Introduction

The introductory chapter deals with the Byzantine Orthodox Holy Week and its hymnography. This section of the book covers the Great Lent, a forty-day fasting period preceding Holy Week, as a baptismal/penitential liturgical cycle. The focus shifts then to Holy Week which culminates with Pascha or Easter vigil. The chapter reconstructs briefly the history of the Byzantine Holy Week with its main moments (i.e., Mar Sabas and Constantinopolitan rites and Constantinopolitan-Sabaic synthesis/symbiosis) and primary sources of evidence, such as the pilgrim Egeria’s Diary (384 C.E.) on Jerusalem rite. A close examination of Holy Week (Holy Monday through Holy Saturday) as observed currently by Orthodox communities follows. The introduction concludes with a brief summary of Byzantine hymnography prescribed for Holy Week, along with some of the most famous hymnographers, such as Theodore the Studite.

Overcoming

This chapter analyzes the Scriptures in several hymns prescribed for Holy Saturday, whose central theme is Jesus’s descent to Hades and overcoming its power, an obscure episode barely intimated by 1 Pet 3:18–20 and Eph 4:9 but embraced by the Church since its apostolic times as a theologoumenon. On the Sabbath, blessed by God at the end of his creative work (Gen 2:3), Jesus, the “sleeping lion of Judah” (Gen 49:9), “sabbatized” in his lifeless body laid in the tomb, descended in spirit to the netherworld (Hades). By his simple, humble, yet shining presence as “deified mortal spotted with bruises,” Jesus came to destroy Hades and liberate its denizens. The hymnographers viewed the prophet Jonah, who was swallowed by a big fish, as a type of Christ’s descent to Hades and his subsequent resurrection.

Holy Saturday Between the Sublime and Beautiful: Fantastic Realism in Kristeva and Desmond's Dostoevskian Ideal

This article examines Dostoevsky's "fantastic realism," which challenges the explanation of rationalism or empiricism in the need for determinate categories fixed in nature. His use of paintings by Hans Holbein, Claude Lorrain, and Raphael in terms of the sublime and beautiful exemplify an understanding of Holy Saturday and its status between death and resurrection. Julia Kristeva's reading of Dostoevsky's melancholy as exemplifying a religious ideal and William Desmond's metaxological philosophy allows us to propose a terminology that rhymes with Dostoevskian between-ness, a conclusion that does not resolve the space between the beautiful and the sublime but remains open to the confessional enigmatic liminality that is Holy Saturday.

The artistic program of the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Dante’s liturgical imagination

This paper 1 re-examines the relationship between Dante’s Commedia and the Baptistery of San Giovanni from an art historical perspective. Drawing on –– and then departing from –– earlier work by Dante scholars who described figurative echoes between the Commedia and the Baptistery’s mosaic program, this article reconceptualizes the relationship between the two as not only figurative, but also liturgical. Using the texts of two extant medieval Florentine libri ordinales to reconstruct the liturgy of Holy Saturday, I document the ways in which the decorative mosaic imagery of the Baptistery is reflected in and reinforced by the multisensory performance of the baptismal rite. I argue further that Dante ekphrastically reimagines this rite in cantos 1–2 and 29–33 of Purgatorio. By exploring Dante’s liturgical imagination vis-à-vis the multivalent space of the Baptistery, this paper articulates and illuminates the profound interconnections that can exist between medieval art, architecture, liturgy, and poetry.

The Silence of Saturday: Luke 23:50-56 (A Sermon)

Holy Week naturally centers its attention on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. When pondering the good news of God’s liberating love in Christ, everything culminates in Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. Not surprisingly, then, Holy Saturday gets short shrift. The gospels themselves have little to say about it, and Christian tradition does nothing of note to mark what it means. The following message, which in its original form was presented as part of an ecumenical Holy Week series, invites worshipers into the pregnant pause of “silent Saturday,” there to lay lives bare in the aftermath of Christ’s death. In the spirit of the first followers of Jesus, for whom resurrection could scarcely be imagined, those with imaginations and willingness to do so can confess their sins, their fears, their frustrations, their doubts. Against the backdrop of today’s yearnings for justice, they can bring their suffering, exhaustion, and disappointment, as well, and find in introspection the gifts of relinquishment and hope.

Wielkotygodniowe inspiracje w hymnografii Zaśnięcia Bogurodzicy

Dormition of the Mother of God is one of the most solemnly celebrated feasts in the Orthodox liturgical year. It has a rich hymnography, including an additional rite of the Funeral of the Mother of God. The texts of the feast are largely inspired by the hymnography of the Holy Week, and especially Holy Saturday. This paper presents, on the example of the feast of the Dormition, a general phenomenon of intertextuality in hymnography. Mutual interpenetration of hymns appears in the context of many feasts and many saints.