Nisibis and Edessa: Teaching and the School (c. 350 – 373)

St. Ephrem as catechist and teacher across his two cities: the work of the malpana who carried doctrine to the congregation in hymn and homily; the institution of theological teaching associated with his name; and the much-discussed “School of the Persians” or School of Edessa — what can responsibly be said about Ephrem’s own role in catechesis and the school tradition, and what belongs to the later, more developed institution that flourished after his death. The chapter holds apart the historical teacher from the founder-figure of later legend.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father) / Syriac

The Office of the Malpana

Ephrem’s vocation, beneath the rank of deacon, was that of a teacher. The Syriac word is malpana — the master or instructor who hands on doctrine — and it captures the center of gravity of his entire life’s work. He was, in Jerome’s striking testimony, a writer who “attained such distinction that, in some churches, his writings are publicly read after the Scriptures” (Jerome, De Viris Illustribus 115). That a deacon’s hymns should be chanted in the liturgy immediately after the scriptural readings is a measure of how completely his teaching had become the Church’s own instruction: the catechist’s verse stood next to the inspired text as the means by which the faithful learned the faith.

The instrument of this teaching was, above all, the madrasha, the stanzaic teaching-hymn sung in church (the genre is treated fully in the chapter on the teaching hymns). Ephrem’s catechesis was therefore not delivered from a lectern in prose argument but carried in melody to a singing congregation, and — distinctively — performed in part by the choirs of consecrated women he is credited with forming (see the women’s choirs). The “school” of Ephrem, in the first and most concrete sense, was the worshipping assembly itself, taught by song.

The School of Nisibis and Its Migration

Behind this liturgical teaching lay a more formal institution. Nisibis was the seat of what would become the celebrated School of Nisibis, a center of Syriac-Christian learning and scriptural exegesis. The tradition associates Ephrem with the school’s teaching life at Nisibis, and then — following the surrender of the city to Persia in 363 (see the chapter on the Persian wars) — with the transplanting of that learning to Edessa, where it continued as the School of Edessa, later famous (and infamous) as the “School of the Persians” (Beth Sahde, in some sources; the “Persians” being the Christian scholars of Persian-ruled territory who studied there).

Here a careful distinction is required, and it is the heart of this chapter. The School of Edessa is best documented in its later, fifth-century form — the great institution that became a center of Antiochene exegesis, translated Theodore of Mopsuestia into Syriac, and was finally closed by the emperor Zeno in 489 because of its association with the Christology condemned at Ephesus and Chalcedon. That developed academy, with its formal curriculum and its dogmatic controversies, is a generation and more removed from Ephrem. The sources that make Ephrem the founder of the School of Edessa in any institutional sense are later than he is, and the claim should be received with caution. [Disputed: later Syriac tradition credits Ephrem with founding or refounding the School of Edessa (the “School of the Persians”); but the well-documented institution belongs to the fifth century, and Ephrem’s historical role is better described as that of a teacher and catechist than as the founder of the later academy (cf. Brock, St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise, SVS Press, 1990; and the scholarship on the School of Nisibis/Edessa).]

What can be said responsibly is this: Ephrem was a teacher of acknowledged eminence first at Nisibis and then at Edessa; the tradition of learning he served at Nisibis did indeed migrate westward to Edessa after 363, as the Christian population did; and his works became foundational texts for the school tradition that followed. The later school revered him as a forerunner and authority. Whether he held any formal headship is not something the early evidence establishes.

Catechesis in Verse

What is distinctive about Ephrem’s catechesis, and what makes the word “school” fit him in a sense quite different from the Greek academies of Alexandria or Antioch, is its medium. Where a Clement or an Origen taught through commentary and disputation, Ephrem taught through poetry that was meant to be sung. The doctrine of the faith — the consubstantiality of the Son, the reality of the Incarnation, the meaning of baptism and Eucharist, the refutation of the heretics — was set to melody and given to the congregation and its choirs (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction; on the anti-heretical purpose, see the chapter on hymnody as counter-propaganda). His prose commentaries on Scripture (treated in the chapter on the verse homilies and commentaries) belong to the more conventional work of the schoolroom; but it is the sung catechism that is Ephrem’s signature contribution to the idea of Christian teaching.

This is why the Syriac tradition could remember him as both a deacon and a doctor, a liturgist and a schoolman, without contradiction. In his hands the line between worship and instruction was deliberately thin. The congregation that sang his hymns was being catechized as it prayed, and the “school” that mattered most to him was the school of the singing Church.

The Antiochene and the Syriac

A word is in order about the intellectual character of the school tradition, for it bears on how Ephrem is to be placed. The later School of Edessa became, in the fifth century, a great center of Antiochene exegesis — the literal, historical reading of Scripture associated with Theodore of Mopsuestia, whose works the school translated into Syriac and whose Christology it championed, to its eventual cost when the emperor Zeno closed it in 489. It is tempting to read Ephrem backward through this later Antiochene identity, as though he were a precursor of Theodore. But this would distort him. Ephrem’s exegesis is not narrowly literalist; it is profoundly typological and symbolic, reading nature and Scripture alike as a web of raze, mysteries pointing to Christ (see the chapter on types and symbols). He belongs to the older, indigenous Syriac tradition of symbolic reading, not to the imported Antiochene method that would later dominate the school that revered him. The continuity between Ephrem and the fifth-century school is real but partial: they shared a city, a language, and a name, but not a hermeneutic. This is one more reason to hold the historical teacher apart from the later institution — a caution that the methodology of this collection requires and that the sources reward (Brock, The Luminous Eye; Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom; GEDSH, “Edessa, School of”).

The Teacher and the Singing Church

If one asks what kind of teacher Ephrem actually was, the answer returns always to the same point: he taught a singing Church. The ordinary image of the ancient Christian teacher — the master expounding a text to a circle of pupils, the catechist drilling the creed, the controversialist arguing a thesis — captures only part of him. The whole of him is captured only when one adds the choir and the congregation, the qala and the refrain, the women’s voices carrying the doctrine through the assembly (see the chapter on the women’s choirs). For Ephrem the schoolroom and the sanctuary were not two places but one; the lesson and the liturgy were not two acts but one. This is the deepest sense in which he was a malpana: not a lecturer but a maker of the Church’s song, a teacher whose curriculum was sung and whose pupils were the whole worshipping body. To call him the founder of a “school” is true only if the word is stretched to mean this — the school of the singing Church, in which the faithful learned their faith by chanting it. That is the school Ephrem certainly founded, whatever may be said of the later academy.

Between Two Cities

The geography of Ephrem’s teaching maps onto the geography of his life: the long Nisibene period of formation and service, and the final Edessene decade of intensified polemic and consolidation. Edessa gave his teaching a sharper edge — it was there, in a city full of Bardaisanites and Marcionites and Manichaeans, that the catechetical hymn became most explicitly a weapon of orthodoxy, an answer in kind to the heretical hymns already circulating (see the chapter on hymnody as counter-propaganda). The character of the Syriac Christian world that both cities shared — its language, its position between Rome and Persia, its theology formed before the full impact of Greek philosophy — is the subject of the companion chapter on the Syriac Christian world.

References

Brock, Sebastian. St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press (Popular Patristics 10), 1990. Introduction — Ephrem as teacher at Nisibis and Edessa; the migration of 363.
Jerome. De Viris Illustribus 115 (392). Ephrem’s writings read in churches after Scripture.
Vööbus, Arthur. History of the School of Nisibis. CSCO Subsidia 26. Louvain, 1965. The standard study of the Nisibene school and its relation to Edessa.
Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (GEDSH), s.vv. “Edessa, School of” and “Nisibis, School of.” Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press / Beth Mardutho. (On the fifth-century School of the Persians and its closure in 489; used to locate the institutional history.)
Griffith, Sidney H. “Ephraem the Syrian’s Hymns Against Julian: Meditations on History and Imperial Power.” Vigiliae Christianae 41 (1987). On Ephrem’s Edessene context.