The Inauguration Anthem of Hagia Sophia Again

Abstract

On Christmas Day, 1988, I received from Marc Deprez the draft of an article entitled Noël et Hanoucah, which threw some further light on the imagery used in the kontakion translated by me in BMGS 12. On p.146 I referred to ‘a verbal reminiscence of the Feast of Booths’, where the poet writes: In celebrating the Word's divine sojourn in the Body may we, the children of his Church, be thatched with luminous virtues worthy of his grace, and may we prove, by divine illumination, a worthy dwelling-place of knowledge … But I did not know why the Feast of Booths was especially relevant to the occasion of the kontakion, which was Christmas Day. It is common knowledge that Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of Light (Josephus, Antiquities xii 7, 7), coincides with Christmas on 25 Kislev (December), the winter solstice, a date justified by the commentators on the Talmud by reference to the twenty-fifth word in the Torah, which signifies ‘light’. What I had not realized is that Hanukkah is called ‘a Feast of Tabernacles in the month Kislev’ (2 Maccabees 1:9, as translated in the New English Bible; cf. ibid., 10:6, where Hanukkah is described as being celebrated in the manner of the Feast of Tabernacles or Booths). The fifty days between the two Feasts of Booths, Sukkot and Hanukkah, constituted at the same time the first and the eighth or last cycle in the liturgical year; the Christian Church adopted this same pattern, calling the first feast ‘Christ the King’ and the last ‘Christmas', so that the time between was ‘Advent’, which signified both Christ's coming to the earth as a baby and his second coming. The Church Fathers were aware of this parallelism between the Jewish and the Christian liturgies: Gregory of Nyssa, in the Christmas sermon echoed in our kontakion (see p.147 of my article, with reference), says ‘We celebrate today the mystery of the real construction of the Booths’. The association of Booths and Light at Hanukkah can be discerned in the Christian image of the Light of the World being born as a baby in a dark cave. It suggested to the poet the paradox SHADE = LIGHT, which he exploits in the passage quoted above (thatched with luminous virtues). I am grateful to Marc Deprez for making me aware of these connections. The Jewish background is further documented in E. Schiirer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B. C.- A.D. 135), vol.l, revised and edited by G. Vermes and F. Millar (Edinburgh 1973) 163 note 65. Is it possible that this is how Christ's birth came to be situated, by western artists, in a thatched shed?