The Apian Universe in Eastern Christian Hymnography

Abstract

Abstract

Despite the considerable scholarly attention devoted to Byzantine hymnography in recent decades, its content remains insufficiently explored. While most research has focused primarily on its historical development and liturgical function, the present study examines one of the many recurring themes found in the lyric compositions preserved in the principal Byzantine hymnographic anthologies—the Octoechos, the Triodion–Pentecostarion, and the Menaia. The subject under consideration is somewhat unconventional, centering on the apian universe and the poetic imagery conveyed through the troparia and stichera that constitute the Byzantine liturgical offices. The aim of this paper is to document the hymnographic passages in which this imagery occurs and to examine the extent of the apian imaginary, together with the ideas and the message employed by such poetic images. Although references to apian imagery are relatively few within the corpus of the main Byzantine hymnographic collections that continue to be used liturgically today, these images (comparisons, epithets, metaphors, and personifications) build a coherent and relatively unitary symbolic system, through which apian vocabulary was employed to express the abstract realities of spiritual life in terms that were both vivid and readily intelligible to Christians of the first millennium—but not only them.