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