Elevated Completeness (1790)

Koinonikon by St Iosif. Sung today (unpublished score). St Iosif is in my opinion the most influential and paradigm-changing liturgical composer of the turn of the 18th century, and the characteristic of his works (again, my subjective opinion) is the unmoving and fiery attunement of The Soul with The Beloved in the purest and most sincere way, so that it takes its bearable verse right above the dolorous cosmic yearn and right through the sanctifying tunnel of grace, without discourse, without the perilous pondering of Reason where syllogism can overturn it into a “thing”, but masterfully keeps Love as an Energeia that sheds all untruths, almost like Strauss does before embarking on writing: with a slight victorious smile risen from the deepest writhes. How can we then not glorify the Creator of such marvelous darkness-veiling in the silence of all verbs, and how can we not swim motionless in such infinities knowing they are ours.

About the original title of the post (“The Piercing That Renders Us Complete“): “Piercing“ refers to the noetic power that gathers all energies of the soul in a single point through which the spiritual perichoresis is done, so it is a specific action and I could not find a better English verb. In Romanian it would be “ațintind”, a verb (in simultaneously passive, active and reflexive diathesis) that combines the Goal (τέλος) with the full force of the desire towards it and the mental acuity not to be overwhelmed by the respective emotion. The text of the koinonikon (“You have fulfilled our redemption even from the middle of the earth/ from hell, Christ our Lord and God, Aliluia”), as well as the composition (the most intense of the paisian short-form koinonika, as well as the eucharistic context within the historical spiritual moment, all are implied in the title verb, which reminds us that we are touched by the divine ray as supra-painfully blissful as we too touch it.