The Syriac Christian World

The world St. Ephrem inhabited and gave voice to: Syriac Christianity as a distinct third stream of ancient Christian culture alongside the Greek and the Latin — Aramaic-speaking, rooted in the Semitic thought-world of the Bible, situated geographically and politically between the Roman and Persian empires, and theologizing (in Ephrem’s generation) before the full impact of Greek philosophical categories. This chapter sets out the linguistic, geographical, and intellectual coordinates that make Ephrem not merely a Father who happened to write in Syriac, but the supreme representative of a way of doing theology native to the Semitic East.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father) / Syriac

A Third Stream of Christian Antiquity

It is one of the habits of Western Christian memory to picture the early Church in two languages, Greek in the East and Latin in the West, and to treat everything else as marginal. Against this, the recovery of Syriac Christianity has been one of the great gains of modern patristic scholarship, and St. Ephrem stands at its center. Syriac — a dialect of Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke — was the vehicle of a third major stream of ancient Christian culture, neither Greek nor Latin, with its own literature, its own liturgy, its own theological idiom, and its own genius (Brock, St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise, SVS Press, 1990, introduction; Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of St Ephrem the Syrian, Cistercian Studies 124, 1992). Ephrem is, by common consent, this tradition’s greatest poet and one of its greatest theologians — “the Harp of the Spirit,” in the epithet the Syriac churches gave him (see the chapter on veneration).

To read Ephrem is therefore to encounter a Christianity that stands closer in its language and its imaginative furniture to the Hebrew Scriptures than anything in the Greek or Latin Fathers. His native tongue was a sister of biblical Aramaic; his thought moved by the parallelism, the concrete imagery, and the typological reading that the Bible itself had taught the Semitic East. The result is a theology done in symbol and poetry rather than in definition and syllogism — a point developed in the chapters on the theology of symbol.

Between Rome and Persia

Geographically and politically, the Syriac world lay astride the frontier between the two great empires of late antiquity. Ephrem’s own life dramatizes this: born and raised at Nisibis under Roman rule, but on the very edge of the Sasanian Persian realm, and ending his days at Edessa as a refugee from a city ceded to Persia (see the chapter on the Persian wars). The Syriac churches straddled this border. To the west, in Roman territory, lay Edessa and Antioch; to the east, under Persian rule, lay a flourishing Christianity — the church that would become the Church of the East, whose scholars were the “Persians” of the School of Edessa (see the chapter on Nisibis and Edessa).

This frontier position had consequences. It meant that Syriac Christianity developed, in its formative period, with a degree of independence from the imperial Church of the Roman East — its councils, its court controversies, its Hellenizing pressures. It also meant that Christians under Persian rule were periodically suspected of Roman sympathies and subjected to persecution, most severely under Shapur II, the same king whose armies besieged Ephrem’s Nisibis. The Syriac world was thus a Christianity of the borderlands: cosmopolitan, exposed, and never wholly absorbed into either empire’s official religion.

A Pre-Hellenized Theology

The most consequential feature of Ephrem’s world, for the historian of doctrine, is that he represents Syriac theology at a moment before the full impact of Greek philosophy. Brock has made this point central: Ephrem theologizes in a Semitic, biblical idiom that owes little to the categories of Greek metaphysics, and this is not a deficiency but a distinct and valuable mode of Christian thought (Brock, The Luminous Eye, throughout; Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction). Where a Greek Father reaches for ousia and hypostasis, for the language of nature and person hammered out in the great councils, Ephrem reaches for paradox, type, and image. He distrusts the very project of defining the divine — his polemic against the “investigators” who would probe and measure God is one of his great themes (see the chapter against the investigators) — and he prefers to circle a mystery in symbol rather than to pin it in a formula.

This pre-Hellenized character must not be overstated. Ephrem was no provincial cut off from the wider Church; his hymns defend the Nicene faith against Arianism with full theological seriousness, and the later Greek translation of his works (the Ephraem Graecus corpus, treated in its own chapter) shows how readily the Greek-speaking Church recognized him as one of its own. But the manner of his theology is unmistakably Semitic. He is in harmony with the apophatic instinct that the Cappadocians were articulating in Greek in the same generation — the conviction that God exceeds all comprehension — yet he arrives at it by a different road, the road of biblical poetry rather than philosophical analysis (Brock, The Luminous Eye, ch. on faith and the limits of knowledge).

The Liturgy and the Language

The distinctiveness of the Syriac world was carried, above all, in its worship. The Aramaic-speaking churches developed their own liturgical families — the East Syriac rite of the Church of the East and the West Syriac rite of the Syriac Orthodox among them — rich in poetry and chant, and it is into this liturgical life that Ephrem’s hymns flowed directly. The madrasha, the memra, and the sogitha, the dialogue-poem (treated in the chapters on the hymns and the memre), are Syriac liturgical forms, and Ephrem is their supreme master. To this day the Syriac churches preserve hymnody under his name and in his metres, so that the worship of these communions remains, in a real sense, Ephrem’s worship. The language itself shaped the theology it carried: Syriac, with its wealth of homonyms and its delight in wordplay, lent itself to the punning typologies Ephrem loved — the play on “skin” and “light” behind the robe of glory, the play on ruha (wind, breath, Spirit) in the Hymns on Paradise, the play on “lance” and “sword” at the Crucifixion (see the chapter on the Hymns on Paradise). These are not translatable ornaments but the very joints of his thought, and they show how deeply his theology was rooted in the genius of his language.

A Tradition Between, Not Below

It would be a mistake, finally, to receive the “pre-Hellenized” character of Syriac theology as a mark of belatedness or inferiority, as though the Syriac East were a Christianity still waiting to be improved by Greek philosophy. The judgment of modern scholarship, and especially of Brock, is the reverse: the Syriac tradition preserves a mode of theological reflection that the Greek and Latin worlds largely lost as they assimilated to the categories of the philosophers, and its recovery is a genuine enrichment of the Church’s self-understanding (Brock, The Luminous Eye, throughout). Ephrem’s poetry of paradox and symbol is not a primitive stage on the way to conciliar definition; it is a complete and adult theology in its own right, capable of confessing the Nicene faith with full seriousness (see the chapter on orthodoxy in verse) while refusing the temptation to mistake the formula for the mystery. The Syriac world stands between the empires and between the great theological cultures — not below them — and in Ephrem it produced one of the authentic masterworks of Christian antiquity. To restore it to view, as the modern scholars treated in the final chapter have done, is to widen the Church’s memory of its own first centuries.

The Genius of Syriac Theology

What this world produced, in Ephrem, was a body of theology that is at once rigorously orthodox and utterly unlike the Greek and Latin patristic mainstream in its texture. Its characteristic forms are the teaching-hymn and the verse homily, not the treatise. Its characteristic method is typology — the reading of all of nature and all of Scripture as a web of symbols (raze) pointing to Christ (see the chapter on types and symbols). Its characteristic stance before the divine is wonder rather than mastery. And its characteristic achievement is to have held the most exalted doctrine in the most concrete and sensuous imagery — Paradise as a fragrant mountain, the Incarnation as God “putting on” the garment of human names, the Church as the bride and the new Eve.

It is the recovery of this whole world, and of Ephrem as its chief witness, that lies behind the modern scholarship of Brock, Murray, McVey, and Griffith (treated in the chapter on modern scholarship). To set Ephrem in the Syriac Christian world is not to confine him to a corner of Church history but to restore to view a third great way of being Christian in antiquity — one that the Orthodox tradition has always venerated even where it has not always understood it.

References

Brock, Sebastian. The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of St Ephrem the Syrian. Cistercian Studies 124. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992. The standard introduction to Ephrem’s distinctively Semitic, symbolic theology.
Brock, Sebastian. St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press (Popular Patristics 10), 1990. Introduction — on Syriac as a third stream and the pre-Hellenized character of Ephrem’s thought.
Murray, Robert. Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975 (rev. ed. Gorgias/T&T Clark, 2004/2006). On the Semitic typological tradition Ephrem inherited and crowned.
Griffith, Sidney H. The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque and various studies on Syriac Christianity between the empires. (Used for the borderland character of the tradition.)
Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (GEDSH). Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press / Beth Mardutho. (Reference for Syriac language, geography, and the churches of the East and West Syriac traditions.)