Kontakion

Wherever the troparion of the day is sung, its kontakion follows close behind: after the troparia at the Little Entrance of the Divine Liturgy, at the Hours, and at Matins, where it keeps its historic seat after the sixth ode of the canon. The two hymns work as a pair, and often as a stereoscope — two slightly different views that together give one depth.

Take the Nativity. The troparion preaches illumination: the star, the Magi, the Sun of Righteousness. The kontakion, composed by St. Romanos, simply sets the scene and lets the paradoxes ring: "Today the Virgin gives birth to the Transcendent One, and the earth offers a cave to the Unapproachable One! Angels with shepherds glorify Him. The wise men journey with a star, since for our sake the Pre-Eternal God was born as a young Child." Every clause is a collision — a virgin giving birth, the earth housing the Unapproachable, eternity in infancy — and the collisions are the method: the kontakion teaches by wonder.

The kontakion was not born a single stanza. In its classic form it was a full sung sermon: an opening stanza — the prooimion, which is all we usually sing today — followed by eighteen to twenty-four longer stanzas called oikoi ("houses"), their initial letters often spelling an acrostic, each ending in a refrain the whole congregation could thunder back. Chanted after the Scripture readings, it did everything a homily does — narrated, argued, gave the biblical characters speeches to speak — but did it as poetry that ordinary people would still be humming at home.

Its greatest master was St. Romanos the Melodist (commemorated October 1), a deacon from Emesa in Syria who came to Constantinople around the turn of the sixth century. The tradition tells that he could neither read nor sing well, and was humiliated at a vigil for it; that night, as he prayed in grief, the Theotokos appeared to him, handed him a scroll, and commanded him to eat it — the prophet Ezekiel's own gesture (Ezekiel 3:1-3) — and at the Nativity service that followed he mounted the ambo and sang "Today the Virgin" for the first time. However the gift came, the work remains: tradition credits him with more than a thousand kontakia, and the several dozen that survive under his name stand among the summits of Christian poetry.

The name is usually explained from the Greek word for the little rod around which a scroll was rolled — the hymn as a whole scroll's worth of preaching. From about the eighth century the great sung sermon was gradually displaced at Matins by a newer form, the canon, and the kontakion contracted to what we now have: the prooimion alone, plus — in monastic use and wherever the canon is read in full — the first oikos after the sixth ode.

Two survivals keep the old scale in view. The Akathist Hymn to the Theotokos is a complete hymn of the kontakion family still sung entire, refrains and all — the one place a congregation today can experience something like what Romanos's hearers knew. And some single stanzas have won a liturgical life all their own: the kontakion of Pascha, or the kontakion sung at every Orthodox funeral and memorial, asking Christ to give rest to His servant with the saints, where there is neither sickness, nor sorrow, nor sighing, but life everlasting. These are no longer sermons; they are distillations — proof that when the Church shortened the form, she kept the strongest drop.