Baring-Gould’s sources: Greek Menaea and Menology.] S. Cosmas of Jerusalem holds the second place among Greek ecclesiastical poets. Left an orphan at an early age, he was adopted by the father of S. John Damascene; and the two foster-brothers were bound together by a friendship kXt I which lasted through life. They excited each other to hymnology, and assisted, corrected, and polished each other’s compositions.
Cosmas, like his friend, became a monk of S. Sabbas, and against his will was consecrated Bishop of Majuma, the port of Gaza, in 734, by John, Patriarch of Jerusalem, the same who ordained Damascene priest. In the office for the saint in the Greek Church for this day is the following testimony to his powers as a hymnographer: — “Put on a glad countenance, O Church, and call thy children together, that thou mayest with them rejoice for thy sublime preacher. For Cosmas, divine and glorious, the spiritual harp, the divine lyre, calls all to the mystic table, laying before us mellifluous and divinely resounding melodies.... O Blessed one ! like a trumpet thou proclaimest the passion and miracles of Christ, and singest the sleep of the Immaculate Mother; thou hast rejoiced all, O Cosmas, by the sweet and soft music of thy words.”
“Where perfect sweetness dwells, is Cosmas gone; But his sweet lays to cheer the Church live on,” says the stichos prefixed to his life. His compositions are tolerably numerous, and he seems to have taken a pleasure in competing with S. John Damascene, as on the Nativity, the Epiphany, and the Transfiguration, where the canons of both are given. He is the most learned of the Greek Church-poets; and his fondness for types, boldness in their application, and love of aggregating them, made him the Oriental Adam of S. Victor. It is partly owing to a compressed fulness of meaning, very uncommon in the Greek ecclesiastical poets, partly to the unusual harshness and contraction of his phrases, that he is the hardest of ecclesiastical bards to comprehend. 1 He probably died in a.d. 780, but the date cannot be fixed with certainty.
1 Dr. Neale, “ Hymns of the Eastern Church." £ND OF VOL. XI Printed by Ballantynb, Hanson & Ca Edinburgh dr* London
