The Prose Refutations

St. Ephrem’s sustained prose polemic against the three great heresiarchs of the Syriac world — Mani, Marcion, and Bardaisan: the Prose Refutations, recovered from a single palimpsest manuscript and edited in the early twentieth century by Mitchell, Bevan, and Burkitt. This chapter sets out the work — the five Discourses to Hypatius, acrostically signed with Ephrem’s own name, and the miscellaneous tracts that follow — and explains why these refutations matter far beyond Ephrem: because in quoting his opponents to refute them, he preserves direct fragments of the otherwise lost writings of Marcion and Bardaisan.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father) / Syriac

The Three Adversaries

The Syriac Christianity of Ephrem’s world was contested ground, and the three names that recur throughout his polemic are Marcion, Bardaisan, and Mani — the heresiarchs whose movements were strong in Mesopotamia and who between them threatened the Church from three directions. Marcion (second century) had cut the God of the Old Testament away from the Father of Jesus Christ, rejecting the Hebrew Scriptures and their Creator. Bardaisan (Bar Daysan, c. 154–222) of Edessa was a Christian philosopher and poet whose cosmological speculations and astrological determinism the Church judged heterodox — and who, dangerously, had cast his teaching in popular hymns. Mani (third century), the founder of Manichaeism, taught a thoroughgoing dualism of two eternal principles, light and darkness, good and evil. Against all three Ephrem wrote, both in the Hymns against Heresies (the verse polemic treated in the chapter on hymnody against heresy) and, more discursively, in the prose Refutations that are the subject of this chapter.

The Work and Its Recovery

The Prose Refutations survive in a remarkable physical state — in a single manuscript that is also a palimpsest. The text comes from British Museum Add. 14623, a sixth-century manuscript whose original writing was scraped away around the year 823 by a monk named Aaron, who wrote other matter over it; the underlying refutations were recovered by the application of a chemical reagent to bring up the erased script (Mitchell, Bevan, and Burkitt, S. Ephraim’s Prose Refutations of Mani, Marcion, and Bardaisan, introductions). The edition was a labor of three hands and two decades: the first volume (1912) was transcribed by C. W. Mitchell with A. A. Bevan, and the second (1921) was completed after Mitchell’s death in the First World War by Bevan and F. C. Burkitt, who supplied the introduction. The edition is bilingual, giving the Syriac with a facing English translation — still the standard form in which these texts are read.

The Discourses to Hypatius and the Acrostic Signature

The first part of the work consists of five discourses addressed to a certain Hypatius — extended prose arguments against the dualists and the followers of Marcion and Bardaisan. They carry an unusual and telling feature: they are arranged acrostically so that their opening words spell out Ephrem’s own name (Mitchell, Bevan, and Burkitt, Prose Refutations, introduction). This acrostic signature is one of the firmer guarantees of authenticity in the whole Ephrem corpus — a built-in authorial seal — and it sets the Discourses to Hypatius apart from the many works of doubtful attribution. The second part of the work gathers seven miscellaneous pieces: a refutation directed at Bardaisan’s disciple Domnus, three tracts against Marcion, a metrical discourse against Bardaisan, a discourse on virginity, and a prose tract against Mani.

In these discourses Ephrem argues against the dualists on their own ground, pressing the philosophical incoherence of two eternal first principles and defending the goodness of the one Creator and of the created order — the same conviction that animates his reading of Genesis (see the chapter on the commentaries) and his vision of Paradise (see that chapter). Where the Hymns against Heresies fight the heretics with the weapon of song, the Prose Refutations meet them in the medium of reasoned argument, showing that Ephrem — for all his distrust of rationalist “investigation” of God’s inner being (see against the investigators) — was perfectly capable of close polemical reasoning when the object was to refute a false system rather than to define the indefinable.

Reason in the Service of Faith

The Prose Refutations correct a possible misunderstanding of Ephrem. Because he is so famous as the poet of paradox and symbol, and because he polemicized so fiercely against the rationalist “investigators” of the divine essence (see the chapter against the investigators), it would be easy to cast him as an enemy of reasoned argument as such. The Refutations show that this is false. Against the dualists Ephrem argues closely and acutely, pressing the logical incoherence of positing two eternal first principles, exposing the contradictions in the Manichaean account of light and darkness, and defending the unity and goodness of the Creator with genuine philosophical force. The distinction is the one Ephrem himself drew: the intellect may and should labor over what is revealed and over the claims of false systems, even as it must not pry into the hidden essence of God (see against the investigators). Refuting Mani is investigating what is revealed — the false teaching is right there to be examined and dismantled — whereas defining the inner being of the Son is prying into what is hidden. Ephrem’s polemic against the investigators is therefore not anti-rational; it is a polemic about the proper object of reason. In the Prose Refutations we see the reason he affirmed, hard at work in the service of the faith.

A Single Manuscript, a Whole Controversy

It is sobering to reflect that this entire body of Ephrem’s anti-dualist argument hangs on a single, damaged manuscript. The text survives because one sixth-century codex was, in the ninth century, scraped down and overwritten by a monk who valued the parchment more than the words, and because nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scholars recovered the erased script by chemical means and labored two decades — across a world war that killed one of the editors — to bring it into print (Mitchell, Bevan, and Burkitt, Prose Refutations, introductions). Had that one palimpsest perished, Ephrem’s prose polemic against Mani, Marcion, and Bardaisan, and with it the precious embedded fragments of the heresiarchs’ own writings, would be lost to us. The survival of so much of antiquity hangs by such threads, and the Prose Refutations are a vivid case: a major work of a Doctor of the Church, and an irreplaceable source for the heresies he fought, preserved by the accident of one reused book and the patience of three scholars. It is a reminder of why the critical editing of these texts — the discipline traced in the chapter on modern scholarship — is not pedantry but rescue.

Why They Matter Beyond Ephrem

The Prose Refutations have an importance that reaches well past the study of Ephrem himself, and it lies in a peculiarity of the polemical method: to refute his opponents, Ephrem quotes them. The writings of Marcion and of Bardaisan are otherwise almost entirely lost; what we know of them we know largely at second hand, through the reports and refutations of their adversaries. Ephrem’s Refutations preserve direct quotations from the lost works of Marcion and Bardaisan — fragments of the heresiarchs’ own words, embedded in the text that argues against them (Mitchell, Bevan, and Burkitt, Prose Refutations; Burkitt’s introduction). For the historian of early Christian heterodoxy, this makes the Refutations a primary source of the first rank: a window, however partial and hostile, onto teachings that the Church suppressed and time would otherwise have erased entirely. The deacon of Edessa, in defending orthodoxy, became an unwitting archivist of the very heresies he opposed.

References

Mitchell, C. W., A. A. Bevan, and F. C. Burkitt (eds. and trans.). S. Ephraim’s Prose Refutations of Mani, Marcion, and Bardaisan. 2 vols. London: Williams and Norgate, 1912 (vol. 1), 1921 (vol. 2). The standard bilingual edition; introductions on the palimpsest (B.M. Add. 14623), the acrostic Discourses to Hypatius, and the preserved quotations of Marcion and Bardaisan. (Reprint: Gorgias Press, 2008.)
Burkitt, F. C. Early Eastern Christianity (St. Margaret’s Lectures, 1904). On Ephrem, Bardaisan, and the Syriac heresies.
Brock, Sebastian. St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990. Introduction — Ephrem’s anti-heretical works.
Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (GEDSH), s.vv. “Bardaiṣan,” “Marcion,” “Mani.” (Used to locate the heresiarchs and their relation to Syriac Christianity.)