Revisiting the Daughters of the Covenant: Women’s Choirs and Sacred Song in Ancient Syriac Christianity†
Susan A.
Harvey
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2005
Vol. 8, No. 2
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https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv8n2harvey
Susan Ashbrook Harvey
Revisiting the Daughters of the Covenant: Women’s Choirs and Sacred Song in Ancient Syriac Christianity†
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol8/HV8N2Harvey.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute,
vol 8
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Syriac Studies
Bnay and Bnat Qyama
Sons and Daughters of the Covenant
choirs
madrashe
Ephrem Syrus
Jacob of Serug
women
teaching
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The Daughters of the Covenant held a
distinctive office in Syriac Christianity, notable (and
possibly unique) for its public ministry of sacred music
performed for liturgical purposes in civic churches. Syriac
tradition ascribed the establishment of these choirs of
consecrated virgins to Ephrem Syrus. Jacob of
Serug’s Homily on St. Ephrem presents these
choirs as modeling soteriological as well as eschatological
significance for the larger church community. This paper
examines the context and content of what these choirs sang, in
order to assess what authority this ministry carried for the
ancient Syriac churches, and to suggest possible social
implications.
[1] Among
modern scholars, one of the best known characteristics of
ancient Syriac Christianity is the institution of the Sons and
Daughters of the Covenant, the Bnay and Bnat
Qyama. Apparently originating in the third century CE, the
office was characterized by vows of celibacy, voluntary
poverty, and service to the local priest or
bishop. Members were supposed to live separately with
others of the same office, or with their families. The office
appears to have been wide-spread in Syriac-speaking territories
both east and west by the fourth century.
G. Nedungatt, “The Covenanters of the Early
Syriac-Speaking Church,” OCP 39
(1973), 191-215, 419-44. At their earliest, the
Daughters of the Covenant may be similar to consecrated virgins
(the subintroductae, or canonicae) elsewhere
in the Roman Empire, prior to the emergence of monasticism as
an institution. For these, see Susanna Elm,
‘Virgins of God’: the Making of Asceticism in
Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
The early fourth
century Acts of the Edessan Martyrs Shmona and Guria
note that Daughters of the Covenant were being specially
targeted, along with priests and deacons, for public torture
and execution during the Diocletianic persecution, attesting
their public prominence.
Shmona and Guria, sec. 1, sec. 70; F. C. Burkitt
(ed. and trans.), Euphemia and the Goth with the Acts of
the Martyrdom of the Confessors of Edessa (London:
Williams and Norgate, 1913).
The Acts of the Persian
Martyrs shortly thereafter recall similar treatment of
Daughters of the Covenant during the persecutions of Shapur
II.
E.g., Martha the daughter of Posi; Tarbo and her
maidservant; Thekla, Danaq, Taton, Mama, Mezakhya and Anna, of
Karka d-Beth Slokh; Abyat, Hathay, and Mezakhya, from Beth
Garmay; Thekla, Mary, Martha, and Emmi, of
Bekhashaz. All these are identified by name as Daughters
of the Covenant, but more are indicated by the texts. See
the episodes collected in Sebastian P. Brock and Susan Ashbrook
Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), 63-82.
Among the first group of Demonstrations written by
Aphrahat the Persian Sage in 337 is the renowned
Demonstration 6, on the Members of the
Covenant.
Aphrahat, Dem. 6, D. I. Parisot (ed.),
Aphraatis sapientis persae demonstrationes, in PS 1,
R. Graffin (ed.) (Paris, 1894), 241-311; J. Gwynn (trans.)
in Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers
13: 362-75.
The treatise is a lengthy exhortation
addressed particularly to the men of that group on the
importance of maintaining their vows of celibacy, and on the
eschatological significance of those vows. In the fifth
century, evidence increases with references from canonical
legislation, historical chronicles, homiletic and
hagiographical literature all contributing to form a picture of
a church office of men and women actively engaged in civic
ecclesiastical activity, in terms that rendered it quite
distinct from the contemporaneously developing monastic
movement. Indeed, monasticism did not replace this office.
References continue certainly until the tenth century and more
rarely into the middle ages.
S. A. Harvey, “Women’s Service in
Ancient Syriac Christianity,” in Mother, Nun,
Deaconess: Images of Women According to Eastern Canon Law,
Eva Synek (ed.), Kanon 16 (Egling, 2000): 226-41.
[2] On
closer examination, however, evidence for the office of
Covenanter is frustratingly thin. References may abound, but
they are often only that: passing mention that Members of the
Covenant were included in an incident. Most frustrating of all,
at least for the historian of women, is that the majority of
references to this office specifically refer to the
men—the Sons of the Covenant. These are the primary
addressees and concern of Aphrahat’s
Demonstration 6 in the fourth century; they are the
primary target of Rabbula’s canonical legislation in the
fifth century, and they are the most frequently mentioned in
historical texts. If we want to understand this office as
it was exercised by women, we have precious little with which
to work.
[3] Given
the elusive nature of the evidence, recent
scholarship—notably by Robert Murray, Sidney Griffith,
and Naomi Koltun-Fromm—has focused on understanding the
nature of the vow that underlay the office, and the perceived
meaning or role of the Members of the Covenant within the
larger congregation of Christian believers.
Robert Murray, “Circumcision of the Heart and
the Origins of the Qyama,” in After
Bardaisan: Studies on Continuity and Change in Syriac
Christianity in Honor of Professor Han J. W. Drijvers, G.
J. Reinink and A. C. Klugkist (ed.), Orientalia Lovaniensia
Analecta 89 (Leuven: Peeters, 1999), 201-11; Sidney H.
Griffith, “‘Singles’ in God’s
Service: Thoughts on the Ihidaye from the Works
of Aphrahat and Ephraem the Syrian,” The Harp 4
(1991), 145-59; idem, “Monks, ‘Singles’, and
the ‘Sons of the Covenant’: Reflections on
Syriac Ascetic Terminology,” in
Eulogema: Studies in Honor of Robert Taft, E.
Carr et al. (ed.), Studia Anselmiana 110/ Analecta
Liturgica 17 (Rome: Centre Studi S. Anselmo, 1993),
141-60; Naomi Koltun-Fromm, “Yokes of the Holy
Ones: The Embodiment of a Christian Vocation,”
Harvard Theological Review 94 (2001), 205-18.
From a different
vantage point, other scholars, including Joseph Amar, Kathleen
McVey, and myself, have drawn attention to an important but
little considered aspect of the work of the female members of
this office: that of the liturgical choirs of the
Daughters of the Covenant.
Joseph P. Amar, “A Metrical Homily on Holy
Mar Ephrem by Mar Jacob of Serug,” PO 47
(1995), 5-76; idem, The Syriac “Vita”
Tradition of Ephrem the Syrian (Ann Arbor: University
Microfilms, 1988); Kathleen McVey, Ephrem the
Syrian: Hymns (New York: Paulist Press, 1989),
pp. 28; eadem, “Ephrem the Kitharode and Proponent
of Women: Jacob’s Portrait of a Fourth-Century Churchman
for the Sixth Century Viewer,” (Forthcoming); S. A.
Harvey, “Women’s Service;” eadem,
“Spoken Words, Voiced Silence: Biblical Women in
Syriac Tradition,” Journal of Early Christian
Studies 9 (2001), 105-31.
For one thing we do know is that
Daughters of the Covenant were charged with the task of singing
psalms and various kinds of hymns in certain liturgical
celebrations of the civic churches. This practice
contrasted sharply, for example, with the normal pattern of
Greek and Latin civic churches to the west. These areas
permitted women’s singing in convent choirs, to be
sure. But with the possible exception of Ambrose’s
cathedral in Milan, women’s voices were excluded from
choral participation in civic liturgical celebration.
Or so we assume. Eusebius, HE 7.
30.10, cites women’s choirs as one of the reasons for
Paul of Samosata’s expulsion from Antioch, but the
problem was perhaps not the women’s choirs so much as
that the hymns they sang were in honor of Paul
himself. Cyril of Jerusalem, Procat. 14, exhorts
that women should keep absolutely silent in church; but he is
speaking about catechumens preparing to receive
baptism. It is not clear to me that the passage precludes
choirs (although scholars have assumed it does). Ambrose,
Explan. Ps. 1.9, mentions women’s singing
positively, directly taking issue with the Pauline admonition
that women must keep silent in church (1 Cor 14:34); he
advocates the singing of psalms as beneficial for all
people. Nonetheless, the references to women’s
choirs that we have, e.g., in the Cappadocian Fathers, are to
convent choirs of women monastics: consider Basil of
Caesarea, Letter 2, and Gregory of Nyssa, Life of
Macrina. See Johannes Quasten, “The Liturgical
Singing of Women in Christian Antiquity,” Catholic
Historical Review 27 (1941), 149-65; idem,
Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity,
Boniface Ramsey (trans.), (Washington: National
Association of Pastoral Musicians, 1983), 75-86. An
extremely useful collection of translations of the relevant
primary sources (Greek, Latin, and some Syriac) may be found in
James McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
In
other words, one of the most visibly concrete forms of public
ministry conducted by the Daughters of the Covenant was that of
sacred music, performed in the congregational gatherings of the
larger church community, male and female, ordained and lay. In
this study, I would like to consider what we know about this
musical ministry of the Daughters of the Covenant, and what the
implications of that ministry may have been for the public
place of women in late antique Syriac Christianity.
Singing Women
[4] The
first explicit reference we have for the liturgical singing of
the Daughters of the Covenant comes in the fifth century
Rabbula Canons.
“The Rules of Rabbula for the Clergy and the
Qeiama,” Arthur Vööbus (ed. and trans.),
Syriac and Arabic Documents Regarding Legislation Relative
to Syrian Asceticism, PETSE 11 (Stockholm: ETSE,
1960), 34-50.
Canon 20 of this collection assigns the
Daughters of the Covenant the mandatory task of singing the
Psalms and especially the doctrinal hymns (madrashe)
of the church. Further, canon 27 requires the Daughters of
the Covenant to observe the worship services of the church,
including the daily offices, together with the other clergy and
the Sons of the Covenant. Other canons of this collection
prohibit the clergy and Sons of the Covenant from requiring
non-religious services of the Daughters of the Covenant (e.g.,
housekeeping or weaving), and restrict the social and economic
activities available to these women. Canons 12, 15, and 19
call for village and town churches to provide the economic
support necessary for poor Sons and Daughters of the Covenant,
thereby safeguarding their liturgical duties on behalf of the
church community.
[5] It is
interesting to note that the liturgical role assigned to the
Daughters of the Covenant, of psalmody and singing the
madrashe, granted these women a more central function
in the ritual life of the Christian community than that
accorded deaconesses or widows at this time. Church orders
and canon collections of the period severely limit the
devotional activities of widows, confining them largely to
prayer practices in their homes or in
churches. Deaconesses were accorded more socially
substantive duties. They were allowed to visit and
instruct female catechumens and women who were ill; they
assisted at the baptism of women, and were charged with keeping
order in the women’s sections of the churches during
liturgies. However, their ministry was clearly marked as
one by women, for women.
Sebastian P. Brock, “Deaconesses in
the Syriac Tradition,” in Woman in Prism and
Focus: Her Profile in Major World Religions and in
Christian Traditions, P. Vazheeparampil (ed.) (Rome: Mar
Thoma Yogam, 1996), 205-18; A. G. Martimort, Les
Diaconesses. Essai Historique, Bibliotheca
“Ephemerides Liturgicae” Subsidia (Rome, 1982),
esp. 21-54, 165-70; C. Robinson, The Ministry of
Deaconesses (London: Methuen, 1898), esp. 169-96; Harvey,
“Women’s Service.”
By contrast, the role of
civic liturgical singing placed the Daughters of the Covenant
in the midst of the entire worshipping community.
[6] Around
the same time the Rabbula Canons were collected, the Synod of
410 was convoked by Maruta of Maipherqat for the Church of the
East in Persia. Among the canons of this Synod, a number
address the importance of cultivating the order of the Members
of the Covenant particularly in the villages, to provide a pool
for clergy and to assist in the maintenance of a devotional
life for the churches in sparsely populated regions.
A. Vööbus, The Canons Ascribed
to Maruta of Maipherqat and Related Sources, CSCO 439-40,
Scr. Syr. 191-2 (Louvain, 1982).
Further canons clarified the ordering of women's ministry: "It
is the will of the general synod that the town churches shall
not be without the order [taxis] of sisters" (canon
41).
Trans. in Vööbus, Canons
Ascribed to Maruta, 72.
The Daughters of the Covenant were to be
under the direction of a superior chosen from among them and
made a deaconess for service at baptisms; under her
supervision, they were to be instructed in Scripture and in
psalmody. These canons appear to have been widely used
among western and eastern Syriac communities, and similar
instructions are found in the sixth century canons attributed
to John of Tella (Iohannan bar Qursos).
Canons of Iohannon bar Qursos, 27,
A. Vööbus (ed. and trans.), The Synodicon in the
West Syrian Tradition, CSCO 367/8, Scr. Syr. 161/2
(Louvain 1975).
[7] An
example of the situation envisioned here is the case recorded
by John of Ephesus in the sixth century, of the holy man Simeon
the Mountaineer.
John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern
Saints, ch. 16, E. W. Brooks (ed. and trans.), PO
17 (Paris 1923), 229-47. The incident is discussed in S.
A. Harvey, Asceticism and Society in Crisis. John of
Ephesus and the 'Lives of the Eastern Saints'
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 95ff.
Wandering the eastern borders
between Roman and Persian territory as a recluse, Simeon
stumbled on a remote, widely scattered semi-nomadic community
that had no apparent Christian presence. Immediately
Simeon set about evangelizing and baptizing the villagers,
building a church, and establishing a canonically governed
ecclesiastical life for the people. One of his first tasks was
to round up the children, lock them inside the church (under
the pretense of giving them special gifts!) and tonsure them as
Sons and Daughters of the Covenant. When some families
protested, their children were struck dead in divine
punishment. But those who remained in their new office,
Simeon instructed in a special school in scripture and
psalmody, and "thenceforward loud choirs were to be heard at
the service." As the years went by, these children grew to
become "readers and Daughters of the Covenant, and they were
themselves teaching others also." Thus Simeon did not fear
his old age and approaching death when the time came, for
through these Members of the Covenant the Christian life of the
villagers would continue in proper order.
John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern
Saints, ch. 16, PO 17: 246f.
[8] It is
often the case, however, that Syriac writers refer to virgins
singing psalms or hymns without explicitly identifying them as
Daughters of the Covenant. Whether this is due to a
pragmatic flexibility of terminology, or to diversity of
ecclesiastical practice—or simply to a looser mode of
institutionalization than characterizes later practice—is
unclear. Scholars have tended to read all references to
consecrated virgins as indicating Daughters of the
Covenant; perhaps the terms could be inclusive of all
“virgins” who might participate, including the
young unmarried girls who were not necessarily dedicated to
life-long celibacy. In his hymns, Ephrem Syrus (d. 373)
occasionally refers to choirs of women, apparently
consecrated virgins, singing his compositions. For
example, in Hymns on Nativity 4:
May the chant of chaste women please You, my Lord,
May the chant of the chaste women dispose You, my Lord,
To keep their bodies in chastity.
Ephrem, Hymns on Nativity 4.
62b-63; K. McVey (trans.), Ephrem: Hymns, 93.
Similar references are sprinkled throughout subsequent
Syriac hymnography.
Sebastian P. Brock, Bride of
Light: Hymns on Mary from the Syriac Churches
(Kottayam, Kerala: SEERI, 1994), 11. 1, p. 42; 9. 1,
p. 38; Jacob of Serugh, Select Festal Homilies, Thomas
Kollamparampil (trans.) (Rome: CIIS, 1997), Hom. Nat. 3.27-8,
353; trans. pp. 112, 127.
In a homily on the Visitation of Mary to
Elizabeth, Jacob of Serug (d. 521) presents Mary exhorting a
women’s choir to song:
Let all the multitude of virgins praise Him with
wonder,
Because the great savior shines forth from them to the whole
world.
Let the voice of the young women be lifted up in
praise,
Because by one of them, behold, hope is brought to the
world.
Jacob of Serug, On the Mother of
God, Mary Hansbury (trans.) (Crestwood, NY: St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998), Homily 3, at p. 83.
[9] Ephrem
and Jacob are in fact the most important sources for our
understanding of the Daughters of the Covenant as liturgical
singers. Perhaps the most cautious reading would be to see
a certain melding of traditions that becomes settled in the
sixth century. In the passage I just quoted, Jacob
purports to speak in the voice of the Virgin Mary as she
addresses her cousin Elizabeth. Her words summon forth the
women’s choirs who would come to sing the hymns assigned
by the canonical sources. It is from Jacob that we have
our most extensive description of these choirs, which he does
not name as Daughters of the Covenant. In his panegyric homily
in commemoration of Ephrem,
Amar, “Metrical
Homily.” Jacob claims Ephrem founded these choirs
because the heretics, especially the Bardaisanites, had been
successful at spreading their teachings through hymns. As
to why Ephrem chose women’s choirs for this task, Jacob
does not say. In the cultural coding of the ancient
Mediterranean world, however, the female virgin body was the
premier image for perfection, purity, and
intactness. Perhaps the female virgin could thus most
effectively image the presentation of true doctrine precisely
as teaching that was perfect, pure, and intact from any
external (unholy) penetration. Heresy was often
likened to harlotry by early Christian writers; see, e.g.,
Virginia Burrus, “The Heretical Woman as Symbol in
Alexander, Athanasius, Epiphanius, and Jerome,”
Harvard Theological Review 84 (1991),
229-48. The images of Wisdom and Folly from Proverbs 8-9
provide a Biblical background for such gendered imagery.
Jacob claims that Ephrem himself
had founded the choirs of consecrated virgins. Jacob defends
the tradition, boldly citing sacramental authority for the
justification of women’s choirs in the church: by
one baptism are men and women cleansed, he declares, and from
one eucharist do they receive. Christ offers one salvation for
all people, male and female, therefore all are free to sing
God's praise. Jacob further argues from Eve-Mary typology,
that where Eve had closed the mouths of women in shame, Mary
had opened them in glory.
[10]
According to Jacob, Ephrem had founded these choirs explicitly
to instruct the congregation of Edessa in right doctrine.
Roughly contemporary with Jacob's discussion of Ephrem, the
Syriac Vita Ephraemi (6th century)
identified these women's choirs specifically as composed of the
Daughters of the Covenant, whom Ephrem convened for the morning
and evening services in the church at Edessa and at the
memorial services of saints and martyrs.
Amar, The Syriac "Vita" Tradition of
Ephrem the Syrian, 158f. (Syriac), 298f. (trans.).
Both
depictions are notable for their emphasis on the instructional
role these choirs played in educating the larger Christian
community in matters of orthodoxy and heresy. Jacob, in
fact, frankly names the women in these choirs
malpanyatha, teachers.
Amar, “Metrical Homily,” v. 42,
pp. 34-5. The passage is quoted and discussed further
below.
The term Jacob uses is
the feminine form of malpana (masc. Teacher), one of
the most revered titles in Syriac tradition, indicating not
only the teaching of the Syriac language, but further, its
proper (doctrinal) understanding.
Teaching, especially of sacred doctrine, is
in fact a primary theme of Jacob’s Homily on Ephrem as a
whole: Amar, “Metrical Homily,” p. 19. As
Jesse Margoliouth points out, malpana was also a
term used to designate the great doctrinal figures of Syriac
tradition, such as Ephrem and Jacob. J. Payne Smith (Mrs.
Margoliouth), A Compendius Syriac
Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903; repr.
1976), 278. Compare, also, the use of the term in A.
Vööbus (ed. and trans.), The Statutes of the
School of Nisibis, PETSE 12 (Stockholm: ESTE, 1962).
Its application to women,
especially with respect to religious instruction, is
startling. According to the Vita, Ephrem trained
the Daughters of the Covenant to sing a variety of
hymnography: doctrinal hymns (madrashe),
antiphons ('ounyatha), and other kinds of songs
(seblatha and qinyatha). To these
melodic forms, the Vita continues,
[Ephrem set words] with subtle connotation and spiritual
understanding concerning the birth and baptism and fasting
and the entire plan of Christ: the passion and
resurrection and ascension and concerning the martyrs. ...
[W]ho would not be astounded nor filled with fervent faith to
see the athlete of Christ [Ephrem] amid the ranks of the
Daughters of the Covenant, chanting songs, metrical hymns,
and melodies!
Amar, The Syriac "Vita" Tradition of
Ephrem, 158f. (Syriac), 298f. (trans.).
[11]
According to the Vita Ephraemi, then, the Daughters of
the Covenant were trained to sing on matters explicating the
entire salvation drama, as well as the devotional life of
Christians, and about the saints—almost the exact list of
topics expressly forbidden for widows to teach about in the
Syriac Didascalia Apostolorum!
Syriac Didascalia Apostolorum, Ch.
15; A. Vööbus (ed. and trans.), The Didascalia
Apostolorum in Syriac, Vol. 1, CSCO 401-2, Scr. Syr.
175-6, and Vol. 2, CSCO 407-8, Scr. Syr. 179-80 (Louvain,
1979).
But thus, by
the sixth century, the Syriac practice of women’s choirs
and the musical ministry of the Daughters of the Covenant had
received the unequivocal authority of Ephrem as founding
father.
[12] The
musical ministry of the Daughters of the Covenant was further
confirmed at the East Syriac Synod of Mar George I in 676,
where Canon 9 identifies the most important work of these women
as the chanting of the psalms at the offices of the church, as
well as the singing of hymns in funeral processions (but not at
the cemetery), at the memorial services for the dead, and at
vigil services.
As discussed in Martimort, Les
Diaconesses, 54. The text is ed. and trans. in J. B.
Chabot, Synodicon Orientale ou Recueil de Synodes
Nestoriens (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1902), 221-2
(Syr.), 486 (Fr.).
After the seventh century, it becomes
increasingly difficult to distinguish between the offices of
deaconess and Daughter of the Covenant, whose roles and
functions seem eventually combined into a skeleton of their
earlier duties. In the ninth century, ps-George of Arbela
states (rather grumpily) that congregations must endure
women’s choirs because the women represent the Egyptians
and Babylonians, under whose domination the Israelites were
kept enslaved: the faithful must not forget the role of
humiliation in the divine dispensation.
As cited by Juan Mateos,
Lelya-Sapra: Essai d’interpretation des matines
chaldeennes (Rome: Pont. Institutum Orientalium
Studiorum, 1959) at p. 408. Is there here a pun on bart
qyama for bart qaina, alluding to the story from
the Syriac Cave of Treasures, Ch. 11-12, where the
Daughters of Cain seduced the Sons of God with their
singing? Su-Min Ri (ed. and trans.), La Caverne des
Trésors les deux recensions syriaques, CSCO 486-7,
Scr. Syr. 207-8 (Louvain, 1987). The episode is especially
emphasized in the East Syriac recension. I am indebted to
Serge Ruzer for this suggestion.
In the Middle
Ages, the term Daughter of the Covenant appears to have become
synonymous with "nun".
E.g., canon 19 in the ninth century
collection of Isho' bar Nun; Vööbus (trans.),
The Canons Ascribed to Maruta, 192.
However, there is a
poignancy in the witness offered by one late manuscript giving
a service of ordination for deaconesses in which the terms
"deaconess" and "chantress" are used
interchangably.
Brock, “Deaconesses,” 213-6,
where he provides a translation of the service.
Perhaps we might see this as a lingering
memory of the importance of the choirs of the Daughters of the
Covenant in the liturgical life of the larger church
community—choirs whose function was not simply to sing
the responses (as in the Testament of Our Lord, 40),
nor only to chant the Psalms, but further, to instruct the
congregation through hymnography in the substance and form of
right belief.
Teaching Women
[13] What
did the Daughters of the Covenant sing? Elsewhere, I have been
trying to address this question.
Harvey, “Spoken Words, Voiced
Silence;” eadem, “On Mary’s
Voice: Gendered Words in Syriac Marian Tradition,”
in The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender,
Asceticism, and Historiography, Patricia Cox Miller and
Dale Martin (ed.) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005),
pp. 63-86.
It is, I think, crucial to
consider the types and forms of hymnography sung by these
choirs in liturgical settings, for the civic churches.
Milos Velimirovic, “Christian Chant in
Syria, Armenia, Egypt, and Ethiopia,” New Oxford
History of Music, Vol. 2: The Early Middle Ages
to 1300, Richard Crocker and David Hiley (ed.)
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 3-9;
McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature, 92-5;
Heinrich Husmann, “Syrian Church Music,” in New
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Stanley Sadie
(ed.)(London & Washington DC: Grove's Dictionary of Music,
1980), Vol. 18: 472-81.
I sketch the issues in summary
fashion here, but I hope their significance will be clear, in
light of the kind of evidence we have just been
considering. Syriac Christianity has always placed
enormous weight on the instructional role of the
liturgy—on the liturgy as the primary teaching context of
the church.
E.g., Kathleen McVey, “Were the
Earliest Madrase Songs or Recitations?”,
After Bardaisan, Reinink and Klugkist (ed.),
185-99; H. J. W. Drijvers, “Solomon as Teacher:
Early Syriac Didactic Poetry,” in IV Symposium
Syriacum 1984, H. J. W. Drijvers, R. Lavenant, C.
Molenberg, and G. J. Reinink (ed.). Orientalia Christiana
Analecta 229 (Rome 1987), 123-34.
Two areas of the liturgy were explicitly
utilized for this purpose: homilies (mimre) and
hymns (madrashe). The madrashe were the
most important form of hymn used for this purpose, but not the
only one; and madrashe themselves were of varied
kinds. One of the favorite types of teaching employed by
Syriac homilists and hymn writers was the presentation of
biblical stories in imaginatively elaborated form, starting
from the base of a biblical text and re-telling the story
through the eyes—and especially through the imagined
words—of its characters.
Detailed discussion in Harvey, “Spoken
Words, Voiced Silence.”
The rhetorical technique of
imagined speech, sometimes in the form of soliloquies and
sometimes in dialogue with other biblical characters, was an
often used and brilliantly engaged aspect of Syriac homiletic
and hymnographic instruction. Among the vast corpus of
such texts surviving to us (by Ephrem, Jacob of Serug, Narsai,
and the whole host of anonymous authors and composers), a
sizeable portion present the stories of biblical
women: Sarah the wife of Abraham, Tamar, Potiphar’s
Wife, the Widow of Sarepta, the Virgin Mary, the Sinful Woman
who anointed the feet of Christ with her tears (in Syriac
tradition, not to be confused with Mary Magdalene). In the
hands of Syriac writers, this meant composing long and
sometimes elaborate speeches and dialogues for female
characters whom the Bible made important, but who in their
scriptural texts were silent or barely granted brief
comments. Major theological themes were addressed through
this means, as well as matters of social and religious
tension.
Important new work is now being done
particularly on Greek homiletics and the reception by
congregations, that raises helpful questions for the Syriac
material. See, e.g., Mary Cunningham and Pauline Allen,
eds., Preacher and Audience: Studies in Early
Christian and Byzantine Homiletics (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1998).
[14]
These different literary forms were performed in liturgical
settings in a variety of ways, each carrying different ritual
significance. The madrashe—such as
Ephrem’s Hymns on the Nativity, in which
Mary’s voice is a frequent and extensive feature of the
hymns—were often sung by women’s choirs. Some
madrashe were stanzaic with a refrain; the male leader
(Ephrem) may have sung the stanzas, and the women’s
choirs the refrain, or the choirs may have sung the stanzas and
the congregation the refrain. Sogyatha, dialogue
hymns, were sung antiphonally, apparently by both male and
female choirs. These often presented a biblical story
through an imagined dialogic exchange between the characters
(Sarah and Abraham, Mary and the Archangel Gabriel or Joseph,
the Sinful Woman and Satan). In these cases, the
woman’s voice was sung by the women’s
choir. The verse homilies (mimre), by contrast,
would have been chanted by the male preacher. In the case
of Jacob of Serug’s homilies on Mary, for example, these
would include long passages of Mary’s imagined speech,
but presented through the intoned voice of the male
homilist. Certainly it is crucial to read and interpret
these texts with consideration of their literary forms and
constraints (meter, strophes, stanzas, responses; the
presentation of narrative, exegetical exposition, speech in
monologue or dialogue). Yet I would argue that it is equally
critical to consider the performative requirements of the
composer’s chosen form, and how performance would have
shaped presentation. What was said in an imagined
dialogue, in the retelling of a biblical story, in the
recalling of a saint’s holy life (as in Jacob’s
homily on Ephrem), was qualitatively changed by who said it,
from what narrative perspective, in what ritual context, and
with what performative features.
[15] In
performance, Syriac hymns and homilies differed in the degree
to which they were inclusive of women’s voices in the
ritual context of their presentation. In content, they
also differed in where and when they located the voices of
female characters. Ephrem often elided biblical past and
historical present, locating women’s sacred speech from
the mythic (biblical) past in the midst of the gathered
congregation in its present worship. The dialogue hymns
performed women’s voices as liturgical drama, setting
women’s voices in high relief; yet these hymns placed
their voices within specific narrative moments of the
church’s salvation story, as characters from a past
event. A homilist such as Jacob of Serug would enclose
women’s voices within the clear boundaries of narrated
story and right interpretation, and within that narration
construct the socially and culturally appropriate constraints
on female speech. Intoned in the spaces of civic ritual
through the mediation of a male priest, these words would then
be echoed by the ritually authorized and ritually contained
voices of women’s choirs.
Harvey, “On Mary’s Voice.”
I suggest that these
different modes of performance all contributed substantially to
the teaching presented through the story at hand. Women’s
voices imagined and real were necessary to that
teaching. How were those voices heard?
Redeeming Women
[16] The
only extensive discussion we have of these women’s choirs
is found in Jacob of Serug’s homily on Ephrem. Indeed,
the space alone that Jacob allots to the matter is striking: in
a panegyric composed a century or more after the great
saint’s death, nearly one third is devoted to
women’s choirs and their singing, 47 couplets out of a
possible 187. His discussion merits closer
scrutiny.
I will follow the translation in Amar,
“Metrical Homily”. I give the verse numbers as
they are in the text; in Amar’s edition, these
passages come from pp. 35-65.
[17] In
contrast to other panegyrical homilies that Jacob composed on
saints—for example, his homilies on the Edessan Martyrs
Shmona, Guria, and Habib, or the one on Simeon the
Stylite—this one contains virtually no narrative of the
saint’s life. Instead, Jacob praises Ephrem for his
extraordinary skill as hymnographer, dwelling at length on the
unparalleled beauty and profundity of his theological teaching.
Amidst this general exaltation of Ephrem’s craft, Jacob
claims that Ephrem founded choirs of women where there had been
none. Ephrem was initially prompted to do so, Jacob says,
because in the task of composing hymns and homilies adequate
for teaching God’s truth, he realized the eschatological
significance of women’s participation.
40. Our sisters also were strengthened by
you [O Ephrem] to give praise,
For women were not allowed to speak in church. [cf. 1 Cor
14:34]
41. Your instruction opened the closed
mouths of the daughters of Eve;
And behold, the gatherings of the glorious (church) resound
with their melodies.
42. A new sight of women uttering the
proclamation (karuzutha);
And behold, they are called teachers (malpanyatha)
among the congregations.
43. Your teaching signifies an entirely new
world;
For yonder in the kingdom (of heaven), men and women are
equal.
44. You labored to devise two harps for two
groups;
You treated men and women as one to give praise.
[18]
According to Jacob, then, Ephrem’s choirs do more than
proclaim that with Christianity a new era has dawned for
humanity. They enact that new dispensation by the very
fact that they include female as well as male voices. The
use of these choirs is startling: despite the Pauline
admonition for women’s silence, Ephrem presents his
church with “a new sight of women uttering the
proclamation.” Nor does Jacob pull punches
here. The term he uses is karuzutha, the Syriac
equivalent for kerygma. These women sing the full
doctrinal proclamation of the church. Rightly so, then,
are “they called teachers among the
congregations”. Here is his term
malpanyatha; by Jacob’s reckoning, these
women sing the very teaching by which Christianity exists, by
which salvation has come. So dramatic is the act of women
in this role, that Jacob declares it images “an entirely
new world”. In Jacob’s account, just as men
and women are equal in the heavenly kingdom to come, so, too,
is that kingdom imaged and anticipated in the Syriac liturgy
with its male and female choirs.
[19]
Jacob’s defense of Ephrem then moves from eschatology to
typology. Moses had led the Hebrew women in song at the
crossing of the Red Sea, summoning them to celebrate the
deliverance of the Hebrews from the Egyptians. So, too,
did Ephrem lead the Syrian women in hymns to celebrate the
deliverance of humanity from the powers of sin and
death. Omitting Miriam’s role in the biblical
account, Jacob presents both men as liberators who declare a
new freedom of worship for women. For Jacob,
Ephrem’s action is a logical result of sacramental
mandate, for men and women participate in salvation by the same
means, first by baptism, then by the eucharist. He
portrays Ephrem calling the women to song:
105. You [O women] put on glory from the midst
of the waters like your brothers,
Render thanks with a loud voice like them also.
106. You have partaken of a single
forgiving body with your brothers,
And from a single cup of new life you have been
refreshed.
107. A single salvation is yours and
theirs (alike); why then
Have you not learned to sing praise with a loud voice?
Unequivocally justified by the sacramental practices of the
church, Ephrem’s choirs themselves represent a further
typological fulfillment, soteriological in its impact. For
Eve had closed the mouths of women in shame by her disobedience
at the Fall. But the Virgin Mary opened them again,
loosening their bonds, opening the closed door of their
tongues, and restoring the voices of women.
112. Because of the wickedness of Eve,
your mother, you [O women] were under judgment;
But because of the child of Mary, your sister, you have been
set free.
113. Uncover your faces to sing praise without
shame
to the One who granted you freedom of speech by his
birth.
[20] By
just such exhortations, Jacob declares, did Ephrem establish
the women’s choirs, granting them the responsibility of
chanting “instructive melodies” (qale
d-malpanutha). And by such melodies were the efforts of
the heretics laid low, as the church triumphed in orthodoxy
through the “soft tones” of the women (vv. 114,
152).
[21]
Jacob’s justification of Ephrem’s establishment of
the women’s choirs is fourfold: eschatological,
typological, sacramental, soteriological. So formidable is
his effort, in fact, that Kathleen McVey has argued for reading
this homily as a defense of women’s choirs in the wake of
an ecclesiastical attack on their validity—whether from
Greek churches to the west (Antioch?), or from rivalries within
Syriac doctrinal circles locked in fierce debate at the
time.
McVey, “Ephrem the Kitharode and
Proponent of Women.”
But we simply cannot know. Greek
sources are as silent on these Syriac choirs as were Greek
women in their liturgies. In Syriac churches, the
women’s choirs have continued to the present day,
although Jacob’s homily is rarely remembered.
Women’s choirs are commonplace still
among the Syriac Orthodox churches. However, Archbishop
Cyril Aprem has told me that the choirs are now criticized as
being the result of pernicious influence from secular western
feminism!
We are left, then, with something of a
puzzle: how to account for these women’s choirs of
the Daughters of the Covenant, and indeed, for Jacob’s
extraordinary defense of them.
[22] One
other ancient source presents a fairly similar understanding of
the significance of male and female choirs: Philo of
Alexandria’s account of the Therapeutae, in his treatise
On the Contemplative Life. Philo describes this
philosophical community and its utopian (or eschatological)
existence at some length. Towards the end of the treatise,
in section 8, he explicitly mentions the women of the
community, “aged virgins” committed as eagerly as
the men to the perfect philosophical life of devotion to
God. Every seven weeks, Philo says, the men and women
gather for a festal banquet, the men sitting on the right and
the women on the left (section 9). Following the
food, instruction on the scriptures is given by the
president (section 10). When the teaching is complete, first
the president and then the entire community join in
song. In two choirs, the men and women sing sacred hymns
all night, of many kinds, of different rhythms, sometimes with
clapping or dancing. Here, too, is the typology of the
singing at the Red Sea recalled, and Miriam as prototype for
the leader of the women’s choir, along with Moses for the
men. “Modeled above all on this (the singing at the Red
Sea),” Philo states, “the choir of the Therapeutae,
both male and female, singing in harmony, the soprano of the
women blending with the bass of the men, produces true musical
concord. Exceeding beautiful are the thoughts, exceeding
beautiful are the words, and august the choristers, and the end
goal of thought, words, and choristers alike is
piety.”
David Winston (Trans.), Philo of
Alexandria: The Contemplative Life, The Giants, and
Selections (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), 41-57, at
pp. 56-7. The Greek is edited with translation by F. H. Colson
and G. H. Whitaker in Philo: Works 9:112-69, Loeb
Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1941).
[23] It
is possible that Jacob knew of Philo’s
text. Eusebius of Caesarea’s Ecclesiastical
History was available in Syriac in the sixth century, and
Bk. 2, 16-7 presents a “filtered” account of Philo
on the Therapeutae.
I owe the phrase and the reference to Anne
Seville, and I am grateful for both. The text is translated in
William Wright and Norman McLean, The Ecclesiastical
History of Eusebius, in Syriac (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1898).
But the descriptions diverge as much
as they resonate. Even without the disputed question of
whether or not the Therapeutae existed as an historical
community, Philo’s account represents the ideal
philosophical collective—an elite community, living apart
from mundane society. Jacob’s description of the
women’s choirs presents an idealized justification for
the practice, to be sure. But the practice, as attested
not only in Jacob but in dozens of canonical sources, was to be
found in every Syriac-speaking village, town, and city of late
antiquity, enacted in the civic churches of the collected
populus. It offered a vision of the ideal, enacted in the
midst of the ordinary.
[24] Very
little evidence has survived to us regarding the pre-Christian,
indigenous religions of the Syrian Orient that continued into
the Christian period.
Fundamental studies are H.J.W. Drijvers,
Cults and Beliefs at Edessa (Leiden: E.J. Brill,
1980); Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East 31 BC
– AD 337 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1993); and Steven K. Ross, Roman
Edessa: Politics and Culture on the Eastern Fringes of the
Roman Empire, 114-242 CE (New York: Routledge, 2001).
We know the names and sometimes the
symbols of deities, and occasionally titular offices. But
of practices, we know almost nothing. Suggestive models
can sometimes be drawn from Greek traditions to the west,
however. In her book Performance and Gender in Ancient
Greece, Eva Stehle discusses the significance of ancient
Greek civic choruses, both male and female, in terms that help
to illuminate the issues of women’s choirs in the ancient
Syriac churches.
Eva Stehle, Performance and Gender in
Ancient Greece: Nondramatic Poetry in its Setting
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
She argues that civic choruses
through their performances in religious festivals provided the
embodied expression of the city itself. As such, their
role was to vindicate and affirm civic order as just, good, and
worthy of admiration (even devotion). The capacity for
this expression lay in the chorus’ ability to reflect and
model the community’s most idealized
self-understanding. Reflection, oriented to the past, was
offered by the chorus’ presentation of the city’s
sacred past: the great events by which it was formed and
bonded into a community under the gods’
protection. Modeling, in turn, was oriented toward the
future: by the harmony and beauty of their performance, the
chorus represented the community in its ideal form. Gender
was essential to the work of these choruses, since male and
female choirs performed these tasks in distinct, differentiated
ways. It is helpful, I think, to consider the role of
women’s choirs in the Syriac churches in these
terms. Indeed, Jacob of Serug had stressed the
eschatological significance of women’s choirs as signs of
the resurrected life to come.
[25]
Scholars have given much attention to the capacity of holy
women in late antiquity to attain high levels of spiritual
authority among the general populace, and to serve as spiritual
teachers and counselors.
In Greek tradition, one thinks of Macrina,
the sister of Gregory of Nyssa; Gorgonia, sister of Gregory of
Nazianzus; Melania the Elder and Melania the Younger; and
especially Syncletica among the Desert Mothers of
Egypt. In Syriac tradition, strong examples would be
Febronia of Nisibis; Mary, Euphemia, and Susan from John of
Ephesus’ Lives of the Eastern Saints; and
Martyrius’ depiction of Shirin. For these, see Brock
and Harvey, Holy Women.
The model of holy woman as
authoritative spiritual teacher is, however, founded on a
pattern of direct, even personal instruction by a mentor to a
devotee. The teaching performed by the Daughters of the
Covenant differed substantially from this model, both in kind
and in nature. The content of their teaching was not the
revealed wisdom of a holy individual, but rather the stated,
collectively identified corporate doctrines of the
church. These choirs through the madrashe
represented to the Christian congregation the affirmed,
authorized teachings they held in common. Moreover, as
liturgical choirs, these women taught by their very performance
the substance of their teaching: women as well as men
received eschatological hope through sacramental practice.
[26] For
the societies of the ancient Mediterranean, religion was the
fundamental means of identity and order. In religious
rituals, the community could see itself constituted and
sustained, renewed and confirmed, time and again. So, too, in
ancient Christianity. In his Hymns on Easter,
Ephrem exhorts the church to offer fitting worship to God in
these terms:
Let us plait a magnificent crown for [Christ our
Lord]...
The bishop weaves into it
His biblical exegesis as his flowers;
The presbyters their martyr stories;
The deacons their lections,
The young men their alleluias,
The boys their psalms,
The virgins their madrashe,
The rulers their achievements,
And the lay people their virtues.
Blessed be the One who has multiplied victories for
us.
Ephrem, Hymns on Easter 2:8-9;
Sidney Griffith (trans.), cited McKinnon, Music in Early
Christian Literature, pp. 93-4. The Syriac is edited
by Edmund Beck, CSCO 248, Scr. Syr. 84. Compare Jacob of
Serug, Hom. Against the Jews, 7. 529-42, Micheline
Albert (ed. and trans.), Jacques de Saroug, Homélies
contre les Juifs, PO 38 (1976), at pp. 216-7:
[27]
Here, in splendid array, is the ancient Syriac church in
glory. Essential to it is the place of the women’s
choir: distinct, separated, included in the proper order,
excluded from the clergy, yet uniquely the source of doctrinal
truth: of right Christian faith. I suggest that we, as
historians, have something more to learn here._______
Notes
† Earlier versions of this paper were
presented at the Syriac Symposium IV, Princeton Theological
Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey, July 2003; at the Center for
Early Christian Studies, Catholic University of America,
Washington, DC, Feb. 2004; and to the Brown Seminar on
Culture and Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean, March
2004. I am grateful to participants in these occasions for
constructive conversation and helpful suggestions, and above
all to Joseph P. Amar and Sidney H. Griffith.
And voices upon voices crowd around [Christ] from every
side,
The speaking of the gatherings and congregations which
surround him.
The voice of the nations who clap their hands to give
praise,
And the voice of the handmaids grouped in choirs to make a
joyful noise.
The voice of the churches who sing praise with their
harps,
And the voice of monasteries who make a joyful noise to him
with their alleluias.
The voice of priests who consecrate him with the gentle
waving of their hands,
And the voice of saints who bless him in every place.
The voice of men who sing praise with their tongues,
The voice of women who exalt him with their
madrashe.
The voice of children who repeat before him [...]
The voice of teachers (rabbone) who set their
knowledge in array before him.
For praise of the Father, the Son wakens all creation.
Anathema to any who does not love the Son of God. (My trans.)
_______
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