The Akathistos Aniconically: Meditations on Unsettled Seeing

As poetry the Akathistos has spurred a whole strain of iconography. The song, however, heaps image upon image, creating a shaky landscape, one which yields an ecstatic kind of seeing. With a form that frequently approximates sound poetry, it complicates a stable gaze.

The icons usually feature 24 narrative scenes neatly representing the 24 stanzas of the hymn. While much kontakion hymnography has a clear narrative layout, the poetic Akathistos actually lacks a narrative development, depending much more on spatially flourishing imagery as it slings itself out in intertwining scrolls. This chapter argues that the icons contribute to a domestication of an otherwise wild and sprawling metaphorical growth, focusing the viewer’s gaze on a humanoid stability absent in the Akathistos Hymn. The Akathistos tradition, then, sprouts with a tension between the aniconic, almost apophatic, darkness of the chairetismoi and the sanitizing pull of the icon scenes. The poetry, ultimately, takes the reader to a place where the iconography hesitates to go.

Having discussed this tension, the chapter turns to the “dark Mariology” of the hymn; the salutations associate the Theotokos with landscapes and fields, an overshadowed meadow, and downplay anthropomorphic forms, giving way to a much more dispersed Marian imagination, connecting her to the rich soil and the fertile earth.