Justified True Belief

(●) The deacon who taught Christian doctrine by writing songs, and whose hymns the Syriac churches have been singing ever since. + In a fourth-century market town almost nobody could read, and almost everybody could sing. Women sang at the loom, men sang on the road, and a tune that caught on went through a city in a week and stayed in people’s heads for forty years. Ephrem understood what that was worth. When rival teachers in his city put their doctrines into catchy verse, he did not answer with a treatise. He answered with better songs, and he taught them to choirs who sang them in church. He is the greatest of the fourth-century theologians who wrote neither in Greek nor in Latin. His language was Syriac, the dialect of Aramaic spoken in and around Edessa, a close cousin of the Aramaic that Jesus spoke, and his mind worked in images rather than in definitions: a pearl, a mirror, a garment, a lamp, a river. While Athanasius and the Cappadocians were hammering out the vocabulary of the Nicene faith in Greek philosophical terms, Ephrem was teaching the same faith in metaphors a farmer could carry home. He never rose higher than deacon, an ordained assistant who serves the congregation and the bishop rather than presiding, and the Syriac churches gave him a better title anyway: the Harp of the Spirit. One fact measures how large he loomed. In the Greek church his reputation grew so vast that later writers began publishing their own sermons under his name, and the catalog of Greek texts attributed to Ephrem is longer than that of any other ancient Christian author except John Chrysostom. Most of them are not his. The real Ephrem had to be dug out from under his own fame, and that work was finished only in the twentieth century. His dates are of two kinds, and the difference matters. The death is a record. The Chronicle of Edessa, a Syriac chronicle compiled in the sixth century from city archives, notes that Mar Ephrem (mar is the Syriac word of honor, my lord) departed from the world on the ninth of Haziran (June) in the Greek year 684, which is 9 June 373. The birth is only a reckoning, because no ancient source states the year at all. The conventional c. 306 comes from a much later Syriac Life, which says only that he was born in the days of Constantine, and some scholars argue for a date a few years earlier still.

(●) c. 306 AD: He was born at Nisibis, a Roman garrison city on the Persian border, and raised in the faith. + Nisibis sat on the far eastern edge of the Roman world, in Mesopotamia, where the empire stopped and Persia began. It was a walled city with a river running past it, a mixed population of Aramaic speakers, Greeks, Jews and Persians, and a garrison, because everyone knew what it was for. Rome held Nisibis the way a man holds a door. Later biographers made his childhood dramatic. One Syriac Life says his father was a pagan priest in the service of an idol, and that the boy was thrown out of the house for becoming a Christian. Ephrem himself says otherwise, in a line from the twenty-sixth of his hymns against the heresies: he was born in the way of truth, and though his boyhood did not understand how great a gift that was, he knew it when trouble came. The plain reading is that his parents were Christians, and that the pagan-priest story grew later, because a conversion makes a better opening chapter than an ordinary Christian home.

(●) c. 338 AD: He was teaching the church at Nisibis by the year Bishop Jacob died, and he stayed a deacon for the rest of his life. + Jacob of Nisibis was one of the bishops who sat at the Council of Nicaea in 325, the council that produced the creed most churches still recite, and he died in 338. A later Syriac Life says that Jacob himself picked the young man out and appointed him; what Ephrem’s own hymns show is that he served under Jacob and honored him afterwards. Either way he became what the Syriac sources call a malpana, a teacher: not a professor with a chair, but the man in a congregation who catechized the young, answered the arguments going around the market, and wrote the material everybody would learn by heart. He was also a member of an order that has no exact Western equivalent. The bnay qyama, the sons and daughters of the covenant, were men and women who took vows of celibacy and simplicity and then stayed exactly where they were, on the same street and in the same congregation as everybody else, rather than withdrawing to a desert. Syriac Christianity had this before it had monasteries, and it is why Ephrem spent his life among the people he was writing for rather than away from them. The daughters of the covenant are also the reason he had singers ready when he needed them. He never became a priest or a bishop. What he did instead was stay, through four bishops of Nisibis in succession, Jacob, Babu, Vologeses and Abraham, and he wrote hymns about all four. In one of them he sets them side by side and tells the new bishop to be a wall like Jacob, tender like Babu, and a treasury of speech like Vologeses.

(●) 350 AD: The Persian king turned a river against the walls of Nisibis, and Ephrem wrote the city’s prayers for it. + Constantine died in 337, and Shapur II of Persia came west. Nisibis was besieged three times, in 338, in 346, and in 350, and the third attempt was the one nobody forgot. Shapur dammed the Mygdonius, the river that ran beside the city, and let the water build until he could release it against the wall. A section came down. Then the ground the flood had made turned to mud, the Persian cavalry and elephants bogged in it, and the defenders threw up a new wall behind the breach while the army in front of them stuck fast. What Ephrem wrote during that siege is unlike anything else from the century, because he does not write about the city. He writes as the city. Nisibis speaks in the first person, compares herself to Noah’s ark, and asks God to do again what he did after the flood. The refrain of the first hymn is the city’s own prayer: “Stretch forth Thy bow against the flood, for lo! it has lifted up its waves against our walls!” Seventy-seven of these poems survive as the Nisibene Hymns, and that first one speaks of the water as still lifting against the wall. The three sieges all failed, which mattered to him. He spent the rest of his life convinced that God had spared the city, and that made what happened thirteen years later harder to bear.

(●) 363 AD: A treaty handed Nisibis to Persia, and at about sixty he walked away from the only home he had known. + The emperor Julian, who had abandoned Christianity and was trying to restore the old gods, invaded Persia in 363 and was killed there. His army was stranded deep in enemy country, and the officers raised a new emperor, Jovian, who bought his way out with a treaty. One of its terms was Nisibis. The city that had held off three sieges was signed over without a fight, and Ammianus Marcellinus, who served on that campaign, says the whole population was given three days to get out. Ephrem was somewhere around sixty, and everything he had was there. The four hymns he wrote against Julian belong to these weeks, and they are not detached theology; they are the work of a man watching a dead emperor’s body carried past the walls of the city his policy had cost. He went west and settled at Edessa, about a hundred and fifty miles away, the great Syriac-speaking Christian city of the region, where he would spend the ten years he had left.

(●) 363 to 373 AD: At Edessa he answered rival teachers by setting true doctrine to the tunes their followers were already singing. + Edessa was crowded with groups who all called themselves the church, so that a stranger asking his way to the Christians would have had to be asked back which ones he meant. There were Marcionites, who held that the God of the Old Testament was a lesser and harsher god than the Father of Jesus. There were Manichees, followers of the Persian teacher Mani, who taught that light and darkness are two eternal powers locked in a war. There were Bardaisanites, the school of the Edessene philosopher Bardaisan. And there were Arians, who denied that the Son was fully God. Ephrem complains in the twenty-second hymn against heresies that his own congregation did not even own the name Christian in that city: “They called us Palutians,” he writes, after an early bishop of Edessa, and he wants the label gone. Bardaisan and Mani had both written in verse, and their songs were popular. Ephrem’s response was to take the form away from them. The historian Sozomen, writing about seventy years later, says that Bardaisan’s son Harmonius had been the first to set Syriac to metre and music, that his songs carried his father’s errors along with the tune, and that Ephrem learned those metres and put church doctrine into them, so that the Syrians went on singing by the same rule of song with Ephrem’s words in it. That is the fourth-century equivalent of writing new lyrics to a song everyone can already hum. Jacob of Serugh, a Syriac bishop and poet of the century after, says he trained choirs of women, the daughters of the covenant, to sing these hymns in the services, and for that calls him a second Moses for womankind. It worked, and it kept working. The hymns Ephrem wrote in those ten years, against heresies, on faith, on virginity, on paradise, on the church, are the backbone of Syriac worship to this day.

(●) 373 AD: A famine brought him out of his cell to run a relief operation, and he died a few days after it ended. + In his last years Ephrem lived as a solitary in a cell on the rocky hill outside Edessa, among other ascetics. Then the harvest failed. Sozomen tells the story: Ephrem came down into the city and rebuked the rich for letting the poor die around them while their own storehouses were full. They answered that they had no one they could trust to distribute the grain. He offered himself, and they accepted. He set about three hundred beds in the public porticoes and nursed the sick and the starving there, foreigners and citizens alike, for as long as the famine lasted. “On the cessation of the famine,” Sozomen writes, “he returned to the cell in which he had previously dwelt; and, after the lapse of a few days, he expired.” The Chronicle of Edessa gives the date: 9 June 373. Sozomen tells one more story about him, and it fits the man. When a delegation came to make him a bishop, he ran into the market square, dragged his clothes about, walked crookedly and ate in public until they concluded he had lost his mind and went away to ordain somebody else. He had been a deacon for decades, and a deacon he stayed.

What He Taught

(T1) God is not a thing the mind can measure, and the wise response to that is praise rather than prying. + A swimmer can go a long way out and still be perfectly safe, and the sea does not mind being swum in. What the sea will not tolerate is being sounded to the bottom by a man holding his breath. That is Ephrem’s picture of theology, and he uses it against the fashionable religious argument of his day. The argument came from the Arian controversy. Arius and the teachers who followed him had claimed that the Son was a creature, made by the Father before all other things, and their later followers pressed the point with sharp logical machinery: if the Son is begotten, there was a moment before he was begotten, so there was when he was not. Ephrem does not answer this with a rival syllogism. He answers that the whole enterprise is a category mistake. The mind that is doing the investigating is itself a made thing, and a made thing cannot get around behind its maker to inspect him. He calls the attempt “scrutiny,” and he thinks it produces heat rather than light: prayer and prying come from the same mouth, he says, and only one of them is listening. This is not anti-intellectualism, and it is worth being careful here. Ephrem wrote thousands of lines of dense theological argument, much of it aimed at Marcion and Mani with real philosophical force. What he refuses is the claim to have understood God’s inner nature well enough to draw conclusions from it. Scripture says the same thing in its own idiom: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord” (Isaiah 55:8), and Paul breaks off an argument about God’s purposes with “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” (Romans 11:33). Ephrem’s contribution is to make that boundary into poetry a congregation can sing, so that the doctrine of God’s incomprehensibility arrives as reverence rather than as a rebuke.

(Q) "Search thou out the sea, but search not out the Lord of the sea!" + Source: Ephrem, The Pearl (Hymns on Faith), Hymn I.3 (Morris translation, Oxford Library of the Fathers, reprinted in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers II.13). The pearl in the poem has begun to speak, and it is telling the poet where his questions may go. Ephrem then adds the image that makes the point stick: divers who came down after the pearl turned back astonished from the middle of the sea to the dry ground. “Who would linger and be searching on into the depths of the Godhead?”

(T2) God put on a body, because a body was the only thing we could bear to look at. + Ephrem’s favorite word for the Incarnation is not a philosophical term at all. It is the ordinary Syriac verb for getting dressed. God puts on a body, the way you put on a coat, and the whole of salvation history is a wardrobe: Adam was clothed in glory and lost it, God clothed himself in Adam’s body to give it back, Christ put on swaddling clothes at birth, the waters at his baptism, linen cloths in the tomb, and the baptized person puts on Christ. It is a plain image, and Ephrem gets an enormous amount out of it. He gets the humility of it first. The Majesty is described as bowing down, the Most High as sucking milk, the one who holds all things as lying in a manger. But he also gets the logic. Why a body at all? Because people worship what they can see, and God met them in the place where they had gone wrong. “He drew us not by force,” Ephrem writes, and that line carries the whole theology: the Creator did not overpower his creatures, he came into their form and healed them from inside it. Behind this stands a principle Ephrem states everywhere: God “put on names” in Scripture before he put on a body. When the Bible calls God a shepherd, a rock, a father, a man of war, it is not describing his nature; it is stooping to a human vocabulary the way an adult stoops to a child’s. The Incarnation is that same stooping carried to its end. John says it flatly: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). What Ephrem adds is that the stooping is not a departure from God’s character. It is the clearest thing about it.

(Q) "God saw that mankind worship things created: He put on a created body, that in our custom He might capture us. Lo! in this our form, He that formed us healed us; and in this created shape, our Creator gave us life. He drew us not by force." + Source: Ephrem, Hymns on the Nativity XIV.12 (Johnston translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers II.13). A Christmas hymn, written to be sung by a congregation on the night of the feast. The stanza just before it has the infant in the manger throwing the Evil One down from his throne, and the stanza just after it has Mary singing her son to sleep while the seraphim cry “Holy.” Ephrem puts the doctrine of the Incarnation between a lullaby and a war.

(T3) Everything God made carries a hint of him, and Scripture is what teaches a reader to see it. + Ephrem has a word he uses constantly, raza, usually translated “mystery” or “symbol.” It does not mean a puzzle and it does not mean a mere illustration. A raza is a real thing in the world that genuinely carries something of a greater reality, the way a wedding ring is not a picture of a marriage but a piece of it. In Ephrem’s universe these are everywhere: in the pearl, the rainbow, the olive tree, the lamp, the grain of wheat, and above all in the events of the Old Testament, which carry the shape of Christ before he arrives. The finest example is the poem he built out of a pearl he was handed one day. He turns it over in his palm, and one small object keeps opening: it is white and undivided, like the truth; it was conceived in the sea without seed, like the virgin birth; it is drawn up out of the depths by divers who risk their lives, like a soul rescued from death; kings wear it in a crown. He says it filled him in the place of books. Two things keep this from becoming a game in which any object can be made to mean anything. The first is that Ephrem always reads the symbol in the light of Scripture, never the other way around; the Bible teaches him the alphabet and the world is what he reads with it. The second is that he holds nature and Scripture together as two witnesses to one author, so that a symbol is a genuine discovery about a world God actually made rather than a private association. It is the habit of mind Paul assumes when he says that God’s invisible attributes have been clearly perceived in the things that have been made (Romans 1:20), and the reason Ephrem’s poetry, sixteen centuries on, still reads as attention rather than as decoration.

(Q) "On a certain day a pearl did I take up, my brethren; I saw in it mysteries pertaining to the Kingdom; semblances and types of the Majesty; it became a fountain, and I drank out of it mysteries of the Son." + Source: Ephrem, The Pearl (Hymns on Faith), Hymn I.1 (Morris translation, Oxford Library of the Fathers, reprinted in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers II.13). The opening lines of the cycle. What follows is one of the strangest and most beautiful things in patristic literature: five hymns of theology drawn out of a single object held in the hand, including the line that it showed “faces on all sides,” from which he concludes that the Son is beyond comprehension because he is wholly light (T1).

(T4) Death took hold of one man and lost everything. + Ephrem’s way of teaching the cross and the resurrection is to write a scene and let the losing side speak. Death and Satan come on as characters with voices, and what they mostly do is complain: they compare notes on how well things used to go, and then they work out, too late, what has happened to them, while the reader sits and watches the realization arrive. The logic underneath the drama is old and serious. Death has authority over sinners; it took hold of a man who owed it nothing, and in doing so overreached and forfeited its claim. Ephrem tells it as a glutton who swallowed something that would not go down, and his Death is genuinely funny in its self-pity: it has been made to fast, it says, and it never used to know what fasting was. The comedy is doing theological work. A tyrant you can laugh at is a tyrant whose power over you has broken. The New Testament makes the same argument without the stage directions: “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery” (Hebrews 2:14–15). Ephrem’s congregation got that doctrine as a song with parts in it, and the man who wrote it would spend his last months nursing the starving with his own hands.

(Q) "Gluttonous Death, lamented and said, I have learned fasting, which I used not to know; lo! Jesus gathers multitudes, but as to me, in His feast a fast is proclaimed for me. One man has closed my mouth, mine who have closed the mouths of many." + Source: Ephrem, Nisibene Hymns XXXV.6 (Stopford translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers II.13). The hymn is titled “Concerning Our Lord, and Concerning Death and Satan.” Satan has called a council of his forces after the resurrection, and one by one they report what they have suffered. Sin speaks, then the Evil One, then Death, then Hell. The refrain the congregation sings back is “To Thee be glory because the Evil One saw Thee and was troubled!”

(Q) "And I who have become a lamb endowed with speech, unto Thee, O God of Abraham, in the posture of Abram will give Thee praise. Blessed be He Who has made me His harp!" + Source: Ephrem, Nisibene Hymns XVII.12 and its refrain (Stopford translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers II.13). He is closing a hymn written for the accession of Abraham, the fourth bishop of Nisibis under whom he served, and he signs it by calling himself the offscouring of the flock. The image he reaches for in the last line is the one the Syriac churches would hand back to him: they call him the Harp of the Spirit.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The churches sang him long before scholars studied him, and they have never stopped. + The reception began while he was alive. Sozomen reports that his works were translated into Greek during his own lifetime and kept their force in translation, and Jerome, writing in Bethlehem within twenty years of Ephrem’s death, records the honor that tells you most: “Ephraim, deacon of the church at Edessa, composed many works in the Syriac language, and became so distinguished that his writings are repeated publicly in some churches, after the reading of the Scriptures. I once read in Greek a volume by him On the Holy Spirit, which some one had translated from the Syriac, and recognized even in translation, the incisive power of lofty genius.” (Lives of Illustrious Men 115, Richardson translation.) Read aloud in church after the Scripture lesson, in his own century, by congregations who had never met him. Few Christian teachers have ever been given that place, and in the Syriac churches Ephrem still has it. Across communities that have been divided from one another for fifteen hundred years, from the Mediterranean to the Tigris and on to the ancient churches of southern India, the services are stitched through with his hymns. A Syriac Christian is likely to be buried to words Ephrem wrote. The word for the form he made his own is madrasha, a teaching hymn: stanzas of fixed syllable count, sung by a choir, with a short refrain the whole congregation answers between verses. The refrain is the pedagogy. It is the line the people take home.

(†) His name traveled further than his writings, and it took centuries to sort out what was actually his. + Fame of that size attracts freight. Greek writers began issuing sermons under Ephrem’s name, those were translated into Latin, Armenian, Georgian, Arabic, Coptic, Ethiopic and Slavonic, and the pile kept growing for a thousand years. The standard catalog of Greek patristic works lists texts attributed to Ephrem under more than two hundred and fifty numbers, second only to John Chrysostom, and scholars now judge that this Greek corpus is only occasionally authentic. Several pieces in it turned out to belong to the Macarian homilies, a Greek collection on the spiritual life that travels under the name of Macarius the Egyptian and was not written by him either. The Lenten prayer recited across the Eastern churches as the Prayer of Saint Ephrem is almost certainly not his, and neither is the widely copied Testament of Ephrem. What this cost is worth saying plainly: for most of Christian history, the West met a man who was largely not there. The Latin Ephrem was translated from the Greek Ephrem, and the Greek Ephrem was mostly somebody else. Rome honored the figure anyway. Pope Benedict XV declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1920, under the title Doctor of the Syrians. A Doctor of the Church is a writer whose teaching Rome commends to the whole body of the faithful, and the list is a short one. The real recovery is recent and is mostly the work of two men. Dom Edmund Beck, a Benedictine, produced critical editions of the genuine Syriac hymn cycles between the 1950s and the 1970s, rebuilding each text by setting the surviving manuscripts side by side and working out what the copyists had added or lost, and in doing so he separated what Ephrem wrote from what had attached itself to him; on his judgment, even most of the hymns on Epiphany long printed among his works are not his. Sebastian Brock then put the genuine Ephrem into readable English and argued his case as a theologian rather than a curiosity. Along the way the lost Syriac original of his commentary on Tatian’s Diatessaron, the second-century gospel harmony that Syriac churches used in place of four separate Gospels, turned up in a manuscript acquired by the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. The man read in English today is closer to the man of 373 than the man read in Latin in 1500.

(†) Where his own record will not bear defending: the hymns he wrote against the Jews. + Honesty requires the other column of the ledger, and in Ephrem’s case it is not hard to find. A run of his hymns on unleavened bread, sung in Holy Week, and one of the Nisibene hymns attack the Jews of his own cities in language that goes well past argument. He warns Christians away from eating with Jewish neighbors and from keeping their feasts, which was a live issue, since plenty of Christians in Nisibis and Edessa did both. He then goes further. In the sixty-seventh of the Nisibene hymns he puts the abuse in the mouth of Death, who says he hates the Jewish dead, wishes there were some way to be rid of their bones because they make Sheol stink, and marvels that he has had to lodge so long among a people who smell as rank as their way of life. Three things should be said, and none of them cancels the others. The setting was real: these were small competing communities in the same streets, the synagogue was strong and attractive, and Ephrem was a pastor who thought he was losing people. The rhetoric was conventional: fourth-century polemic went for the throat in every direction, and Ephrem wrote with the same heat against Marcion, Mani, Bardaisan and Julian. And the rhetoric is still indefensible, because contempt for a people is not an argument about anything, and he directed it at the people from whom the promises and the Messiah came. Paul had settled the matter three centuries earlier, in the passage any Christian polemicist against the Jews had to get around. “They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever” (Romans 9:4–5). To Gentile Christians inclined to feel superior he gives an order: “do not be arrogant toward the branches. If you are, remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you” (Romans 11:18). And he closes the argument by insisting that God has not finished with Israel: “For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). Ephrem knew those chapters. On this one subject he did not sing what they say.