S. Theophanes
A.D. 759 -- A.D. 818.
S. Theophanes, who holds the third place among Greek Church-poets,
was born in 759, his father being Governor of the Archipelago. Betrothed
in childhood to a lady named Megalis, he persuaded her, on their
wedding-day, to embrace the monastic life. He retired to the
monastery of Syngriana, in the early part of the reign of Constantine
and Irene. From the fiftieth year of his age he was nearly bedridden;
but his devotion to the cause of Icons marked him out as one of the
earliest victims of Leo the Armenian, who, after imprisoning him for two
years, banished him to Samothrace. On the third day after his arrival in
that inhospitable region, worn out with sufferings and sickness, he departed
this life:
A.D. 818. He is chiefly famous for his History,
with which we have now nothing to do. With the one exception of S. Joseph
of the Studium, Theophanes is the most prolific of Eastern Hymnographers;
and in his writings we first see that which has been the bane and ruin of
later Greek poetry, the composition of hymns, not from the spontaneous
effusion of the heart, but because they were wanted to fill up a gap in
the Office-book.
Because the great festivals and the chief Saints of the Church had their
Canon and their Stichera, therefore, every martyr, every confessor, who
happened to give his name to a day, must have his Canon and Stichera also,
just for uniformity. How different the Latin use, where not even the
Apostles have separate hymns received by the whole Church, but supply
themselves from the
Common! Hence the deluge of worthless
compositions that occur in the Menaea: hence tautology, repeated till
it becomes almost sickening; the merest commonplace, again and again
decked in the tawdry shreds of tragic language, and twenty or thirty
times presenting the same thought in slightly varying terms. Theophanes,
indeed, must be distinguished from the host of inferior writers that
about his time began to overwhelm the Church. Many of his subjects
are of world-wide interest. The Eastern martyrs, whom he celebrates,
are, for the most part, those who have won for themselves the greatest
name in the annals of history. But still we find him thus honouring
some, of whom all that can be said is, that they died for the Name of
C
HRIST. And though the poet brings more matter to his task
than do others, many long stanzas, that keep pretty close to their
subject, concerning a Saint of whom there is nothing especial to say,
must become tedious.
