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Please reference as: Tamboukou, Maria. 2025. 'Kassia on friendship', https://sites.google.com/site/mariatamboukoupersonalblog/home/research-projects/soundscapes-and-echoes/kassia/kassia-on-friendship
Reading Fragments
A classic theological reading of Kassia’s gnomic verses on friendship would approach them as an articulation of Christian moral philosophy grounded in the synthesis of patristic ethics, classical virtue traditions, and ascetic practice. It would emphasize the ways in which Kassia integrates the vocabulary of discernment (diakrisis), gratitude, and divine love (agape) into a coherent vision of the Christian life. Within this framework, friendship becomes a site for exercising spiritual discernment, cultivating virtue, and participating in the divine order through imitation of the sacred. The gnomic form—aphoristic, balanced, and didactic—serves as a pedagogical vehicle for transmitting moral wisdom, guiding the reader in distinguishing genuine friendship from worldly attachment or self-interest. The emphasis falls on moral exemplarity, the purification of the soul, and the alignment of human affect with divine will. In this sense, the verses appear as an extension of the theological anthropology of the Byzantine monastic tradition: a meditation on how the rightly ordered self relates to others through the mediation of divine love. [1]
A new materialist reading, by contrast, moves away from this moral and theological hermeneutic toward an exploration of the relational and affective materiality at work in the text. Rather than interpreting friendship as a moral category or a reflection of divine order, it examines how the verses themselves enact and circulate affect—how rhythm, sound, and metaphor generate a field of relations that entangle human, metaphysical, and environmental forces. Attention shifts from the interpretive labour of discernment to the vibrancy of the text’s language and form: the way its aphorisms pulse with repetition, resonance, and sensory charge. In this perspective, friendship is not only an ethical or theological concept but also a mode of connectivity that exceeds human intentionality, registering the mutual shaping of voice, emotion, and material atmosphere. It is within this vibrating texture of relation that new materialist motifs begin to surface—of rhythm and resonance, breath and embodiment, the porous thresholds between voice and world.
"Kassia", © Gama Neaves
Friendship as Vibrant Relation
“A friend sharing his sufferings with his dearest friends
finds relaxation from extreme distress.”
The rhythm here does what it describes: it loosens, releases, softens. Suffering, when shared, becomes lighter. Friendship is not just moral support—it is a material practice that changes the affective density of pain. This is what Karen Barad (2007) calls intra-action: the idea that meaning and matter are co-created through relations, rather than pre-existing entities that interact. Kassia’s friendship is precisely this kind of process—an entanglement that makes both self and other anew through shared feelings.
More Than Metaphor: The Ethics of Things
“Take an understanding friend to your bosom as you would gold,
but avoid the foolish one just as you would a serpent.”
Kassia’s verses pulse with nonhuman actors—gold, serpents, pearls, honey. In her imagery, materials are never passive. Gold glows, endures, attracts; the serpent coils, deceives, strikes. These are not symbols but participants in an ethical ecology. Kassia’s world is alive with material agency, much like Jane Bennett’s vision of “vibrant matter” (2010), where things possess their own forces and propensities. By bringing friendship into contact with material vitality, Kassia imagines ethics as ecological: an ongoing negotiation between people, feelings, and the matter that surrounds them. Friendship, then, is not separate from the world—it is how the world coheres.
Affective Economies and the Flow of Gratitude
“A little is the most, if the friend is grateful,
but to the ungrateful the most is the least.”
Kassia often measures friendship through the flows of gratitude and reciprocity: This is not moral arithmetic—it’s an affective economy. Gratitude amplifies the energy of relation; ingratitude blocks it. As Rosi Braidotti suggests in The Posthuman (2013), ethics emerges from our capacity to sustain vital intensities across bodies and relations. Kassia’s friends, grateful or otherwise, are part of this circulation of vitality. The moral life is not an abstract ideal—it is a material rhythm, an ongoing choreography of giving and receiving.
The Fence and the Dwelling
“The love of friends forms a protective fence.
Wealth without friends is a dark dwelling place.”
Perhaps most striking are Kassia’s spatial metaphors. The fence is not a barrier but a boundary that holds the fragile space of relation together—a topology of care. The dark dwelling, by contrast, is a space where vitality cannot circulate. This spatial imagination aligns with Donna Haraway’s notion of sympoiesis, or “making-with” (2016): the idea that living systems exist only through collective processes of maintenance. For Kassia, friendship is such a structure of co-making. It builds shelter, sustains community, and keeps vitality in motion. Her verses imagine a social architecture that is both material and affective—what we might call a monastic ecology of relation.
Crisis and Revelation
“A crisis will reveal a true friend;
for he will not desert the one who is his friend.”
Here friendship becomes temporal, not static. It reveals itself through transformation and endurance. Elizabeth Grosz (2004) reminds us that becoming, not being, is the essence of matter: stability is what change looks like across time. Kassia’s crisis is such a moment of material revelation—when relation shows itself as the most enduring form of care.
Kassia and the Genealogical Thread
Reading Kassia’s gnomic verses through the lens of feminist new materialisms invites a reimagining of authorship and composition. The abbess who gave voice to the divine also spoke to the living—her aphorisms unfolding as fragments that translate theology into the cadence of the everyday. In her hands, composition extends beyond music into the ethical tuning of relation. Within the genealogy of women composers, Kassia emerges as both musician and thinker of relation, one who lets thought and sound vibrate together as intertwined materials—words resonating with the same ethical pulse as chant. Her gnomic verses thus appear not as moral afterthoughts to her hymns, but as experiments in relational ontology, where ethics, matter, and friendship are composed in rhythm.
This reading of Kassia unfolds within the wider horizon of my project on writing feminist genealogies, which rethinks history through fragments, discontinuities, and the writing practices of women. Rather than following a linear chain of influence, the genealogical method listens for the conditions of emergence—how women’s voices surface in the folds of discourse, archive, and material life. To read Kassia in this way is to release her from the solitude of exception and to hear her instead as part of a continuum of women who think through form itself, where writing becomes a mode of ethical and ontological inquiry. Her secular verses, like her hymns, open spaces of material thought—sites where friendship, matter, and language intra-act in the resonance of becoming. Feminist genealogy, then, is less an act of recovery than of recomposition: a tracing of the lines through which women’s creative labour continues to imagine the world otherwise.
Notes
[1] For an extended discussion of Kassia’s theological and literary legacy, see Sherry 2013, Silvas 2006, Simic 2011, Tripolitis 1992.
References
Barad, Karen. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bennett, Jane. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Durham: Duke University Press.
Braidotti, Rosi. (2013)The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Grosz, Elizabeth. (2004) The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham: Duke University Press.
Haraway, Donna J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Sherry, Kurt (2013) Kassia the Nun in Context: The Religious Thought of a Ninth-Century Byzantine Monastic. New Jersey: Gorgias Press.
Silvas, Anna M. (2006) “Kassia the Nun c. 810–865: An Appreciation” in Byzantine Women: Varieties of Experience 800–1200, ed. Lynda Garland, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 17–39.
Simic, Kosta (2011) “Kassia’s hymnography in the light of patristic sources and earlier hymnographical works,” Zbornik radova Vizantoloskog instituta 48: 7–37.
Tripolitis, Antonia (ed. & trans., 1992) Kassia: The Legend, the Woman, and Her Work. Garland library of medieval literature, New York.
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