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9 Dialogue and Deliberation: The Sensory Self in the Hymns of Romanos the Melodist Georgia Frank The quest for a Christian self might typically begin and end in the realm of biographical works. Jesus of the gospels provided a paradigm that would be refracted through martyrs’ accounts, legends of the apostles, and, eventually, saints’ lives, including those of ascetics.∞ Beyond biography, however, there was another apparatus by which to construct a Christian self: the retelling of stories from the Bible. New versions of old stories could tie up Scripture’s ‘‘loose ends’’ or fill nagging ‘‘gaps.’’≤ Yet biblical expansions also had the potential to develop characters that might, in the words of philosopher Charles Taylor, ‘‘bring to the fore a kind of presence to oneself.’’≥ An important figure in this development was the poet Romanos the Melodist (ca. 485–ca. 560), best known for his versified homilies focused on individual episodes or characters from the Bible. With centrifugal license, Romanos retold familiar biblical episodes, weaving garlands of biblical types.∂ Another technique of biblical expansion was to give obscure or silent characters new voice by paying scrupulous attention to their sense perceptions. That sensory interiority does not necessarily mean a superhuman sensory acuity. Romanos is more interested in sensory awareness than in visionary powers or clairvoyance. Romanos’s characters demonstrate their ability to scrutinize their perceptions, question what they perceive, and ask what it means, often through dialogue with themselves or with others. How a self emerges from Romanos’s rhetoric of sense perception is the central concern of this essay. To illustrate this interplay between sensory perceptions and the interior deliberations they elicited, I focus on five characters: Adam and Eve, the sinful woman who washes Jesus’ feet with her tears and 164 Georgia Frank anoints them, and Hades and Satan. As I shall argue, the formation of self emerges from the transformation of perception these characters undergo. More precisely, that transformation requires a ‘‘reeducation of the senses,’’ a phrase taken from Leigh Schmidt’s study of hearing in the Enlightenment. In Hearing Things, Schmidt demonstrates how natural philosophy, politics, medicine , science, and theology all shared a ‘‘learned fascination with acoustics.’’∑ To take but one example, the invention of the stethoscope not only augmented hearing but also refined it. The enhancement of hearing, however, also coincided with greater suspicion of other voices, namely the miraculous, marvelous , and revelatory.∏ As Schmidt put it, ‘‘The Enlightenment changed the senses’’; it ‘‘dulled and sharpened simultaneously.’’π It was more a matter of reeducating perception than of privileging any single sense. What Schmidt calls ‘‘reeducating perception’’∫ is not necessarily dependent on devices, however. The ritualized dialogue of Romanos’s metrical sermons provided a patterned and habitual process of calling subjects into existence through right use of the senses. As I shall argue, his chanted sermons, or kontakia, served as devices with which to augment and refine perception. Speci fically, the dialogue, that clash and exchange of views, sharpened the imagined senses of the characters and thereby those of the audience. Before we turn to those characters, however, it is important to recall the liturgical setting for these chanted sermons. The Kontakia of Romanos the Melodist Romanos the Melodist was born around 485 c.e. in the Syrian city of Emesa.Ω After serving as deacon in Beirut, he moved to Constantinople during the reign of Anastasius I (491–518), where he established himself as a significant composer of versified homilies. He remained active there until about 551. Kontakion, from the Greek word kontos, the rod that held parchment scrolls read aloud during the liturgy, refers to a biblical tale typically retold in metrical verse.∞≠ It is unlikely that kontakia were staged dramas, since all the voices were performed by a single soloist, who typically sang a short prelude, followed by nearly two dozen stanzas of identical meter. Additional voices would have come from the congregation, who probably joined the soloist in singing the same one-line refrain that punctuated every stanza.∞∞ By the sixth century, the stories and characters of the Bible were settled. It remained the homilist’s task to interpret them for the public.∞≤ Romanos achieved dramatic results by ‘‘do[ing] the Gospels in di√erent voices.’’∞≥ His hymns retell the major events of Christ’s life and that of the Virgin Mary, as well as stories of Old Testament characters encountered in lectionary readings. Some sixty kontakia composed by Romanos survive, although far more are ascribed to him...

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