Justin Appel

Dear Friends,

Today is the feast day of Saint John of Damascus, an eighth-century Syrian church father known for the many hymns attributed to his name, and for his defense of the use of icons during the iconoclast controversy of that century.

One of the sets of hymns, known collectively in the Orthodox tradition as idiomela, is sung in modern Orthodox funeral liturgies. St John’s funeral hymns have a particularly stark and astringent beauty, and kind of unflinching realism about the transience of life, and an equally rapturous quality.

Both the ascetic and ecstatic qualities seem to me inextricable. In our Western traditions and ways of thinking, particularly in the wake of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism, we seem to create artificial polarities in the inner person, setting “heart” against “mind” or “emotion” against “reason,” However, this ancient hymnic text seems to bear within itself a wholistic expression of human emotion (while also admitting this faculty’s need for purification) and the intellect and will (while emphasizing the need for submission and obedience).

I worked on a setting of St John’s first funeral hymn some years ago and I must confess it was baffling trying to arrange notes on the page with these kinds of dynamics at play. However, I found it very rewarding at the time, not least because my grad school colleagues sang the notes very beautifully!

Yours in Christ,

—Justin

What earthly sweetness remaineth unmixed with grief?
What glory standeth immutable on earth?
All things are but feeble shadows, all things are most deluding dreams: yet one moment only, and Death shall supplant them all.
But in the light of thy countenance, O Christ, and in the sweetness of thy beauty,
give rest unto him/her whom thou hast chosen: forasmuch as thou lovest mankind.