International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Paul Blowers
Emmanuel Christian Seminary at Milligan College, Johnson City TN, United States; 
[e-mail]
George of Pisidia among the Hexaemeral Commentators
George of Pisidia, a deacon of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople in the seventh century, is no 
doubt best known as a Byzantine poet laureate who advanced the imperial mythology of the reign 
of Heraclius. Among his epics is the 
Hexaemeron
, a panegyric which integrates commentary on 
the six-day creation (Genesis 1:1‒2:3) into a grand exaltation of Heraclius, extolling him as the 
“deliverer of the world” (κοσμορύστης) by his defeat of the Persians, thus effectively inaugurating a 
“new creation.” Cultural historians of Byzantium have largely treated this epic as a highly developed 
piece of political rhetoric, with little attention to its actual place within the long tradition of Greek 
patristic Hexaemeral commentary. Historians of patristic exegesis of Genesis, on the other hand, 
have largely ignored George’s 
Hexaemeron
, leaving it within the domain of political propaganda. My 
essay will explore the continuities and discontinuities of George’s 
Hexemeron
with the antecedent 
commentary tradition, and will argue that George indeed desired to be taken seriously, not just as 
a panegyrist, but as a theological commentator on the origins of the world, albeit in the service of 
imperial theology and eschatology. Indeed, George’s use of the Genesis cosmogony as a buttress 
for eulogizing Heraclius as savior of the world would have fallen flat had there not already been 
a well-developed pattern, in Greek patristic exegesis of the six-day creation story, of insinuating 
soteriology into the interpretation of the origins of the world, and of depicting the Creator’s ongoing 
creative work as one of ever “saving” his creation from nonbeing.

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