44
[19]
Undoubtedly there are many reasons behind
this wide divergence of judgments in the Anglophone world about
the attractiveness of Ephraem's verses, ranging from poor translations
based on poor editions, to the vagaries of personal taste. But
it may also be the case that readers have in some instances failed
to make the distinction that Robert Murray noted some years ago
between the speculative theology one expects in the works of some
major patristic writers in Greek, and what many call the 'symbolic
theology' of Ephraem. Murray put the point memorably when he wrote:
Ephrem refuses to answer the Arians by developing speculative theology on the orthodox side, as both Athanasius and the Cappadocians did; he sticks to his symbolism and demands that the mystery remain veiled. Not fides quaerens intellectum but fides adorans mysterium!45
[20]
In fact no small part of the universal
appeal of St. Ephraem the Syrian, especially in more recent times,
has been his distrust of human rationalism as a sufficient guide
to religious truth. In this connection, commentators have been
fond of quoting Ephraem's words in connection with the 'Arian'
controversies of his day. He wrote in his Hymns on Faith:
Blessed is the one who has not tasted
the bitter poison of the wisdom of the Greeks.
Blessed is the one who has not let slip
the simplicity of the apostles.46
[21]
Ephraem rejected the idea that the articles
of faith could be determined by academic research, or by intellectual
scrutiny that put dialectic ahead of believing. It was this position
that put him on a collision course with some of the more academically
inclined theologians of his day, especially in the Greek-speaking
world. He spoke of the "accursed dialectic (drãshâ)"
as "a hidden worm from the Greeks."47 But by 'Greeks'
(yawnãyê) Ephraem did not mean contemporary
churchmen who wrote in Greek such as Athanasius (c. 300-373)
or Basil (330-379). He meant those who would measure the disclosures
of biblical revelation solely by the logic of the 'Hellenic' canons
of reason, men such as the followers Arius (c. 260-336) or Aetius
(c. 300-370), whom Greek Christian writers themselves would be
inclined to call 'Hellenes'.48 Ephraem, for his part, thought
that the proper posture for a Christian was an attitude of prayer
and praise, arising from the contemplation of the mysteries God
has strewn in both nature and scripture to lead the human mind
to divinity. This line of thinking has endeared Ephraem to many
generations of Christians, and it found its most beautiful and
fetching expression in the poetry of his madrãshê,
the "teaching songs," to use Andrew Palmer's apt phrase
for them,49 which have found a welcome reception in the post-modern
world, so tired of rationalism, but deeply drawn to the revelatory
power of metaphor and symbol.
VII
[22]
According to Ephraem, what one finds in
Nature and Scripture are the types and symbols, along with the
names and titles, by means of which the invisible God reveals
himself to the eyes and minds of persons of good faith, and which
prepare them to recognize the incarnate Word of God in Jesus of
Nazareth. In one stanza from his Hymns on Virginity he
says the following about the incarnate Son and his symbols and
types:
In every place, if you look, his symbol is there,
and wherever you read, you will find his types.
For in him all creatures were created
and he traced his symbols on his property.
When he was creating the world,
he looked to adorn it with icons of himself.
The springs of his symbols were opened up to run down and
pour forth his symbols into his members.50
[23]
Similarly, in one of his hymns for the
liturgy of Maundy Thursday Ephraem speaks of the symbols and types
of God's Son and Messiah to be found in the scriptures. He says,
in allusion to the 'Arianism' which he combats in so many of his
texts:
Those doctrines are put to shame
which have alienated the Son.
See, the Law carries
all the liknesses of him.
See, the Prophets, like deacons, carry
the icons of the Messiah.
Nature and Scripture
together carry
the symbols of his humanity
and of his divinity.51
[24]
What Ephraem commends to the spiritually
starved is nothing less than the prayerful practice of lectio
divina, allied with an appropriate sense of intellectual humility.
In one stanza of the Hymns on Faith he gives this advice:
Let us not allow ourselves to go astray
and to study our God.
Lest us take the measure of our mind,
and gauge the range of our thinking.
Let us know how small our knowledge is,
too contemptible to scrutinize the Knower of All.52
[25]
The fact is, according to Ephraem, there
is a deep chasm (pehtâ)
between God and his creatures, which human knowledge cannot bridge,
but which love crosses.53 God, for his part, as a function of
His love for us, has provided for us, in human language, the symbols
and types, the names and metaphors, culminating in the Incarnate
Son, by which we may cross over to Him. Ephraem makes this point
clearly in a prayer he addresses to Jesus as the final strophe
in an acrostic madrãshâ which ends with the
middle letter of the Syriac alphabet, yodh, which is also
the first letter of the name 'Jesus' (Yeshûc).
He says,
O Jesus, glorious name,
hidden bridge which carries one over
from death to life,
I have come to a stop with you;
I finish with your letter yodh.
Be a bridge for my words
to cross over to your truth.
Make your love a bridge for your servant.
By means of you I shall cross over to your Father.
I will cross over and say, 'Blessed is the One
who has made his might tender in his offspring.'54
[26] The scriptures too are a bridge over the chasm that separates man from God, and in one of his Hymns
on Paradise, as he describes his reading of the book of Genesis,
Ephraem provides the perfect paradigm for the contemplative Christian
at prayer, Bible in hand. He says,
I read the opening of this book
and was filled with joy,
for its verses and lines
spread out their arms to welcome me;
the first rushed out and kissed me,
and led me on to its companion;
and when I reached that verse
wherein is written
the story of Paradise,
it lifted me up and transported me
from the bosom of the book
to the very bosom of Paradise.
The eye and the mind
traveled over the lines
as over a bridge, and entered together
the story of Paradise.
The eye as it read
transported the mind;
in return the mind, too,
gave the eye rest
from its reading,
for when the book had been read
the eye had rest
but the mind was engaged.
Both the bridge and the gate
of Paradise
did I find in this book.
I crossed over and entered;
my eye remained outside
but my mind entered within.
I began to wander
among things indescribable.
This is a luminous height,
clear, lofty and fair:
Scripture named it Eden,
the summit of all blessings.55
VIII
[27]
While Ephraem was thus a master poet of
the spiritual life, a biblical exegete, and even a religious polemicist
of considerable acumen,56 he was also a spiritual father, psychologically
astute, whose counsels were widely esteemed. It was this quality,
as much as any other, that contributed to his universal appeal.
For in the texts attributed to Ephraem that circulated so widely
outside of the Syriac-speaking milieu, in almost all the languages
of the late antique and medieval Christian world, especially in
the monastic communities where the icon of Ephraem Byzantinus
was cherished, advice for spiritual direction predominated. A
case in point is the so-called Sermo Asceticus, one of
those works ascribed to Ephraem Graecus, which, in the form in
which it survives in Greek, is to be found translated into almost
all the languages of early and medieval Christianity. As has been
remarked, it is "one of Ephraem's most read and most abused
writings"57 - abused in the sense that many writers in many
languages have made it their own by adding to it, shortening it,
and even moving its paragraphs around.
[28]
There are Latin, Coptic, Georgian, Arabic,
Armenian, Ethiopic, and Slavonic versions of the Sermo Asceticus
known to scholars, and in what seems to be its original Greek,
almost twenty passages from it have so far been found included
in other texts attributed to Ephraem Graecus.58 Latin sources
from as early as the seventh century can be cited in attestation
of the Sermo Asceticus as a work of Ephraem. The late seventh
century monk of Ligugé, Defensor, quotes from it some nine
times in his Liber Scintillarum, an ascetical compilation
which had a very wide circulation in monasteries in the west throughout
the Middle Ages.59 In addition to the Greek text, and the Latin
translation, the Sermo Asceticus has also been published
in its Coptic version, from a manuscript of the tenth century,
together with an English translation.60 The manuscript was written
in the year 973 A.D. at the Monastery of Saint Macarius of Idfu
in Egypt. But its Coptic version includes only about two-thirds
of the original Greek text.
[29]
The Sermo Asceticus is an extended
homily addressed to the monastic estate at large. There are no
specifics in it which might identify either the author or the
particular community to whom he spoke, or for whom he wrote. The
author speaks in the first person, and addresses the audience
in the plural as 'brethren' (adelfoí),
or 'beloved' (agaphtoí),
or occasionally as 'monks' (monacoí).
He talks of monastic garb, of night vigils with Psalms and hymns,
and of extended prayer and penance. A typical, exhortatory passage
is the following one:
O brethren, let us humble our souls with fasting and with sorrow, and with vigils by night, and let us walk in the truth. ... Let us mourn, so that the Holy Spirit may comfort us . . . especially we who have been made to be worthy of the conversation of the angels.61
[30]
The author is concerned about what he regards
as the decadent situation of the life of the monks of his day.
He complains that "the word of instruction has ceased to
prevail in our time, and that inasmuch as we are in a state of
ignorance our sins have multiplied."62 The Sermo Asceticus
exhorts the monks to return to the teachings of the fathers. Several
times the readers are reminded that "we are spiritual business
men (emporoí pneumatikoí),"
who should be concerned solely to seek the pearl of great price.
The 'habit does not make the monk,' the writer maintains, but
only the work of the truly moderate on who has learned to enjoy
the gifts of nature in the measure the Creator intended, and not
according to the appetites instilled in humans by habits of sin.
[31]
Of the thirty columns of Greek text which
it takes for the printing of the Sermo Asceticus in Assemani's
edition,63 only ninety-two lines of it can be found to be translated
from a Syriac original.64 That is to say, there was a Syriac Vorlage
for only a small part of it. Moreover, the nine translated passages
are for the most part brief, containing only a few lines; the
longest continuous passage, however, includes forty-three lines,
almost half the total. The translated passages are distributed
throughout the work, and hence, with the exception of the long
one, they are not concentrated on a single point. They are in
no way set apart, but are completely integrated into the discourse.
It is only the discerning eye of the modern scholar, searching
for evidence of the Syriac Vorlagen of the work, which
has discovered them and set them apart.
[32]
The Syriac works attributed to Ephraem
the Syrian from which the translated passages in the Sermo
Asceticus come are two: the so-called Sermo de Reprehensione
and the Sermo de Confessoribus et Martyribus. Both of these
texts are available in modern editions.65 In a couple of instances
the same passage quoted in the Sermo Asceticus appears
in more than one Syriac work attributed to Ephraem. This circumstance
recalls the somewhat fluid state of some texts attributed to Ephraem
in the fifth and sixth centuries, when in the Graeco-Syrian monastic
communities in the Syriac-speaking world the major collections
of the Syriac works of Ephraem were being assembled. In some instances
editors and compilers somewhat arbitrarily shifted verses by Ephraem
from collection to collection, and sometimes they completed one
compilation with lines by other writers done in the style of Ephraem
and on themes favored by him. This kind of activity is testimony
not only to Ephraem's popularity and authority in the Syriac-speaking
churches, but also to the essentially public-service character
of much of his writing. Later people who used his work saw no
reason why they should not adapt it to their immediate purposes;
some of them composed whole works in the style of Ephraem.
[33]
In regard to the two Syriac works from
which quotations are drawn in the Sermo Asceticus, it is
the current scholarly opinion that the portions of the De Reprehensione
quoted in the text do in fact come from the pen of Ephraem.66
On the other hand, it seems that the hymns De Confessoribus
attributed to Ephraem in the manuscript tradition were actually
composed in the generation after his lifetime by writers consciously
working on the model of his style and concerns.67 So it turns
out that for the most part the Sermo Asceticus has nothing
much literally to do with the authentic Syriac works of Ephraem,
with the exception of several phrases quoted in Greek translation
from the Sermo de Reprehensione. And yet, the work often
breathes with the spirit of Ephraem, sometimes using words and
phrases with a distinctly Ephraemian ring to them, although the
composition as a whole is cast in a monastic framework that would
have been unfamiliar to Ephraem.
[34]
This does not mean that the Sermo Asceticus
is simply a forgery and that the Ephraem known in the monastic
communities of the east and west in the Middle Ages and in modern
times has no connection at all with the Syriac-speaking 'teacher'
(malpãnâ) and melodist of Nisibis and Edessa.
Rather, it seems more reasonable to see the Greek compositions
and their many versions as a natural outgrowth of the tendency
that began already in Ephraem's lifetime for those deeply affected
by him not only to collect his work and make compilations of it
in the original language, but to adapt his insights and teachings
to ever new settings and new languages, often preserving only
the acuity of his spiritual insights, clothed in a completely
unfamiliar idiom. In other words, one can see in the numerous
productions of Ephraem Graecus, the beginnings of the universal
appeal of St. Ephraem the Syrian, filtered through a new fashion
of Christian spirituality, which grew steadily from its origins
in the Egyptian deserts and elsewhere in the fourth century, until
the point when expressions attributed to Ephraem in the new mode,
and often encapsulating his insights, reached virtually a canonical
status by their not infrequent quotation in texts included in
the Philokalia, in the work of Peter Damaskenos (fl. c.
1156/7).68 In this way St. Ephraem the Syrian became in fact a
spiritual father for the whole church. Even Pope Benedict XV,
who declared him a Doctor of the Universal Chruch, marvelled that
"holy and orthodox fathers and doctors, from Basil, Chrysostom
and Jerome, to Francis de Sales and Alphonsus Liguori," could
sing Ephraem's praises in one voice.69
IX
[35]
It is not appropriate to end these reflections
on the universal appeal of St. Ephraem the Syrian without ourselves
asking for a word of advice from so widely esteemed a spiritual
father. For this purpose I have chosen a passage from his second
mêmrâ "On Reproof," from the same
material that so inspired the composer of the Greek Sermo Asceticus.
Ephraem wrote:
Let us be builders of our own minds
into temples suitable for God.
If the Lord dwells in your house,
honor will come to your door.
How much your 'honor' will increase
if God dwells within you.
Be a sanctuary for him, even a priest,
and serve him within your temple.
Just as for your sake he became
High priest, sacrifice, and libation;
you, for his sake, become
temple, priest, and sacrificial offering.
Since your mind will become a temple,
do not leave any filth in it;
do not leave in God's house
anything hateful to God.
Let us be adorned as God's house,
with what is attractive to God.
If anger is there,
lewdness abides there too;
if rage is there,
fumes will rise up from there.
Expel grudges from there,
and jealousy, whose reek is abhorent.
Bring in and install love there,
as a censer full of fragrant incense.
Gather up and take the dung out,
odious liaisons and bad habits.
Strew good fellowship around it,
like blossoms and flowers.
But instead of roses and lilies,
decorate it with prayers.70
_______
Notes
1
See Benedict XV, "Principi Apostolorum Petro,"
Acta Apostolicae Sedis 12 (1920), pp. 457-453.