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CHAPTER 2

On the Verge of Virginity

I give warning and advice to everyone who is not yet free of the vexations of flesh and blood and who has not withdrawn from the desire for corporeal nature that he completely abstain from reading this book and what is said about it.

—Origen, Prologue to the Commentary on the Song of Songs

The kontakion On the Annunciation tells of a young and beautiful maiden who meets a flaming and resolute male in a private chamber. His name is Gabriel, and the attractive virgin whom he visits is none but Mary herself. When Joseph approaches her after the visitor has left, Mary exclaims accusingly: “Where were you, wise man? How could you not guard my virginity?” (Hymn XXXVI 12.4). The irony is palpable, but the situation was critical. A late antique girl would reach marriageable age somewhere between twelve and eighteen, and the transition from virginity to the married state was perhaps the most important in her life.¹ Romanos shows Mary’s precious virginity unguarded; a male intruder challenged her sexual innocence. The young Mary was, according to a tradition going back at least to the Protevangelium of James, protected by the older man Joseph. Why did the guard not do his job?

The maiden’s virginity is threatened. Something has happened, something that endangered her maidenhood. She is now a bride, and yet she is not. The poet makes the Virgin linger in this liminal interval that defies her state—on the threshold of womanhood—face to face with a sexual embrace. As Romanos brings her to this verge, he brings the listener along, furnishing the audience with excitement. Risky stories fascinate—and fascinated the people of late ancient Constantinople. Symeon the Fool, who, as we have seen, threw nuts at women in church, attests to the attraction of the forbidden also in Christian storytelling. Nobody throws nuts at Mary, but she is hit by other surprises. And she is caught in a web of attractions whose threads I shall tug at.

EROS AND CHRISTIAN BODIES

Virginity precludes sexuality. That, at least, is our general assumption. Mary’s virginity excludes her from the realm of sex. But how dissociated is the Virgin from sexuality? And can we ever say “not sex” without thinking “sex”? It is in this paradox that we must look for the sixth-century Virgin Mary. The same century saw the creation of the mosaic of the Annunciation in the Euphrasian Basilica in Poreč in what is now Croatia (Figure 7). The picture portrays the Virgin as an elegant maiden who with blushing cheeks moves a finger toward her red lips; her big eyes present a mindful gaze. In an earlier text, the eighth book of the Sibylline Oracles,² we learn that a “strong … person”—the angel Gabriel—came and greeted the young Virgin, who reacted in a manner similar to that of the Virgin in Poreč, but not as calmly. She was coy, and yet taken by the moment:

Fear and, at the same time, wonder seized her….

She stood trembling. Her mind fluttered

while her heart was shaken….

The maiden laughed and reddened her cheek,

rejoicing with joy and enchanted in her heart.³

A complex nexus of feelings overwhelmed her. To suggest a complete dissociation from the erotic would simply be reading too much prudishness into this text; there is unquestionably thrill and passion hiding behind the blushing cheeks. Even before Romanos, in other words, interpreters had filled the Annunciation scene with excitement.⁴

In Christian Byzantium the ideal of virginity, chastity, and celibacy existed side by side with, and certainly in contrast to, values of family life, procreation, and sexuality.⁵ Characterizations of the Virgin Mary tend to reflect this tension. Her virginity could serve to promote the ascetic virginity of the monastic movement. But it did not always. What happens if the representation of her virginity does not match the ideals of an ascetic life?

Late ancient people took desire seriously. The Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor (580–662) saw erotic attraction as fundamental to communal life: “Amongst [humanity as a whole] there is the law of affectionate attraction…. [I]t is from this erotic force that birds fly in flocks, such as swans, geese, cranes and crows and the like. And there are similar creatures on land, such as deer, cattle and the like. And there are marine creatures such as tunny and mullet and the like.”⁶ Desire was vital not only to created life but also to human experiences of the divine, and in certain instances sexuality might even constitute one such form of desire.⁷ George Capsanis, a modern-day archimandrite from the Byzantine monastic peninsula of Athos, points out that “the sexual urge is an expression of that natural yearning which is implanted within us by our creator, and leads us toward Him.”⁸

Figure 7. Sixth-century wall mosaic of the Annunciation in the Euphrasian Basilica in Poreč, Croatia. Henry Maguire and Ann Terry Poreč Archive, 1990s–2000s (MS.BZ.015–2012–0076–0018), Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.

In his Hymns of Divine Eros the Constantinopolitan monk Symeon the New Theologian (ca. 949–1022) directed his erotic love toward God. His hymns represent mystic longing rather than carnal sexuality, perhaps, but he is not prim. Without shying away from the corporeal, he explains that everything is known by Christ, “both my finger and my penis.” And he adds daringly—presumably to the reader, or maybe to himself: “Do you tremble or feel ashamed [by this]?”⁹ The poet is consciously provocative in this instance, placing the word he uses for penis (balanon) next to Christ in a rhyming homeoteleuton construction. Symeon represents a different era than Romanos, but these examples serve to warn us not to apply anachronistic assumptions about Byzantine theologians and poets to our readings of their texts. In Romanos’s day, we should remember, the Byzantines entered the baths naked.¹⁰

Byzantine saints’ lives are another example of literary longing. These compositions often explore their characters’ desire.¹¹ A literary and thematic relationship between hagiography and the ancient novels is well established, and in various early Christian acts and legends, chastity and erotics interact and exchange positions. A florilegium transmitted under Maximus’s name includes a citation from two ancient Greek novels, Leucippe and Clitophon by Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus’s Aethiopica.¹² Whether or not Maximus actually had anything to do with it matters less than the fact that these narratives—driven by suspense and romantic yearning—are woven into an ecclesiastical text connected to his name.

In Romanos erotics is not just as a spiritual desire to be near to God. It is a carnal-spiritual longing for the beauty of holiness, played out in the sacramental realm of human bodies. Romanos’s kontakia represent a poetic Christian corpus that engages eros, nudity, and sexuality in a strikingly liberal way.¹³ Desire does not always manifest itself carnally, but sexuality involves one form of desire, and one that Romanos employs frequently in his literary characterizations. Desire is fundamental to the way he imagines Christian faith.¹⁴ The lack of desire, the lack of yearning, would mean a lack of faith. According to his On the Nativity I, King Herod and the Pharisees ask and are told about the birth in Bethlehem, but the poet shows them to be faithless, for “as if they had not understood, they did not crave [ἐϖεθύμησαν] to see” him.¹⁵ They had, in other words, no intense desire for a sensorial and corporeal involvement with him.

Someone who had an intense desire for corporeal involvement, according to Byzantine imagination, was the actress-prostitute (pornē) who anointed Christ in the house of the Pharisee (cf. Luke 7:36–50). Romanos’s On the Harlot tells the story of this figure, who was arguably the second most important biblical woman in Byzantium. His version describes the relation between the man (Christ) and the woman (the prostitute) in a sensual way, and a distinctly erotic tone marks his language.¹⁶ The critical issue of the hymn is toward whom one directs one’s desire; desire itself is not questioned, it is taken for granted.

The hymn opens by acknowledging that we have all committed filthy deeds, and that the harlot should be read as a representative of the poetic “I,” and by implication the whole congregation. They have all committed fornication, but she has turned away from it.¹⁷

One day the harlot notices the sweet-smelling fragrance of Christ, and she is seized by it;¹⁸ everything else suddenly seems repulsive to her—she wants this man. Through her desire, she becomes a model for the congregated church and is explicitly likened to the church;¹⁹ Romanos’s audience should respond to the same enticement as she did.²⁰

The “harlot and chaste [ϖόρνην καὶ σώφρονα],”²¹ as Romanos calls her, yearns for him who shines in her:

Jesus,

the most beautiful [ὁ ὡραιότατος] and doer of beautiful deeds,

for whose appearance [ἰδέαν] the prostitute longed [ἐϖόθησεν] before she could see [it]. (X 4.2–4)

The harlot has not done away with her flirtatious lifestyle. On the contrary, she presents herself as practicing precisely the art of seduction. The fact that Romanos seems to assume, like so many others, the rather problematic idea that a prostitute has an overtly large libido is not the point here; the character simply typifies the openly sexual woman.²² The Greek word potheō means to long for, desire, or want.

In one stanza the poet repeats it four times in different forms—and in certain manuscript variants even more. He lets the harlot exclaim:

—for I want him so much [ϖάνυ ϖοθῶ] now;

and for him to want [ϖοθοῦντα] me, I anoint with perfume and fawn [κολακεύω],

I weep, I moan and I urge him rightly to want [ϖοθῆσαι] me;

I am transformed by the desire of the desired [ϖόθον τοῦ ϖοθητοῦ],

and as he wants to be kissed, I kiss my lover. (X 5.2–6)

This “wise woman”²³ forsakes neither the trade of desire itself nor the language of desire. She keeps doing what she has done before, but now the object of her erotic desire is a different lover, the right lover. As she goes on reflecting on her situation, the harlot compares herself to the Old Testament harlot Rahab from Jericho, who “received” or “entertained” the spies.²⁴ She only does what Rahab did. And she describes how she takes hold of the virgin that she loves (i.e., Jesus) and holds him tight.²⁵

The harlot abandons her former multitude of lovers;²⁶ she breaks with past lovers in order to please the new one, she says.²⁷ Her new-found life is a life of monogamy and faithfulness—the love is lived out justly²⁸—but it does not lack passion. As a fervent and eager customer, she cries to the perfume seller:

—Give me, if you have, perfume worthy of my friend,

who is rightly and purely kissed,

who has set my limbs on fire. (X 9.4–6)

The seller tries to calm her down, but she compares herself with Michal who was in love with David, and she continues saying how good looking Jesus is, and how exceedingly delightful.²⁹ He is the one who sets her body aflame, she says, the limbs being the loci of her passionate enthusiasm.

The direction of desire is horizontal rather than vertical in this hymn, sensual rather than spiritual, passionate rather than contemplative. In On the Annunciation the erotics work very differently, but what the kontakia share, as we shall see, is precisely the erotic device in the storytelling. If to Augustine of Hippo (354–430) curiositas was a vice, Romanos delighted in it.³⁰ Erotic literature and imagery tantalize expectations, and it is exactly the same strategy Romanos employs.

On the Annunciation negotiates between chastity and sexuality; it shifts the Marian emphasis toward marriage, sexuality, and procreation—without therefore abandoning the language of virginity.³¹ Instead of resisting the world through ascetic virginity, Romanos’s Mary embraces the world through erotic virginity. As one who is now potentially to be married, she becomes associated with sexual attraction and procreation. The poetry never loses sight of her virginity, but her virginity no longer coincides with notions of celibacy or renunciation. Virginity becomes the hallmark of her holiness, her exclusive rank, as she is loved by both the earthly and heavenly realm, yet wedded to neither of them.³²

It has been said about Chariton’s (first–second century) attractive virgin Callirhoe that as her “beauty renders her an object of desire within the narrative, it simultaneously situates her as an object of the reader’s gaze.”³³ Can we observe a similar dynamic in Romanos’s presentation of the Annunciation, which displays Mary as an erotically appealing virgin, one toward whom desire may be extended?

ANNUNCIATION

The separate festival of the Annunciation was introduced to the Constantinopolitan rite in the sixth century,³⁴ and Romanos was probably among the first who wrote a hymn for the new feast, some time after 530.³⁵ His On the Annunciation is the oldest extant hymn written for this particular celebration.³⁶ In line with a general tendency among modern theologians to turn everything Marian into Christology, scholars have assumed that the feast was originally Christocentric in character rather than Mariocentric, and that it only became Marian later.³⁷ Judging from Romanos, this assumption is hard to maintain, for his focus is highly Mariocentric.

As Romanos recounts it elsewhere, the Virgin was born miraculously to her parents, Anna and Joachim. Early in her life they gave her to the temple, where angels fed her. Later she was betrothed to Joseph. These stories from the kontakion On the Nativity of the Virgin follow the Protevangelium of James, but they subject her to the same kind of scripted childhood as a Constantinopolitan girl would experience: Early in life her parents would pledge her to a husband or a convent. We do not need to think of this background when we read about the encounter in the Annunciation, for Romanos did not write a continuous story of Mary’s life from cradle to grave, yet On the Annunciation does presuppose that she was betrothed by Joseph, whose task was to guard her.

On the Annunciation is transmitted only in the Patmos manuscript. The Greek text of the whole hymn and an English translation can be found in Appendix 1, but the narrative structure of the hymn may be described thus:

Prelude: Appeal to Christ

Stanza 1: Acclamations to Mary

Stanza 2: Gabriel arrives in Nazareth

Stanzas 3–4: Gabriel’s greeting, and dialogue between Mary and Gabriel

Stanza 5: Mary deliberates in an inner monologue

Stanza 6: Mary questions the message and messenger

Stanzas 7–8: Gabriel deliberates in an inner monologue and answers Mary with OT reference

Stanza 9: Mary questions the validity of the OT parallel

Stanza 10: Gabriel answers

Stanza 11: Mary accepts the message and the messenger

Stanza 12: Gabriel’s exit. Mary summons Joseph and questions him

Stanzas 13–15: Joseph is awestruck and asks Mary not to consume him

Stanzas 16–17a: Mary tells Joseph what has happened

Stanzas 17b–18: Joseph promises to be her guard, but sends her away

In this hymn, as in Luke 1:26–38, we first meet the Virgin when Gabriel enters her house. Virginal conception takes place underneath the cover of a dialogue, a dialogue between a young virgin and an angel in the shape of a man. Both of them constitute ambivalent characters as far as gender and sexuality is concerned: An angel is sexless and bodiless, but Gabriel comes in the form of a man. A virgin stands outside the realm of gendered sexuality, which would otherwise be the prerequisite for conception. With indirectness and imagery the dialogue describes a union that is conceived of and anticipated, yet never actually exposed. Just as veiling is a means to both hiding and showing, the poet works with revealing by concealing in this hymn. It plays with the ambiguous role of the messenger just as it plays with that of the new mother. She is a virgin but not a virgin, bride but not a bride; he is an agent but not an agent, a man but not a man. Such play is no mere game, but an eroticization.

The Virgin and the Spirit

In the Annunciation an angel visits Mary, and in most versions of the story, an angel visits Joseph too (see esp. Matt. 1:20–21). Not so in Romanos. Here Joseph functions merely as a bewildered witness and a chaperone. Even the latter task he does not perform very well, for when the encounter with Gabriel takes place, he is not present at the scene. The Joseph character acts out human befuddlement in the face of holiness and divinity. He ends up sending her off—apparently fearing what people will say and do.

The omission of Joseph’s angel, however, is less striking than Romanos’s treatment of the Holy Spirit in the Annunciation. In the Lucan version of the Annunciation, Mary asks how the pregnancy can come about when she has not been with a man. The angel answers clearly and explicitly that the Holy Spirit will come upon her, the Power of the Highest overshadow her (Luke 1:34–35). In the sixth-century kontakion, on the other hand, the angel does not know how to answer the question. He is frustrated and dumbfounded as he sighs to himself:

—I am not believed here either,

…………………….

yet I cannot, I dare not be frank,

I am not able to fetter her voice. (XXXVI 7.3, 6–7)

Why does he not say anything?

In the Gospel, Mary is identified as “a virgin” (parthenos, Luke 1:27), but her virginity itself is not discussed in detail, except that she wonders how she can become pregnant when she has not been with a man.³⁸ The point that the Mother has not known a man indicates that the origin of her offspring is not human but divine. Apart from this there is little interest in the details of her virginity. Luke does not make the lack of human intercourse per se a prerequisite for this form of motherhood; virginity is not so much a criterion for the conception but a sign of God’s involvement instead of a man’s. Mary plays a relatively passive role, conceiving without having known; her body is a vessel of God.

In the strictly dyophysite language of the Tome of Leo, a document sanctioned by the Council of Chalcedon (451), “The birth of flesh reveals human nature; birth from a virgin is a proof of divine power.”³⁹ It is as simple as that! A Marian preacher of the fifth century, Proclus of Constantinople, asserts in his famous Theotokian Homily 1 that “If the mother had not remained a virgin, then the child born would have been a mere man and the birth no miracle. But if she remained a virgin even after birth, then indeed he was wondrously born who also entered unhindered ‘when the doors were sealed,’ whose union of natures was proclaimed by Thomas.”⁴⁰ To Proclus, Marian virginity, or more precisely postnatal virginity, is in itself a topic; her virginity is intrinsic to the miracle of divine incarnation. The homily goes further than Luke in its explicit insistence on virginity as a token of the union of natures (ἡ συζυγία τῶν φύσεων). Virginity does not simply form a sign and a miracle (Matt. 1:22–23; cf. Isa. 7:14); there is a prevailing awareness that the womb that gives birth to the Son of God must be a holy one, a virginal one. The Virgin has become integrated in a more profound way into the mystery of incarnation—not only as a servant but as a womb constituting carnal translation of the Word. Nevertheless, Proclus asserted that “by the Holy Spirit she conceived”;⁴¹ incarnation is not an act of a virgin first and foremost, but the work of the Holy Spirit.

Another text from the fifth century, the homily ascribed to Basil of Seleucia as his Homily XXXIX, declares that “conception will not take place with the mediation of a man, but with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. It will be the power of the Most High that will overshadow you, and will accomplish this event…. If this power did not overshadow You, You would not contain the One who is uncontainable.”⁴² The Spirit, in other words, takes the place of the man. Similarly Severus of Antioch, writing not much earlier than Romanos, could assert that Christ’s birth “was not preceded by marital intercourse but only by the descent of the holy Spirit.”⁴³

The Akathistos, another text that deals with the Annunciation narrative,⁴⁴ emphasizes the transformative capacity of the womb. This organ—rather than Mary’s face, mouth, or breasts—represent the whole, in a pars pro toto logic. Mary functions as a place of transformation. Yet the Akathistos is, again, quite explicit about what one may call the pneumatic aspect of virginal conception. Just as in Luke, divine “overshadowing” brings about new life on earth. According to stanza 4, “the Power of the Most High overshadowed the unwedded [maiden] for conception.”⁴⁵ Even though the role of the virgin in divine economy is thoroughly developed and explicated compared to that of the Lucan text, the unknown author left no question about the origin of the divine Child. The active Spirit performs the miracle and the womb of the Virgin provides a passive space. The term “Holy Spirit” is itself not mentioned, but the “Power of the Most High” denotes the Divine—the Spirit or possibly the Logos—in this instance, since it refers to the apparently synonymous parallel phrases of the gospel story.⁴⁶ Mary is the transformative locus or the supplier of human nature; God is still emphatically the agent.

None of these versions focuses on what Mary contributes. And this is in line with the traditional Aristotelean doctrine of reproduction: “What happens is what one would expect to happen. The male provides the ‘form’ and the ‘principle of the movement,’ the female provides the body, in other words, the material.”⁴⁷ The father sows the seed into the moist but completely passive ground of the female womb, the unformed material. In the same way, Mary is the divinely chosen place where the incarnation happens. A certain amount of divinity may wear off onto her womb, but the main point is that the offspring has a divine rather than human origin. The womb symbolizes incarnation metonymically. Mary directs our gaze to what Christ is. Virginity points to the Spirit.

But why does Gabriel hem and haw in Romanos’s On the Annunciation? The hymn deals with the angelic encounter in a much more detailed way than the Gospel of Luke. Nonetheless, there is simply no Holy Spirit in the text. There is only a shy angel. Nothing hints in the direction of the Power of the Most High. The angel cannot explain by pointing toward the Spirit, for the Spirit is not part of the story. One could assume that Gabriel somehow came to represent the Spirit in the drama, but there is nothing to encourage such an interpretation either; after all, he explicitly claims that he is not worthy, he is “not encouraged to go in between like that.”⁴⁸ The Holy Spirit could hardly be discouraged by God. The Annunciation is thus displayed as an encounter where the Holy Spirit or the Power of the Most High does not play a role. By obscuring the Spirit, the poet gives the couple, Mary and Gabriel, full attention.

It has sometimes been assumed that Romanos, like many fifth-century authors, generally exalted a womb, a sign, a Christological virginity.⁴⁹ But On the Annunciation stages the new feast and its story as utterly Marian. The poet was fond of the language of an unsown soil. Yet his insistence on the lack of any sower yields prominence to this miraculous soil. The absence of the Spirit indicates a fertile virginity, for Mary herself fills every stanza and is omnipresent in the drama.

Exhortations to Acclaim the Virgin

As On the Annunciation opens, the listeners are encouraged to accompany the angel to the Virgin Mary, to see and salute her as a delightful and beautiful unwedded bride. The prelude and the first stanza of a Romanos hymn often function as emblems or reliefs set apart from, and even in contrast to, the narrative part, layering the hymn with an almost multidimensional structure.⁵⁰ The prelude—usually in the form of prayer or praise—mimics or reflects the liturgical situation, while stanza 1 exhorts the listener, as it were, to enter onto the imaginary stage. In the first stanza of On the Annunciation the listeners approach the maiden, and while the song draws the Virgin into the audience’s attention, it also draws the audience into the drama. The stanza introduces the Virgin of veneration as an object of the congregation’s longings. The listeners are to follow in the footsteps of the angel:

Come, let us follow the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary

and greet her as Mother and Nurse of our life;

for it is fitting not only for the general to greet the empress,

but even for the lowly is it possible to see and salute her,

she whom all peoples [γενεαί] call blessed [μακαρίζουσαι] as Mother of God and shout:

—Hail, inviolate one, hail, maiden divinely called,

hail, sublime one, hail, delightful, hail, fair one,

hail, beautiful, hail, unsown one, hail, unspoiled,

hail, mother without man,

hail, unwedded bride [νύμφη ἀνύμφευτε]! (XXXVI 1)

In Mary’s New Testament hymn, the Magnificat, the poor Virgin Mary sings: “he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations [γενεαί] will call me blessed [μακαριοῦσιν]; for the Mighty One has done great things for me” (Luke 1:48–49). My translation of line 5 does not show the similarity as well as the Greek does, but what Romanos’s hymn suggests is clear: In this moment Mary’s own prophecy is fulfilled. The lowly maiden has turned into an empress. Even the lowly people get to salute her. The people’s acclamation for benefactors, politicians, bishops, or rulers was a commonplace in early Byzantine society. For a while here the Virgin is put in the empress’s place as “all peoples” acclaim her.

She stands at the center of everyone’s attention; all the people and all the peoples gather around this exalted woman. In front stands the general, Gabriel. Byzantine empresses who were regents for minors would usually choose to marry a general,⁵¹ so already in the first stanza one may glimpse vague nuptial allusions, or, at least, the scene is set for what is to come.

From the very beginning the singer blurs the distinction between text and audience, between the Mary of the text and the Mary of the audience’s religious lives. She is brought, as it were, out of the text and into historical imagination. The listeners are invited to enter into the story with their own bodies and participate in the drama, to see and imagine, and to call out to her. As a people used to Marian chairetismoi, that is repeated “hail thee”s, which had become a trope in liturgical hymns or homilies by Romanos’s time, they now engage in such salutations with the whole world. What readers are invited to see in stanza 1 is simultaneously a queen of beauty, a nursing mother, and fertile ground, a fair maiden and a bride—an attractive bride who is not a bride. This storm of imagery serves to exalt her, giving her an abundance of faces, and thus to awaken the audience’s desire to see and hear more. The refrain concludes: She is an unmarried bride. Such a conclusion leaves the tension unresolved.

The words of the refrain explicitly introduce the notion of wedding and sexuality into the hymn. Interestingly, two epithalamium fragments by Sappho have a wording reminiscent of the On the Annunciation and Akathistos refrains:

Hail, bride [χαῖρε, νύμφα]! Hail, most honored groom!

May you rejoice, bride [†χαίροις ἀ νύμφα†], and may the groom rejoice.⁵²

A millennium separates Sappho and Romanos, but the fact that chaire numpha seems to have been used—and possibly reused—in a ritual nuptial setting suggests that the Mariological use of the phrase chaire numphē may allude to traditions concerning ritual entering into the chamber (Gr. thalamos, which explains the word “epithalamion”), evoking a potent moment on the threshold.⁵³ Late ancient marriages also celebrated the groom’s ritualized entrance into the bridal chamber. The rite marked a moment of transformation in more than the simple anatomic sense; the girl was now leaving the symbolic world of maidenhood for the symbolic world of womanhood.⁵⁴ By adding the word anumpheute (unwedded), Romanos captures the liminal moment between the wedded and the unwedded state.

The Akathistos uses the same refrain as On the Annunciation. Which hymn relies on which, of course depends upon the dating of the Akathistos. In any case, reuse of older material is more of a rule than an exception in Byzantine ritual poetry; the challenge for the poet is to give old material a new twist. Romanos employs the refrain to freeze Mary in an appealing and slightly ambiguous posture, not yet married.

In the context of the traditional Annunciation story, the words numphē anumpheute can be taken to mean that Mary is the bride of God as opposed to the bride of a man. In the context of this stanza, however, the poet is praising the beauty of this maiden, and he makes the congregation exclaim to her: “hail, unwedded bride!” The text does not suggest that she is the bride of Christ. Here is a young maiden yet to be had. According to the text, the congregation—whose gaze I take the text here to construe as male—approaches her with longing: longing to see and salute the exalted maiden. Attempting to establish a relationship of desire on the part of the audience toward the Virgin is a strategy almost absent from the Akathistos. The chairetismoi of Romanos, on the other hand, salute her not as the finest of all ascetics nor the most pious of all women, but as a paradoxically august and divinely desirable girl: Although without a man, she is Mother to all; although a mother, she is inviolate and incorrupt; and as an unmarried virgin, she is appealing to all. Although a bride, she is unmarried. Romanos never indicates that Mary should be particularly pious in any ascetic sense.

The Encounter with the Virgin

Once the narrative part of the hymn starts, Mary is set in humble surroundings and to her comes the fiery archangel. He, in whose footsteps the reader is invited to follow, “hastened to show himself to the virgin,” and he “entered the honorable maiden’s covering” and greeted her.⁵⁵ While the English word “greeting” is rather reserved, the Greek word aspasmos usually involves a more physical embrace or even a kiss. The meaning “erotic embrace” is attested in post-Byzantine Greek.⁵⁶ Romanos uses the word several times in the hymn. It refers to Gabriel’s greeting phrase “Hail,” but at the same time it suggests that their encounter amounts to more than verbal interaction. Gabriel later argues that God has given him one task, the greeting or the kiss (aspasmos), but he is not in charge of the child.⁵⁷ The fact of the matter is that when a male enters a virginal chamber, the act carries nuptial connotations.