Cosmas of Maiuma

Cosmas was, by the tradition preserved in the Greek church, an orphan taken into the household of John of Damascus's father in Syria and raised alongside John as a brother. The two boys were educated together by a captured Italian monk, also named Cosmas, whom the elder Damascene bought out of slavery in the market at Damascus and set to teaching them grammar, music, philosophy, and theology.

The two foster-brothers went together to the monastery of Mar Saba in the Judean wilderness. They spent decades there. Around 743 Cosmas was made bishop of Maiuma, the port of Gaza, and he held that see until his death, usually placed about 773 or a little later. The details of his episcopate are almost entirely unrecorded. He is remembered for what he wrote in the desert.

Cosmas, called Cosmas the Melodist, or Cosmas the Hymnographer, is one of the two or three greatest poets the Byzantine church produced. Working in the kanon form that Andrew of Crete had established, he wrote the canons for the great feasts: the Nativity, Theophany, the Presentation, the Transfiguration, Palm Sunday, Pentecost, the Exaltation of the Cross. He also wrote the canons for Holy Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, which carry the Orthodox church through the darkest days of its year.

His verse is dense, learned, and tightly built. Many of his canons are acrostics, the first letters of the stanzas spell out a line of verse. He worked in classical metres that most of his contemporaries had abandoned, and he packed his stanzas with scriptural allusion, so that a single line of a Christmas hymn can carry Isaiah, Habakkuk, and the Gospel of Luke at once. Byzantine scholars wrote commentaries on his hymns the way they wrote commentaries on Homer, because his Greek was hard.

English-speaking Christians know him mostly through John Mason Neale, who translated pieces of his work in the nineteenth century, including the lines that begin Christ is born, give ye glory.

His foster-brother John set the doctrine of the Eastern church in prose. Cosmas set it in poetry, to be sung. Between them, at one small monastery in a dry valley south of Jerusalem, they largely furnished the worship of half of Christendom.

Sources: Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vols. 98 and 138; The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware; John Mason Neale, Hymns of the Eastern Church; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).