Kassiani the Hymnographer

A Constantinopolitan of the ruling class

Kassia was born at Constantinople in the first decade of the ninth century, into a wealthy family of the official aristocracy; her father is called a kandidatos in the later notices, one of the palace ranks. Her education was of a kind that only that class could give a daughter, and its marks are everywhere in what she wrote: she quotes and imitates the classical gnomic poets, she handles the iambic trimeter with confidence, and her verses assume a reader who will catch an allusion. Nothing in her surviving work suggests a woman writing at the edge of the Church's literary life; it is the work of someone formed at its centre, in the capital, in the years when the capital was tearing itself apart over the icons.

The bride-show of Theophilos, and the exchange about Eve

The story that has carried her name outside the Church is told, with variations, by the tenth- and eleventh-century chroniclers — Symeon the Logothete, the continuator of George the Monk, Pseudo-Symeon, and afterwards Zonaras. The dowager empress Euphrosyne, so the account runs, gathered the most beautiful and best-born girls of the empire so that her stepson Theophilos might choose a wife, and gave him a golden apple to hand to the one he wanted. He stopped before Kassia, who was the most striking of them, and — testing her, or teasing her — said: "Through a woman came the worse things." She answered at once: "And through a woman came the better things." The worse was Eve and the fall; the better was the Theotokos and the Incarnation. The emperor, put down in public by a girl he had come to marry, walked past her and gave the apple to Theodora, who would one day restore the holy icons.

The story is told in the Church as the beginning of her monastic life, and it is a good story; whether it is history is another matter, and the entry does not pretend otherwise (see Disputed questions below).

The second iconoclasm: Theodore the Studite, and the lash

What is documented, and far more important, is her part in the second iconoclasm. Four letters of Theodore the Studite (†826) to a young woman named Kassia survive in his correspondence, and they are the earliest and the best witness to her. He writes to her as to a person of consequence: he praises her learning while warning her, in the manner of a spiritual father, against the vanity that learning breeds; he thanks her for what she had sent to the confessors in prison and in exile; and he encourages her in a confession that was costing her something. The tradition that grew from this — and it is consistent with everything the letters imply — is that she was scourged with a lash for her open support of the icons and of the monks who were suffering for them. The Studite letters place her, while still a laywoman in her teens or early twenties, on the persecuted side of the great question of her age, and among the confessors of the icons rather than the spectators.

Her own most famous line belongs to this, whatever its occasion:

I hate silence when it is the time to speak.

The convent on the Xerolophos

About the year 843 — the year of the restoration of the icons, though some scholars place the foundation a decade earlier — Kassia founded a convent in the western part of Constantinople, near the Constantinian wall, on the hill the Byzantines called the Xerolophos, the "dry hill," the seventh of the city's hills. She became its first abbess. The house kept close relations with the monastery of Stoudios, then the engine of the iconodule resistance and afterwards of Byzantine hymnography, and it is in that connection, rather than in any romance, that her work as a hymnographer is to be understood: she was writing where the service books of the Church were being made.

The hymnographer

Something like fifty hymns pass under her name in the manuscripts; of these about twenty-three are accepted as securely hers, and the rest are contested or plainly misattributed. What is remarkable is not the number but the placing: her work was received into the Triodion and the Menaion and has stayed there, sung every year by the whole Church, under a woman's name, for eleven centuries. Among the pieces generally allowed her:

• the doxastikon of the aposticha at the Matins of Great and Holy Wednesday, the Hymn of Kassiani (see below) — Great and Holy Wednesday;
• the doxastikon of Christmas Eve, Αὐγούστου μοναρχήσαντος ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς — "When Augustus reigned alone upon the earth, the many kingdoms of men came to an end" — which sets the single empire of Augustus against the single Lordship of Christ and the enrolment of Quirinius against the enrolment of the nations in the name of the Godhead; it is one of the great political-theological texts of the Byzantine office (see the Nativity of Christ);
• part of the canon of Great and Holy Saturday, Κύματι θαλάσσης, whose first ode the manuscripts give to her, the remainder being completed by Mark, bishop of Idrous (Otranto) on the foundation of Cosmas of Maiuma — see Great and Holy Saturday;
• the aposticha doxastikon for the Nativity of the Forerunner (June 24), ascribed to her in the Menaion, which sets Elizabeth and the Virgin face to face (see the Nativity of the Forerunner);
• a long canon for the departed, in thirty-two strophes;
• stichera for martyrs and for saints of the fixed year, scattered through the Menaion.

A persistent tradition — repeated in Greek handbooks, and impossible either to prove or to dismiss — holds that her Great Saturday canon was cut short and completed by a man because the Church of her day would not sing a whole canon written by a woman. What is certain is that the received text is composite, and that her authorship of the opening was never suppressed.

The epigrams and the gnomic verses

Beside the hymns stands a second body of work, never set to music and never liturgical: somewhere over two hundred and fifty epigrams and gnomic verses, mostly in iambics, on friendship, on fortune, on monks, on fools, on beauty, on the rich, on the Armenians (against whom she is unsparing). They belong to the classicising secular tradition of Byzantine verse, not to the Church's poetry at all, and they are the reason she has a place in histories of Greek literature as well as in the synaxarion. Their tone is dry and epigrammatic — a moralist's, not a mystic's — and their survival gives her a double character almost unique among Orthodox saints: the author of the most emotionally extravagant hymn in the Triodion was also the author of some of the coolest verse of the ninth century.

Repose

She reposed about 865. One tradition keeps her at Constantinople, in the convent she had ruled; another, strongly held in the Dodecanese, has her end her life on the island of Kasos, where a chapel at Panagia is shown as the place of her tomb. Neither can be verified from a contemporary source.