The Antiphons: Songs of Allegiance

In the days of St. John Chrysostom, the Liturgy began with the entry into church of the bishop and the people.  The bishop would ascend to his episcopal chair at the back of the altar facing the people, greet them by saying, “Peace be unto all!” (and their response, “And to your spirit!”), and then he would sit down to listen to the readings.  Nowadays the Liturgy begins by singing the three antiphons (and by chanting the Great Litany, which tended to move around a bit within the Liturgy).  So one may ask:  what’s the deal with the three antiphons?  How did they come to precede the celebrant’s initial greeting?

The antiphons were originally sung as processional psalms during what was essentially a parade through the city on the way to the church where the Liturgy was to be held.  (Details can be found in Hugh Wybrew’s The Orthodox Liturgy and John Baldovin’s The Urban Character of Christian Worship.)  In the early days of Byzantium, the Christians of a city would sometimes meet at a certain pre-arranged place and go in procession as a group to church for the Liturgy.  These processions were not spontaneous, but fixed liturgically.  Rome and Jerusalem both had them, Roman Christians using the holy sites of their martyrs in their processions and Jerusalem Christians the holy sites associated with Christ’s ministry.  Constantinople had no such martyric or Dominical sites, but held many processions anyway:  the Typicon of the Great Church listed 68 of them, which is about 5 per month, or an average of about one per week.  That is a lot of processions.  The liturgical parades (for that is what they were) apparently were very popular, especially since the Emperor took part in them.

During these processions a cantor would chant a psalm and the people would respond with a refrain—often a short church composition (now known as a “troparion”).  The favoured psalms were Psalm 92, 93, and 95 (Psalm 94, with its “God of vengeance, shine forth!” was omitted as a bit too blood-thirsty for the festive occasions.)  This arrangement of three psalms each with their repeated refrains (called in the liturgical sources “the Office of Three Antiphons”) persists in the Orthodox liturgical tradition, though in Russian churches those psalms with refrains are often replaced by three other pieces, sung with no refrains—Psalm 103, Psalm 146, and the Beatitudes.  But using psalms with refrains is the earlier practice.  After processing through the city while singing these antiphons, the crowd would arrive at the main church, enter, and begin the Liturgy with the bishop’s usual opening greeting.

Why were these processions (sometimes called “stations”) so popular?  The answer to this question takes us far away from our modern secular city and straight into the heart of Byzantium.

Today city space is secular, having no religious purpose.  Indeed, if someone did try to co-opt a space for a religious purpose, the attempt would be immediately suppressed.  We believe that city space should be religiously neutral.  If religious people want to do religious things, they must resort to their own buildings set apart for that purpose.  Having a parade of any sort—especially a parade celebrating religious faith—requires a special permit, which may or may not be forthcoming.  Christians must keep their faith under wraps and indoors.  Even processing around the church building on church property can be a bit “iffy”—what if the neighbours complain about the noisy midnight procession at Pascha?

It was otherwise in Byzantium, where the entire city was sacred space and was used liturgically.  Indeed, in that day, it was the city itself which celebrated the faith, not just the Christians within it.  To quote Baldovin, “The liturgy in the city was the liturgy of the city.  The average worshipper did not so much ‘go to mass’ [i.e. the Divine Liturgy] as participate in the worship-life of the city as it unfolded.”  Our modern “separation of church and State” (now transformed into the “separation of religion and State”) would have struck the Byzantines as impious and impossible.

Those stational processions therefore had a proclamatory function—they proclaimed that Christ was King over all the earth, and that the city belonged to Him.  This divine ownership of the world and its cities included the possibility of Christ’s saints taking a special interest in this or that city.  The Theotokos, for example, was regarded as patron saint of Constantinople, and as its official protector.  That is why the processions were matters of Imperial law as well as ecclesiastical custom, for the Emperor had an interest in securing divine protection for his city and his empire.  We see this Imperial interest in the laws passed regarding the processions:  it was a punishable crime to hold a procession without Imperial sanction or to disturb a procession when it was being held.

It is significant too that heretics were forbidden to hold such processions within the city of Constantinople itself.  This was not mere religious bigotry:  to secure divine favour, it was thought that one must hold the correct faith, so that heresy was a civil danger to the State as well as an individual danger to the soul.  The processions throughout the streets of Constantinople were not therefore simply acts of religious devotion.  They were demonstrations of which religious group—Arian or Orthodox—controlled the city.

From all this we can see that the antiphons sung in procession were acts of allegiance, declaring to God and to mankind that Christ owned the world’s cities and that those cities responded with the true Orthodox faith.  The processions were so popular (and numerous) that even at the times when there was no procession through the city, their antiphons continued to be sung after the people had gathered in church—as they are to this day.

Though we no longer sing the antiphons as processional songs through the city on our way to church, we can still remember their original function, that of declaring that the city belongs to Christ.  That remains true today, even though the secular city has forgotten and rejected Him.  This means that, because Christ is a city’s true King, their rejection of Him is not only impious, but treasonous, for it is the rejection of the city’s true and only real King.  As we sing those antiphons, let us sing them as hymns of renewed allegiance.  We may not be able to give open and political expression to our allegiance to Christ as was done in saner times, but our allegiance is real nonetheless.  We defy the city’s rejection of its King.  Though we no longer process through the city streets, our allegiance to the city’s King remains firm.