The Madrashe: The Teaching Hymns

St. Ephrem’s signature genre, the madrasha (plural madrashe): the stanzaic teaching-hymn, sung in church to a model melody (qala) with a congregational refrain (’unita), the vehicle by which Ephrem made doctrine singable. This chapter sets out the form — its metre, its melodies, its performance — and surveys the great cycles that survive: the Hymns on Faith (with the Hymns on the Pearl), the Hymns on the Nativity, the Hymns on Virginity, and the rest, in the critical editions of Edmund Beck and the translations of Brock and McVey. The madrasha is the form in which Ephrem chiefly thought, and to understand it is to understand the man.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father) / Syriac

What a Madrasha Is

A madrasha is a stanzaic teaching-hymn — the word is related to the Hebrew midrash, “instruction,” and the form is exactly that: doctrine taught in sung verse. It is Ephrem’s signature and most characteristic genre, and the bulk of his genuine surviving work — something over four hundred madrashe — is composed in it (Brock, St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise, SVS Press, 1990, introduction; the corpus surveyed in the GEDSH entry “Ephrem”). The madrasha is to be distinguished from the memra, the recited verse homily (treated in the chapter on the verse homilies), and from the sogitha, the dialogue-poem. What sets the madrasha apart is that it was sung, in regular stanzas, by a soloist or choir, with a refrain taken up by the congregation.

Each madrasha is built of stanzas (each a bayta, “house”) that all follow a single fixed syllabic pattern (the mshuhta). Ephrem worked in some fifty distinct stanza-patterns, ranging from the simple to the highly intricate — a metre might count out a stanza in lines of, say, five and four syllables in a set sequence, and every stanza of that hymn would reproduce it exactly (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction; on the metrical schemes see also the GEDSH entry “Poetry”). Syriac verse is isosyllabic: it counts syllables, not stresses or quantities, so the metre is a matter of fixed syllable-counts per line. This gave Ephrem a supple and exact instrument, capable of carrying sustained theological argument within a strict musical shape.

Melody and Refrain

Every madrasha was sung to a qala (plural qale) — a model melody-and-metre identified by the opening line of some well-known hymn, much as a hymn-tune today is named by its first words or a tune-name. The qala fixed both the tune and the stanza-shape, so that a manuscript heading naming the qala told the singer at once how the hymn went. A sobering fact for the modern reader: all the original melodies are lost. What survive are only the names of the qale — the incipits — and the syllable-counts they imply (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction). We have Ephrem’s words and his metres; we no longer have his music.

The second structural element is the ’unita (also ’onita), the refrain. After each stanza the choir or congregation sang a short refrain, its melody echoing the first part of the stanza, gathering up the hymn’s theme in a repeated acclamation. The refrains are often little theological epigrams in themselves — “Blessed is He who has appeared to our human race under so many metaphors” is the refrain to one of the great hymns on the divine names (Hymns on Faith 31; Brock, The Luminous Eye, ch. 3). The madrasha was thus a genuinely communal form: the trained voice carried the doctrine in the stanzas, and the whole assembly answered in the refrain. On the choirs of consecrated women who carried much of this singing, see the women’s choirs.

The Great Cycles

The genuine madrashe survive grouped into cycles, each devoted to a feast, a theme, or a controversy, and each edited in the standard critical edition of Dom Edmund Beck, whose paired Syriac-text and German-translation volumes in the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (CSCO, Scriptores Syri) appeared between 1955 and the late 1970s and remain the scholarly basis for all serious study (Beck, CSCO; Brock’s bibliographic guide). The principal cycles are these.

The Hymns on Faith (De Fide), eighty-seven hymns, is the longest of the cycles and one of the longest extant works of early Syriac literature (Beck, CSCO 154/155, 1955). It defends the Nicene faith against the rationalist theology of the Arians and contains Ephrem’s most concentrated reflection on the limits of human knowledge of God, on the divine names, and on the chasm between Creator and creature — the matter of the chapters on the theology of symbol. Within it, hymns 81 through 85 form the celebrated sub-cycle the Hymns on the Pearl, a meditation on the pearl as a symbol of Christ, the faith, and the kingdom — among the most beloved of all Ephrem’s poems (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction; first complete English of the whole cycle: Jeffrey T. Wickes, The Hymns on Faith, FOTC, 2015).

The Hymns on the Nativity (De Nativitate), twenty-eight hymns (Beck, CSCO 186/187, 1959; trans. Kathleen McVey, Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns, CWS, 1989), celebrate the Incarnation in dense typological imagery — Mary and the new Eve, the virgin earth, the descent of God into the human condition. The Hymns on Virginity (De Virginitate), fifty-two hymns (Beck, CSCO 223/224, 1962; trans. McVey, CWS, 1989), treat consecrated virginity and unfold some of Ephrem’s richest symbolic theology, including the meditations on Christ as the medicine of life and on the symbols scattered through nature and Scripture. The Hymns on the Church (De Ecclesia) survive in Beck’s edition (CSCO 198/199, 1960) [Disputed: the hymn-count of this cycle is given as fifty-two in some reference works but is not independently confirmed against Beck’s edition; the CSCO volume numbers are secure].

Beyond these stand the Hymns against Heresies (Contra Haereses), fifty-six hymns against Marcion, Bardaisan, and Mani (Beck, CSCO 169/170, 1957; see the chapter on hymnody against heresy); the Hymns on Paradise (De Paradiso), fifteen hymns (Beck, CSCO 174/175, 1957; trans. Brock, the volume that gives this collection its anchor text — see the chapter on the Hymns on Paradise); the Hymns on the Fast (De Ieiunio); the cycle of Paschal Hymns comprising the Hymns on Unleavened Bread (De Azymis, twenty-one), the Hymns on the Crucifixion, and the Hymns on the Resurrection; and the Carmina Nisibena, the seventy-seven “Hymns of Nisibis,” the historically richest cycle, rooted in the sieges and the life of Ephrem’s native city (Beck, CSCO 218/219 and 240/241; see the chapter on the Persian wars).

The Lost Music and What Remains

The loss of the original melodies is worth dwelling on, because it shapes how the madrashe can and cannot be received today. Ephrem composed for the ear as much as for the mind: each cycle was tied to particular qale, particular tunes, and the manuscripts preserve the names of these tunes as headings — incipits that once told a singer exactly how the hymn should sound, and that now tell us only that a melody existed and roughly how many syllables it carried. The music itself is gone, vanished with the oral tradition that bore it. What survives is the architecture: the syllable-counts, the stanza-shapes, the refrains, the names of the tunes. A modern reader meets the madrashe as one might meet a great hymnody known only from its words and its metrical notation, the tunes silenced. The Syriac churches have preserved later melodies and their own continuing chant traditions, and these give some sense of the soundscape Ephrem worked in; but the precise music to which the Hymns on Paradise or the Hymns on Faith were first sung is irrecoverable (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction; on the qale and their transmission, GEDSH, “Poetry”). This is a real loss, and it should temper any account of the madrashe: we have Ephrem’s poetry and his theology in full, but only the skeleton of his music.

The Madrasha as Theology in Miniature

Each cycle has its own theological center of gravity, and reading them together reveals the coherence of Ephrem’s mind. The Hymns on Faith labor at the knowledge of God and its limits; the Hymns on the Nativity at the Incarnation and its types; the Hymns on Virginity at the symbols scattered through creation and at the consecrated life; the Hymns on Paradise at protology and eschatology and the robe of glory; the Hymns against Heresies at the defense of the one Creator and the unity of the Testaments. Yet the same themes migrate freely across the cycles — the robe of glory appears in the Nativity hymns as well as the Paradise hymns, the divine names in the Faith hymns and the Virginity hymns alike — because they are not separate doctrines but facets of a single vision. The madrasha is the natural unit of this theology: short enough to hold one image or paradox in focus, flexible enough to be gathered into long cycles, and communal enough to make the congregation a participant in the thought. To read a single hymn is to glimpse the whole; to read a cycle is to watch a theme turned slowly in the light from every angle. This is theology done not as system but as sustained meditation, and the madrasha is its perfect vessel.

Why the Form Matters

It is tempting to treat the madrasha as a vehicle and to look past it to the doctrine it carries. But for Ephrem the form is not incidental to the thought; it is the thought’s proper mode. He distrusted the project of pinning God in definitions (see the chapter against the investigators), and the madrasha gave him a way of teaching that proceeds not by definition but by accumulation — image piled on image, paradox answering paradox, the refrain returning again and again to the central wonder. A Greek Father argues toward a conclusion; Ephrem circles a mystery in song until the congregation has felt its dimensions. The teaching-hymn is the perfect instrument of a theology that holds truth in symbol rather than in formula, and that means the faithful to sing their doctrine rather than merely to assent to it. To recover the madrashe, as the editions of Beck and the translations of Brock and McVey have done, is to recover not just a set of texts but a whole way of doing theology — the subject of the chapter on modern scholarship.

References

Brock, Sebastian. St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press (Popular Patristics 10), 1990. Introduction — the madrasha form, metre, qala, and refrain; survey of the cycles.
Brock, Sebastian. The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of St Ephrem the Syrian. Cistercian Studies 124. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992. (The divine-names refrain of Hymns on Faith 31.)
Beck, Edmund (ed.). Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Fide. CSCO 154/155 (Scriptores Syri 73–74). Louvain, 1955. (87 hymns; the Pearl = 81–85.)
Beck, Edmund (ed.). Hymnen de Nativitate. CSCO 186/187 (1959); Hymnen de Virginitate. CSCO 223/224 (1962); Hymnen de Ecclesia. CSCO 198/199 (1960); Hymnen contra Haereses. CSCO 169/170 (1957); Hymnen de Paradiso et contra Julianum. CSCO 174/175 (1957); Carmina Nisibena. CSCO 218/219 (1961), 240/241 (1963). Louvain.
McVey, Kathleen E. Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1989. (Translations of the Nativity, Virginity, and against-Julian hymns; preface by John Meyendorff.)
Wickes, Jeffrey T. St. Ephrem the Syrian: The Hymns on Faith. Fathers of the Church 130. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2015. (First complete English of the De Fide.)
Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (GEDSH), s.vv. “Ephrem” and “Poetry.” (Used to locate the cycle counts and metrical data.)