Paul Blowers: The Vanity of Human Life in the Poetry of George of Pisidia: Echoes of Patristic Lament

Besides works of imperial panegyric, the Byzantine court poet George of Pisidia composed two deeply contemplative poems on the vanity of creaturely existence, On the Vanity of Life and On Human Life. Mary Whitby has uncovered many classical topoi, allusions and reinventions within these pieces, especially in On Human Life. My essay will instead investigate these works in terms of their recovery and reworking of themes from Greek patristic literature of lament over the fallen and stunted condition of humanity, themes richly informed by biblical imagery of the vanity of creation (Ps. 103:14-15; Qoheleth; Romans 8:19-23; 1 Peter 1:24 et al.). Certain patristic parallels were noted in the eighteenth-century edition of George’s works by Giuseppe Querci (in Migne, PG 92), but Whitby herself has only briefly touched on them. Beyond more commonplace motifs like the transitoriness of bodily life and the futility of human striving apart from God, George elicits knowledge of some quite specific themes in the Cappadocian Fathers, John Chrysostom and other sources, also themes found in George’s contemporary Maximus the Confessor. These include, among others, the dialectical tension between dignity and degradation of the human body, the precariousness of human passibility (liability to passions), the phenomenon of ‘Fortune’ and the image of human existence as a game or stage-play. These will be my special focus, and the essay will conclude by reflecting on how George’s severity and sobriety in these poems addressed the unique chemistry of religion and world affairs in seventh-century Byzantium.