The Church Fathers · c. 730–749
The Paschal Canon and the Hymns
John of Damascus · c. 675 – c. 749
What it is
The canon sung at the Orthodox Easter midnight service — the day of resurrection, let us be radiant, O people — together with the funeral idiomela, which ask what earthly sweetness remains unmixed with grief, and answer that all is weaker than a shadow.
Why it lasted
The best-known hymnody in the Eastern churches, sung unchanged every Easter and at every Orthodox funeral for twelve hundred years. The same man who argued the case for images wrote the words most Orthodox Christians actually know by heart.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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