Liturgy and Theater: Hearing Poetry Anew

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

It is an honor and a joy to celebrate our distinguished colleague Laura Lieber and her magnificent achievement, Staging the Sacred. There are so very many reasons to celebrate! Professor Lieber writes in her introduction of the participation of ancient liturgical poets in an “aesthetics of delight.” But that in fact is what she has given us: a gift that allows us an aesthetics of delight as we marvel at her sparkling prose, her savvy wit, and her coolly elegant, seemingly effortless command of late antique liturgical poetry (Jewish, Samaritan, Christian and in half a dozen languages) ––  what’s not to love? Yet, all the while, amidst our “delight”, she is ushering us through what can only be described as a tour-de-force encounter with the exuberant vibrancy of late antique religion and its modes of performance.

In the first place, Laura Lieber has brought together three areas of cultural expression – three modes of performance: theater, oratory, and hymnody – that have often been studied separately. For some time now, religion scholars (if not classicists or historians) have understood that the connections are profound, even fundamentally crucial, if we are to understand what liturgical life in late antiquity involved and why. But no one has yet woven together these three modes of performance (theater, oratory, and hymnody) in the terms Laura Lieber offers here: considering how deeply the very mechanics of theatrical performance shaped and informed the ritual lives of late antique Jews, Samaritans, and Christians. This is not at all the same as thinking about ancient tragedy and comedy as themselves religious rituals of sacrifice and prayer. It is about how key religious figures – ritual agents, community leaders, but most especially and above all, the poets who wove the separate parts into seamless tapestries – learned their crafts, learned the tools necessary to make the rituals of religious life and worship effective.

Laura Lieber’s book attends to the many component parts necessary for effective liturgy. But the beating heart of this book on every page is the poets whose words made it all happen. These had to learn their craft literarily and performatively; the mechanics of representation and presentation; the forging of words and ideas into voices and stories, chanted or sung with musical melodies that would linger in ear and mind and set the words indelibly into the hearts of their congregations. They had to learn how to deliver all of this to a culturally sophisticated, hungry, even needy audience in ways that were (to draw from Laura Lieber’s favored vocabulary) pleasing, effective, engaging, lively, entertaining, even enlightening, and meaningful, for all participants, from every vantage point, and in the midst of the joys, sorrows, terrors, losses, or hopes that comprised late antique life.

Laura Lieber gives us stages and performance spaces (from household to civic center); author-poets and their inherited literary genres ripe for renewal or new forms altogether; techniques of description, emotional evocation, and sensory engagement (ekphrasis and enargeia); techniques of character presentation (speech-in-character: ethopoeia, prosopopoeia); the physicality of bodily performance: movement, posture, gesture, interaction and exchange as congregations participated through a wide range of refrains, responses, and collective recitation and song. And she reminds us that of necessity, every performance was distinctive and complete in the sense that every performance was live and therefore unique, and every participant a fully embodied presence (whether leading or following, whether impeded or enabled, whether excited or bored).

A major achievement of the book is the successful setting of Jewish, Samaritan, and Christian hymnody in shared spotlight, as partakers together of their cultural world, its landscapes, society, literary, oral, aural, and visual cultures (and, one might add, olfactory culture as well: with incense everywhere to cleanse and adorn the air of worship, and fragrant lamp oils to illuminate with beauty). Rather than siloed away in separate communities, as if everyone lived in remote, self-contained little pods, they drank together, deeply, from the abundant cultural springs of the times ( and perhaps also the taverns). Laura Lieber manages to honor the literary creativity and power of each distinctive religious tradition of hymnody at the same time that she presents them unequivocally as sharing the same training, tools, and techniques.  In this accomplishment, she has truly taken us to new heights of historical understanding and even aesthetic enthrall. Each receives their due, and the results are the richer for the sheer fact of their commonalities.

The book is an adventure every bit as exciting and exhilarating as a night on Broadway (or one’s choice of performance venue). Yet the results are significant, and to an uncommon extent. We come up against “real life” and the real world of those who lived within it, to a degree one rarely experiences in scholarship of the ancient past.

There is everything here to praise.

            Yet, part of our own ritual to perform as scholars and colleagues is the presentation of something more from our own corners of expertise. In my case, I would like to add in a few notes on music (with apologies for the pun). It is interesting that the book’s effect is of literary, spoken impact on the reader. Rightly so, since all of the music from this mosaic of liturgies is tragically lost to us. Melody titles are preserved sometimes with the hymns, sometimes (at least in Syriac, and occasionally with the kontakia of Romanos) sounding like the titles still in use in certain liturgical traditions; but who knows.[i] The music is gone, so it would be difficult to present any of Laura Lieber’s material truly as musical theater. On the other hand, that is what it was.  The melodic sounding of those metered verses, refrains, prayers, supplications, and responses was the warp to the weft of the words. So: what can we add here?

Singing was so basic to the religious worlds of the ancient Mediterranean across millenia and cultures that sometimes we forget to ask: why sing at all?  I offer three reminders here, taking my base orientation from Syriac.[ii] There are Greek and Aramaic (and Hebrew and Samaritan) counterparts, to be sure.

Pedagogy: 

Sung poetry was an effective way to teach and to learn. Melody and meter helped to keep the content in ear and mind, and hence helped with remembering biblical story, exegesis, or doctrinal instruction.  Syriac authors composed sung poetry of different types for a variety of uses.  In addition to liturgy itself, sung poetry was basic for Syriac liturgical training and religious instruction starting at least with Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373), as Jeffrey Wickes and Adam Becker have shown us.[iii]  In turn, sung poetry was also the primary mode of liturgical celebration for the gathered church community, characterizing both the instruction provided (scriptural recitation, homilies, hymns, responses) and also the mode of performance for all participants (ordained or lay).[iv]  The singing of this poetry was part of its pedagogical presentation and reception, whether in classroom or church. 

Therapy: 

Why was music useful in this way? Music was an effective tool for teaching because music was affective: it made an impact on those who sang and those who heard. As such, music could be dangerous.  Whether Jewish or Christian, religious leaders feared the perils that music could pose for the unwitting. Heretical hymns, songs from the theater, or singing at the festivals of rival groups, even the lure of an exceptionally beautiful voice could lead astray.  Dangerous songs incited the passions, roused the emotions, and clouded one’s reason, lingering in the mind and turning one’s disposition towards sinful tendencies.

A vivid example attributed to Jacob of Sarug is the description of songs from the theater, “responses (or choruses, chants) which are not true;  troublesome and confused sounds; melodies which attract children; ordered and cherished songs; skillful chants, lying canticles…[In the theater] your ear is captivated by song.”[v]  Not unlike the liturgy – in fact (to Laura Lieber’s point),  just like the liturgy, the theater told its stories with melodies and verses carried in one’s ears, whether young or old.  Its songs were delightful, pleasing, and insidious.

Syriac tradition liked to remember its great liturgical poets as fighting fire with fire: composing beautiful hymns of truth to counteract false ones. Ephrem the Syrian, Rabbula of Edessa, Narsai of Nisibis, and Jacob of Sarug are all commemorated for the turning the power of their sung poetry against dangerous songs.[vi] The strategy was more than a battle plan in a religiously competitive society.  It was also a therapy, a tradition dating back deep into classical philosophy and vibrantly current in late antiquity.[vii] Music could heal a divided self; it could unite a divided community.

The problem with dangerous music, for these authors, was its ability to distract and fragment a person, turning one’s attention away from truth – away from God.  One became disordered in oneself. The larger result was a disordered, fragmented community: instead of one true religion, or one true church, there was the disorder of many.

Isaac of Antioch, while visiting that city during a pagan festival, was sorely disturbed by the music of the civic celebrations.  He disdained this pagan festal singing as disordered chaos: “Everyone composed and learned melodies in every genre,/ so that every person is pleased by his own voice, and delights in his [own] singing”.[viii]  To combat the noise, Isaac turned to chanting Psalm 92 (Peshitta): “It is good to give thanks to the Lord”,[ix] an act he describes as bringing the self back to order. In singing, he tells us, he utilized tongue, mind, and spirit, proceeding verse by verse. Chanting allowed repetition to focus him, ritual to guide him; sounding the words led to interpretation; movement from verse to verse led to riches of truth.  He marveled, “There is no [other] grace such as this…there is no [other] music such as this”;[x] “how much more beautiful our songs are than [theirs]!”[xi] He ends with an exhortation to join one’s own voice to that of the heavenly hosts: “for between the voices [of heaven] and ours, there should be no opportunity for silence”.[xii]  Note that Isaac, a monk, admonishes not to silence, but to song.

What Isaac described at the individual level, Thomas of Marga described at the collective.  When the churches in Iraq fell into what Thomas called a confusion of “tunes, melodies, and airs and songs” due to lax episcopal oversight, Thomas described it this way:  “Every country, and town, and monastery, and school had its own hymns and songs of praise and tunes, and sang them in its own way, and if a teacher or a scholar happened to be away from his own school he was obliged to stand [silent] like an ignorant man.”[xiii]  The situation led to dramatic liturgical reforms. When everyone knew what to sing and how to sing, musical order, was restored.  So, too, was community order.

The sounds of civic life– multi-religious, multi-lingual, with the turbulent buzz of the marketplace, the roar of the stadium, the excitement of theater ­– overwhelmed or at least distracted one at every turn.  The response, according to Jacob of Sarug, should be the music of liturgy: “when [the soul] hears the melody [qol] of liturgy (teshmeshto) in God’s house,/ she is moved spiritually with the love of God.”[xiv]  Jacob extols liturgy as a school that offered a powerful therapy of song: “The church in the world is like a teacher to the human being,/ teaching, educating, and treating the wounds of all who come to her.”[xv]  Its music, he chanted, impacted the soul both through the experience of listening and through that of singing: music received, and music offered. Singing “truthful songs” every day, Jacob urged, annoyed Satan and vanquished the dangers of the civic world. [xvi]  

Perfection:

Singing together brought health and peace to the individual (as Isaac of Antioch describes) and to the community (as Jacob of Sarug or Thomas of Marga portrayed). It brought harmony in its fullest ideal: a notion that required not only words of truth (pedagogy), and not only a healed disposition (therapy), but the impact and effect of the music itself. The bodily experience of meter, rhythm, and melody ordered sounds, meanings, and performance into a whole and incised it into one’s deepest  interior (those insidious ear worms), one’s deepest memory (the songs always known), and into one’s most inclusive community (everyone joined in song). A consummate description of the capacity of music to join words, community, and the divine into one perfectly performed communion of truth is one we all know well from Philo’s On the Contemplative Life, in Philo’s description of the Therapeutae and Therapeutrides singing their night vigil service.

In the vigil service, Philo describes the men and women standing as two separate choirs (choroi), each with its own director, for each group “the most honoured amongst them and also the most musical [emmelestatos]”.[xvii]  The choirs sang separately and antiphonally, keeping time with hands and feet. In due course, in the ecstasy of worship, the choirs joined together.  Their rapturous song replicated that of the Hebrews at the Red Sea, where Moses led the men and Miriam the women in hymns of thanksgiving.  Philo continues:

“It is on this model [of Exodus 15] above all that the choir of the Therapeutae of either sex, note in response to note and voice to voice, the treble of the women blending with the bass of the men, create an harmonious concert, music in the truest sense (enarmonion sumphōnian apotelei kai mousikēn ontōs).  Lovely are the thoughts, lovely the words and worthy of reverence the choristers (oi choreutai), and the end and aim of thoughts, words and choristers alike is piety.”[xviii]

Philo’s account gives a literarily detailed report of the hymns studied and composed by the Therapeutae, and the music performed at their banquets and services: the types of hymns, the melodic and metrical patterns, and the musical sounds of the two choirs singing separately, responsorily, in octaval harmony, and in unison.[xix]  The power of this utopian ideal rests on its difference from the life of ordinary Jews in villages, towns, or cities, and the ordinary forms of song that filled such days and nights.

It seems that no treatise specifically on music, per se, survives to us in Syriac from late antiquity. Yet occasional comments in homilies or hymns enable us to reconstruct a basic sense of the aesthetics cherished by Syriac Christians, at least, when it came to the singing of sacred music. And it is not unlike what Philo portrayed. The first and most important aspect was order: everyone needed to sing their right part, at the right time and in their right place. Disorder was disaster. The second valued quality was volume: loud, thundering song was celebrated by our Syriac Christians with great delight. This was not only because of the singing competitions that we know were happening as processions and outdoor rituals took place. It was also to imitate and emulate the angelic hosts, whose thundering exaltation around God’s throne the prophet had witnessed in Isaiah 6, and who had taught the shepherds on the night of the Nativity how to thunder God’s glorification in Luke 2.  Yet to Syriac ears, such loudness did not preclude descriptors like “soft”, “sweet”, “soothing”, or “instructive” for liturgical hymns, as well. Liturgy and liturgical participation (it seems for Jews as well as Christians) trained its partakers to exemplify the kind of musical vision Philo, too, had evoked: of an inclusive community of all members, singing in fullness and in perfect harmony: in order, rhythmically, melodically, in loud, confident truth, sweet to their ears and healing to the heart.

Turning back to Laura Lieber and Staging the Sacred, perhaps we can take an idea of its music in our ears (if only in our dreams). Perhaps there are glimpses in the liturgical poetry of the piyyutim to help us fill out the musical aesthetics that must have characterized the performative power that Staging the Sacred sets before our eyes. But perhaps this is asking more than the evidence allows. Laura Lieber’s book goes far to lay a sumptuous feast for our viewing. She has captured the vitality, dynamism, and interactive religious energy of late antiquity with uncommon eloquence and elegant insight. We are wholly in her debt, and I, for one, am grateful to be so.

Susan Ashbrook Harvey is Willard Prescott and Annie McClelland Smith Professor of History and Religion at Brown University.

[i] Gregorios Y. Ibrahim and George Kiraz, “Ephrem’s Madroshe and the Syrian Orthodox Beth Gazo: A Loose, but Fascinating, Affinity,” Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 2.1 (1999 [2010]): 47–56.

[ii]  Some of what follows is addressed in more detail in S.A. Harvey, “Music as Liturgy: Models from Ancient Syriac Christianity,” Journal of the International Society for Orthodox Church Music 4.2 (2020): 371-382.

[iii]  Jeffrey Wickes, “Between Liturgy and School: Reassessing the Performative Context of Ephrem’s Madrāšê,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 26.1 (2018): 25–51; idem, Bible and Poetry in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Ephrem’s Hymns on Faith (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019). Adam H. Becker, Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis and the Development of Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); idem, Sources for the Study of the School of Nisibis (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008).

[iv] Consider the sketch of earliest Syriac liturgy by Baby Varghese, The Early History of the Syriac Liturgy: Growth, Adaptation, and Inculturation (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2021), which tells the story of Syriac liturgy through the history of its hymns.

[v]  ‘On the Spectacles’, Hom. 3, trans. Cyril Moss, ‘Jacob of Serugh’s Homilies on the Spectacles of the Theatre,’ Le Muséon 48 (1935), at p. 105.

[vi] Discussed in S.A. Harvey, “Holy Sound: Preaching as Divine Song in Late Antique Syriac Tradition,” in Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism, ed. Andrei A. Orlov (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 226-239.

[vii] On the late antique philosophical traditions of music as therapy, see e.g., Antonietta Provenza, “Correcting ethos and Purifying the Body.  Musical Therapy in Iamblichus’ de vita pythagorica,” Greek and Roman Musical Studies 3 (2015): 94-115;  Andreas Kramatz, “Is the Idea of ‘Musical Emotion’ Present in Classical Antiquity?,” Greek and Roman Musical Studies 5 (2017): 1-17.  As these studies note, the notion of music as therapy has important foundations in Plato: Elizabeth Lucia Lyon, “Ethical Aspects of Listening in Plato’s Timaeus:  Pleasure and Delight in 80b5-8,” Greek and Roman Musical Studies 4 (2016): 253-72.

[viii]   Isaac of Antioch, “On the Vigil which took place in Antioch,” ll. 13-14, trans. Robert , at p. 104, in Isaac of Antioch, “On the Vigil which took place in Antioch; and On ‘It is Good to Give Thanks to the Lord,’”  trans. Robert Kitchen, in Glenn Peers, “Isaac of Antioch’s Organ and the Media of Musical Subjects,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 26.1 (2018): 75-109, at pp. 103-9 (Appendix).

[ix]  “This entire psalm was prepared as if for a contest;/ grace armed it to chase away impertinent noises”, Isaac of Antioch, “On the Vigil which took place in Antioch,” ll. 45-6, trans. Kitchen at p. 105.

[x]  Isaac of Antioch, “On the Vigil which took place in Antioch,” ll. 75-6, trans. Kitchen at p. 106.

[xi]  Isaac of Antioch, “On the Vigil which took place in Antioch,” l. 93, trans. Kitchen at p. 107.

[xii]  Isaac of Antioch, “On the Vigil which took place in Antioch,” ll. 118-9, trans. Kitchen at p. 109.

[xiii]  Thomas of Marga, Book of Governors, 3.1, ed. and trans. E.A. Wallis Budge, The Book of Governors: the Historia Monastica of Thomas Bishop of Marga A.D. 840 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, and Co., 1893;  repr. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2003), vol. 2: 293.

[xiv]  Jacob of Sarug, “On Partaking,” l. 165, trans. Amir Harrak, Jacob of Sarug’s Homily on the Partaking of the Holy Mysteries (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009), 22.

[xv]  Jacob of Sarug, “On Partaking,” ll. 179-80, trans. Harrak, 24.

[xvi]  Jacob of Sarug, “On Partaking,” l. 214, trans. Harrak, 28

[xvii] Philo, On the Contemplative Life, 83;  ed. and trans. F.H. Colson, Philo, Loeb Classical Library 363 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941), vol. 9, 112–169, at p. 165.

[xviii] Philo, On the Contemplative Life, 88;  ed. and trans. Colson, p. 167.

[xix]  Peter Jeffrey provides incisive analysis of Philo’s terminology, its classical background, as well as its misinterpretation by fourth and fifth century Christian writers based on theirreading of Eusebius’ version.  P. Jeffrey, “Philo’s Impact on Christian Psalmody.” in Psalms in Community: Jewish and Christian Textual, Liturgical, and Artistic Traditions, ed. Harold W. Attridge and Margot Elsbeth Fassler (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 147–187.