerges in Lieber’s analysis of rhetorical techniques. She engages the breadth of scholarship on the progymnasmata (“preliminary exercises”), which preserve how students of rhetoric acquired skills in effective oral and written communication.[3] Despite this seemingly circumscribed audience, the techniques theorized in such texts informed expectations of individuals across the social spectrum (p. 28). While we possess little insight into the education most liturgical poets received, Lieber asserts that “informal” avenues for the dissemination of rhetorical practices were ubiquitous within the performative culture of late antiquity (p. 10).  The rich tradition of scholarship around early Christian homiletics and ancient rhetoric serves as a critical conversation partner as Lieber demonstrates the applicability of oratorical practices for understanding the persuasive power of liturgical poetry.[4]

The various strategies prized within the ancient rhetorical curriculum may be found across homiletic literature and hymnody. Lieber underscores how the technique of ekphrasis (“setting before the eyes”) proved a critical tool for infusing one’s descriptions with enargeia (“vividness”) (pp. 162-168). The attribution of imagined speech (ethopoeia) played a central role in populating these compositions with memorable characters as poets fleshed out sparsely detailed biblical narratives into imaginative vignettes.[5] For orators and later homilists, ethopoeia punctuated their declamations with the pathos of theatrical performance. It was also an exercise in demonstrating one’s oratorical skillfulness: “Ethopoeia synthesizes the mimetic elements of classical education, even as it weds this intrinsically performative skill to the entire canon of learning the student was expected master. Interiority, chronology, voice/physical expressiveness, and gender constituted the performative nexus of ethopoeia, and each aspect imbues the exercise with specific potency in a performance” (p. 234). As they re-narrated familiar stories, writers applied such techniques to fill lacunae, craft memorable characters, and smooth infelicities within the scriptural text. The proliferation of voices could include members of the congregation through the incorporation of imaginative refrains, rendering those present an impromptu chorus resembling the ancient theater. With these established rhetorical techniques at hand, poets shaped the imaginaries of their audiences.

While reading Staging the Sacred, I reflected on what I have overlooked in my previous studies of liturgical poetry by failing to embrace this theatrical dimension. In conclusion, I offer an additional example to the numerous case studies found in Staging the Sacred, read in light of Lieber’s monumental study. Within Jacob of Serugh’s verse homilies (mēmrā, plural mēmrē), I have often fixated on passages where Jacob scripts characters addressing their own bodies and ailments. Such monologues draw us into a relationship with the speaker as we hear their most intimate reflections. Examples of this may be found in his mēmrē on the woman with the flow of blood (Mk 5:25-34; Mt 9:20-22; Lk 8:43-48) and the woman bent over (Lk 13:10-17).[6]  Through the techniques Lieber details, ekphrasis and ethopoeia, Jacob fixes the listener's attention on the embodied suffering of these women and invests their plight with theological and pedagogical significance. He does this not only through the voice of the poetic narrator, but perhaps more poignantly, through imagining how these biblical women could advocate for themselves. In Jacob’s verse homily, these biblical women decry their suffering and protest the ways their bodily condition impinges on their social and spiritual mobility. These instances of imagined speech are redolent with the emotionality of compelling theater.

While these examples of New Testament figures protest their bodily limits, frustration is not the only posture Jacob configures through imagined speech. One of the most memorable examples may be found in his shorter mēmrā on Symeon the Stylite (ca. 386-459).[7] Rather than a static image of the idealized ascetic hero, Jacob fashions a literary portrait of holiness infused with kinetic energy. He likens Symeon to the biblical figure, David, but on his pillar, the Stylite battles one even more terrifying than Goliath. The agonistic struggle between the spiritual athlete and Satan in Jacob's verse hagiography takes on universal significance. Invoking the imagery of an athletic contest, Jacob vividly depicts Symeon and his dastardly foe vying with one another atop the pillar.[8] As listeners, we hang on each verse, holding our breath as the two exchange blows. The pace of the verses vacillates between the swiftly unfolding details of combat and the staid reflection of the preacher. At a critical moment, Satan bites Symeon’s foot. Jacob contextualizes Symeon’s pedal woes through an apt reference to David as the singer of Psalms (Ps 40:2).[9] We see how Jacob’s biblical idiom informs his ekphrastic description, narrowing the gap between his sources, the poetic narrative, and its performance. 

Symeon’s injured appendage becomes an increasingly dire affliction. Extending our theatrical reading, this consequential bite may be described as hastening the dramatic action and revealing the steadfast ascetic commitment of the protagonist. As the condition of his injured foot deteriorates, Jacob revels in recounting the grizzly details of its decay, assuring us that, nonetheless, Symeon’s “beauty increased.” To use Lieber’s words, Jacob demonstrates here how “a skilled speaker offered listeners entrée into a world perceived through the sensory imagination. Ekphrasis draws author and reader – or, here, speaker and listener – together into a shared imaginary space. A performer’s delivery imagines worlds into being, worlds he shares and inhabits with his audience” (p. 169). We are simultaneously repulsed by Symeon’s flesh and drawn to witness his endurance. The listener may find themselves wondering if the ascetic athlete can, like Job, withstand this corporeal triall? Has Satan’s bite revealed the saint’s “Achilles’ heel”? Reading with Lieber, we see how Jacob draws us into Symeon’s presence, confronting us with the paradox of embodied holiness, its beauty and its horror.

Among the many accounts of Symeon’s life, as Harvey notes, only in Jacob’s mēmrā does the saintly man amputate the rotting appendage. As the poetic narrator directs our eyes to Symeon, we witness our ascetic hero considering his own bodily state:

And he watched his foot as it rotted and its flesh decayed. And the foot stood bare like a tree beautiful with branches. He saw that there was nothing on it but tendons and bones. And he took its weight and raised it and set it upon its companion. He saw that the wearied heifer could not bear the yoke, and he sought to unhitch her from her work, and he would labor with the one. The blessed man did a marvelous deed that has never been done before: he cut off his foot that he would not be hindered from his work. Who would not weep at having his foot cut off at its joint? But he looked on it as something foreign, and he was not even sad.[10]

Within these lines, Jacob playfully evokes Jesus’s warning that it is preferable to sacrifice an appendage than to fall (Mk 9: 43,45,47; Mt 5:29-30 and 18:8-9). However, this allusion is only partial since the saint’s holiness conditions his body even as it deteriorates before our mind’s eye. Symeon does not maim himself for fear that the foot might lead him astray, but rather as an act of compassion.[11] The ascetic renunciation on display here demonstrates the equanimity toward the body such discipline engenders. These verses also show Jacob’s characteristic form of description, what Lieber describes as a “‘cataloging’ or ‘listing’ aesthetic” (p. 188). To use another image Lieber employs, Jacob’s mosaic portrait of Symeon comes into ever greater view as he keeps adding the tiles, image after image, biblical allusion upon biblical allusion.

Not only does Jacob use ekphrastic description in this mēmrā, but most memorably, the type of ethopoeia Lieber emphasizes as central to the drama of liturgical poetry. The poetic narrator sets the scene to amplify the impending monologue. While Satan stands to the side of the poetic stage, covered in the blood and bodily effluvia of the detached foot, Symeon, again likened to David, “sings” to his former limb: "Why are you shaken and grieving since your hope is kept? For again on that tree from which you have been cut off you will be grafted. Go, wait for me until I come and do not grieve. For without you I will not rise up on the last day.”[12] Here and in the lines that follow, Symeon reassures his foot that they will be reunited, emphasizing the bodily resurrection as total and complete. The tone of these verses teeters on the edge of the tragic and the comical. The saint, renowned for his discipline over the body, shows genuine tenderness. These verses speak to human fears about the finality of death and the chasm between the living and the dead. Just as Hamlet famously considers Yorick’s skull, a prop to invoke memento mori, Jacob depicts Symeon as holding out his foot for all to behold as we listen. Perhaps the cantor giving voice to Jacob’s mēmrā accentuated Symeon’s words of consolation by gesturing toward his audience with an upturned, empty palm, inviting the congregation to conjure the scene for themselves.

Reading these works with Prof. Lieber, I attend with greater care to how these writers adapted material for their listeners by applying all the effective communicative skills available. Hymnographers and verse preachers did not merely reflect or disseminate hegemonic views in a more palatable form for the masses. They drew upon established interpretative traditions, participating in their preservation and development within the formal constraints of their preferred genres. With strategies akin to those practiced within ancient theater and oratory, liturgical poets jolted their listeners out of the torpor of spiritual complacency, confronting them with memorable moral exemplars and villains. How can historians and translators help modern readers appreciate the liveliness of this form of theological discourse? Staging the Sacred provides a compelling response to this challenge. 

Erin Galgay Walsh is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

[1] Robert Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition, rev. ed. (New York, NY: T&T Clark, 2006), 193-195.

[2] A helpful introduction to the performative settings of the hymns of Ephrem, for example, is Jeffrey Wickes, “Between Liturgy and School: Reassessing the Performative Context of Ephrem’s Madrāšê,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 26, no. 1 (2018): 25-51.

[3] An excellent starting point remains George A. Kennedy, trans. and intro. Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric. Writings from the Greco-Roman World (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical literature, 2003).

[4] Scholarship on John Chrysostom demonstrates the significant contributions rhetorical analysis of homiletic discourse has made in recent decades. See Margaret M. Mitchell, The Heavenly Trumpet: John Chrysostom and the Art of Pauline Interpretation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 22-28 for an illustrative summary of how scholars have grown increasingly attuned to classical rhetoric as essential context for understanding Chrysostom’s homilies despite early resistance.

[5] Lieber, Staging the Sacred, 107 fn. 16. Lieber differentiates between ethopoeia (“a human speaker who speaks in character”) and prosopopoeia (“personification of a nonhuman figure”). In her recent book, Morwenna Ludlow cites the inconsistency of ancient usage and employs prosopoeia to refer to the general practice of attributing speech within her analysis. See Art, Craft, and Theology in Fourth-Century Christian Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 119, fn. 2. While Ludlow’s study concentrates on Christian literary productions composed in Greek, the shared focus on rhetorical technique and the influence of the theater invites further comparative reflection. Here I follow Lieber’s terminology and transliteration.

[6] The Syriac text of homilies 169 and 170 may be found in Homilies of Mar Jacob of Serug, ed. by Paul Bedjan and Sebastian Brock (2nd ed. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2006), V.506-525 and V.525-551. Readers may find beautiful translations of these works in Jacob of Sarug, Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on Women Whom Jesus Met, trans. Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Sebastian P. Brock, Reyhan Durmaz, Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos, Michael Payne, and Daniel Picus (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2016). For my analysis, see Erin Galgay Walsh, “Giving Voice to Pain: New Testament Narratives of Healing in the Poetry of Jacob of Serugh,” Journal of Early Christian History 12, no. 1 (2022): 96-118.

[7] The Syriac text of Jacob’s mēmrā may be found in P. Bedjan, Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum IV (Paris and Leipzig: O. Harrassowitz, 1894; repr. Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1968), 650-665. The English translation used here may be found in Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Jacob of Serug: Homily on Simeon the Stylite,” in Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 21-22. Harvey’s translation renders the Syriac verse in continuous prose which I follow here.

[8] Among scholars working on stylites and the development of the saint’s cult, Dina Boero’s numerous publications are essential reading as she brings together literary and archaeological evidence. See, for example, Dina Boero, “Making a Manuscript, Making a Cult: Scribal Production of the Syriac Life of Symeon the Stylite in Late Antiquity,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 73 (2019): 25-68. For a recent study of Symeon Stylites the Younger and the evolution of the holy man, see Lucy Parker, Symeon Stylites the Younger and Late Antique Antioch: From Hagiography to History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

[9] Harvey, “Jacob of Serug: Homily on Simeon the Stylite,” 22.

[10] Harvey, “Jacob of Serug: Homily on Simeon the Stylite,” 22.

[11] Perhaps another reference to explore here is Lk 13:15 which incidentally coincides with the passage about the woman with a bent spine.

[12] Harvey, “Jacob of Serug: Homily on Simeon the Stylite,” 22.