(b Sozopolis, Pisidia, c465; d Xois, Egypt, 8 Feb 538). Greek hymnographer and theologian. He studied law and philosophy in Alexandria and Berytus and in 488 was baptized in Libya. He became a monk and is thought to have founded a monophysite monastery near Maiuma in Palestine. Because of the persecution of Palestinian monophysite monks, Severus went to Constantinople in 508, where he opposed the teachings of the Council of Chalcedon and succeeded in gaining the support of Emperor Anastasius I for the monophysite cause. In 512 he became Patriarch of Antioch, but with the suppression of monophytism following Anastasius’s death in 518 he was removed from office and went into exile in Egypt. In 535 Severus returned to Constantinople, but he was excommunicated in 536 and again fled to Egypt where he later died.
One of Severus’s intentions after he had taken up office was to create a magnificent rite (according to his biographer, Joannes bar-Aphthonia). Realizing that the people of Antioch loved both sacred and secular music, he composed many hymns and employed ecclesiastical singers to attract more people to church services. He was a prolific writer, whose surviving works have mostly come down in Syriac translation, among them the hymnal GB-Lbl Add.17134 entitled Ma‘niāthā d’qadisha ogtānā Seoira patriarka d-Antiokia (Ma‘niāthā of holy and blessed Severus, patriarch of Antioch’). This manuscript represents the oldest version of the hymnal and was probably copied at the end of the 7th century; it is based on James of Edessa’s revised Greek edition of 675, which probably came very close to Severus’s original text, even though James was revising Paul of Edessa’s early 7th-century Syriac translations with their various reworkings and interpolations. (The original Greek title is not known: ma‘nithā, singular of ma‘niāthā, is usually translated antiphōna but may originally have been hypēchēsis, i.e. ‘echo’ or ‘response’.)
GB-Lbl Add.17134 contains 295 hymns, most of them by Severus himself, but texts by Joannes bar-Aphthonia and Joannes Psaltes are also included. A number of the hymns provide information about the modes of the melodies to which they would have been sung. Many manuscripts of later date that are based on James’s edition diverge widely from each other in the arrangement of the hymns; some are ordered according to the Oktōēchos, and consequently the collection came to be known, incorrectly, as the ‘Oktōēchos’ (I-Rvat syr.94, an early 11th-century copy of GB-Lbl Add.17134, was described by Assemanus as ‘Octoechus sive Cantus tonis octo expressi’, although only the second part is so ordered). Severus’s hymnal, however, followed the liturgical calendar of Antioch, in which the Church year begins at Christmas; the first hymns in the collection, therefore, are those for feasts from Christmas to Pentecost, followed by the feasts of the Holy Innocents, the Theotokos (Mother of God), John the Baptist, Stephen the Protomartyr, the Apostles etc. The collection also contains communion hymns and – perhaps unusually – songs for the Brumalia (the Roman festival of the winter solstice) and for the theatre.
S.E. Assemanus and J.S. Assemanus: Bibliothecae apostolicae vaticanae codicum manuscriptorum catalogus, i (Rome, 1756/R), 500–11
M.-A. Kugener, ed.: Sévère, patriarche d’Antioche, 512–518: textes syriaques (Paris, 1907/R), 243–5
E.W. Brooks, ed. and trans.: James of Edessa: The hymns of Severus of Antioch and Others (Paris, 1909–10/R)
J. Jeannin: ‘Octoechus syrien’, Oriens christianus, new ser., iii (1913), 82–104, 277–98
H. Husmann: ‘Hymnus und Troparion’, JbSIM 1971, 7–86
W.H.C. Frend: The Rise of the Monophysite Movement: Chapters in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries (Cambridge, 1972)
H. Husmann: ‘Die Gesänge der syrischen Liturgien’, Geschichte der katholischen Kirchenmusik, ed. K.G. Fellerer, i (Kassel, 1972), 69–98, esp. 86ff
H. Husmann: ‘Eine alte orientalische christliche Liturgie: altsyrisch-melkitisch’, Orientalia christiana periodica, xlii/1 (1976), 156–96
GERDA WOLFRAM