Against the Investigators: The Chasm and the Luminous Eye

St. Ephrem’s critique of the rationalist “investigation” of God — his great theme in the Hymns on Faith. This chapter sets out the impassable chasm Ephrem places between the uncreated Creator and the creature; his polemic against those who would probe, measure, and define the divine nature (the Arian theologians of his day); his insistence that this is not anti-intellectualism but a right ordering of the mind, which may investigate what is revealed but must not pry into what is hidden; and the positive counterpart of the critique — Brock’s “luminous eye,” the inner eye of faith by which alone the hidden God is rightly perceived.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father) / Syriac

The Impassable Chasm

Underlying the whole of Ephrem’s theology of symbol (see the chapter on types and symbols) is a conviction about the absolute difference between God and everything else. There is, between the uncreated Creator and the created order, an ontological gap that cannot be crossed from below. As Brock summarizes Ephrem’s position, “the ontological gap between God the Creator and his creation is in fact impassable… any knowledge of God would be impossible had not God himself, out of his love, bridged this chasm” (Brock, St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise, SVS Press, 1990, introduction). The chasm is the presupposition of everything: it is precisely because the gap is impassable that God’s self-clothing in symbols and names (the robe of names) is necessary, and precisely because God has so condescended that any true knowledge of Him is possible at all. Ephrem can image the gap with the chasm of the parable of Dives and Lazarus, fixed between the two so that none may pass over (cf. Luke 16:26), set now between the creature and the Creator: “there is a chasm between it and the Creator” (Hymns on Faith 69; Brock, The Luminous Eye). [Disputed: the often-quoted phrase “fearful is the gap” and the Syriac term sometimes cited for it are not confirmed verbatim in Brock’s published translations, which render the concept as the “chasm” or “ontological gap”; the teaching itself is securely attested in the Hymns on Faith.]

The Sin of the Investigators

Against this background Ephrem launches his sustained polemic against the investigators — those who, in his judgment, presume to cross the chasm by the intellect, to probe and measure and define the inner being of God as if it lay open to human scrutiny. The target, in the Hymns on Faith, is the rationalist theology of the Arians in their various forms — the school that, by locating the generation of the Son within time, in effect placed the Word on the creaturely side of the gap, where He could be grasped, weighed, and defined like any other object of thought (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction). To Ephrem this was a double blasphemy: it diminished the Son, and it betrayed a fundamental disorder in the would-be theologian, the hubris of the mind that will not accept its limits. The sharper edge of the polemic — its connection to the neo-Arian “Anomoeans,” Aetius and Eunomius, who made the boldest claims for the comprehensibility of the divine essence — is drawn out by Jeffrey Wickes (Bible and Poetry in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Ephrem’s Hymns on Faith, University of California Press); Brock himself names the adversary more generally as Arianism.

The investigators’ error is to treat God as an object of investigation (the Syriac root carries the sense of searching out, scrutinizing, prying). They bring to the Creator the methods proper to creatures: dissection, definition, the demand that everything yield itself to the inquiring mind. But the Creator is not on the same side of the gap as the inquirer, and the attempt to drag Him across it — to know His essence as one knows a created thing — is both impossible and impious. Ephrem’s hymns return again and again to the folly of the swimmer who would sound an ocean without a bottom, the eye that would stare at the sun.

Not Anti-Intellectualism

It would be a serious misreading to take this as a blanket hostility to thought. Ephrem is not anti-intellectual, and he says so explicitly. He draws a clear line between two kinds of inquiry: the legitimate investigation of what God has revealed, and the illegitimate prying into what God has hidden. As he puts it in the Hymns on Faith, “there is intellectual enquiry in the Church, investigating what is revealed; the intellect was not intended to pry into hidden things” (Hymns on Faith 8.9; Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction). The mind is given its proper field — the revealed, the symbols, the Scriptures, the works of God — and within that field it may and should labor. What it may not do is overstep the field, reaching past the revealed into the hidden essence of God, which is not given to be defined. The fault of the investigators is not that they think but that they think out of bounds, applying the right instrument to the wrong object.

This places Ephrem in deep harmony with the apophatic theology that the Cappadocian Fathers — Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa — were articulating in Greek in the very same years, and against the very same Eunomian rationalism (Brock, The Luminous Eye, ch. on faith; and compare St. Basil the Great). The Greeks reached the conviction through philosophical analysis of the limits of language and concept; Ephrem reached it through the poetry of wonder. But the conviction is one: that God is named truly yet never comprehended, adored in His revelation yet veiled in His essence.

The Folly of the Plumb-Line

Ephrem’s favorite way of exposing the investigators’ error is to set their pretension against the immensity of what they presume to measure. The recurring images are of measurement defeated: the diver who would touch the bottom of a bottomless sea, the scales that cannot weigh the unweighable, the eye that is blinded by staring at the sun it would examine. The investigator approaches God with a plumb-line, expecting the divine to yield a sounding like any depth; but there is no bottom, and the line runs out forever. The point is not that God is merely very large and the mind merely rather small — a difference of degree that a stronger mind might overcome — but that the difference is one of kind, the absolute difference of the uncreated from the created (see the chasm, above). No created instrument, however refined, can measure the uncreated, because measurement belongs to the order of creatures and God is not in that order. The investigators’ folly is a category-mistake raised to blasphemy: they apply to the Creator the tools made for creation, and call the failure of those tools a deficiency in God rather than in themselves. Against this Ephrem sets the only fitting posture before the immeasurable — not measurement but adoration, not the plumb-line but the bowed head (Brock, The Luminous Eye, ch. on faith; Hymns on Faith, the recurring imagery of the sea and the sun).

Faith as the Bridge from Above

The deepest structure of Ephrem’s answer is that the chasm, impassable from below, is crossed only from above. If knowledge of God cannot be seized by the creature reaching up, it can be given by the Creator reaching down — and this is precisely what God has done, clothing himself in symbols, in names, and at last in flesh (see the chapter on types and symbols). Faith is the creature’s reception of this self-giving descent: not a leap across the chasm by human effort, but the open hand that receives what God lowers across it. This is why faith and the luminous eye are central to Ephrem’s epistemology and investigation is fatal to it. The investigator tries to take God by force of intellect, and grasps nothing; the believer receives God in faith, and is given everything needful. The whole difference between the two is the difference between seizing and receiving, between the plumb-line cast down into the abyss and the eye lifted up to the light. Ephrem’s polemic against the investigators is, in the end, an invitation: to lay down the futile instruments of measurement and to open instead the inner eye, that one may see the God who has crossed the chasm in love.

The Luminous Eye

The critique has a positive counterpart, and it is the image from which Brock’s great study takes its name: the luminous eye, the inner eye of faith. If the hidden realities — the raze, and above all the hidden God — cannot be reached by the prying intellect, how are they perceived? Ephrem’s answer is that they are perceived by an interior faculty, “the eye of faith,” “the interior eye, or eye of the heart,” which “functions by means of faith” to discern the spiritual reality behind the visible (Brock, The Luminous Eye, ch. on “The Eye, Light and Mirror”). Faith is to the inner eye what light is to the outer: the medium that makes seeing possible. The clear, luminous eye — the heart purified and illumined by faith — perceives the sacramental relationship between the physical and the spiritual that the raza establishes, reading the two witnesses of nature and Scripture rightly, beholding the hidden in the revealed.

The contrast with the investigators is exact. They would seize the divine by the force of the inquiring mind, and fail; the faithful receive it through the luminous eye, and see. The investigators’ instrument is scrutiny; the faithful’s is wonder. And so Ephrem’s whole theology, for all its rigor, ends not in a system to be mastered but in a posture to be adopted — the clearing and illumining of the inner eye, so that the creature, who can never cross the chasm to God, may see God cross it to him. This receptive, illuminated seeing is the disposition proper to the entire symbolic and paradisal vision treated in the chapters that follow.

References

Brock, Sebastian. The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of St Ephrem the Syrian. Cistercian Studies 124. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992. The title study of the eye of faith; the chasm; the critique of investigation.
Brock, Sebastian. St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press (Popular Patristics 10), 1990. Introduction — the impassable gap; Hymns on Faith 8.9 (“intellectual enquiry… investigating what is revealed”).
Beck, Edmund (ed.). Hymnen de Fide. CSCO 154/155 (Scriptores Syri 73–74). Louvain, 1955. (The Hymns on Faith, including 8 and 69.)
Wickes, Jeffrey T. Bible and Poetry in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Ephrem’s Hymns on Faith. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. On the anti-Arian and anti-Eunomian context of the polemic.
Wickes, Jeffrey T. (trans.). St. Ephrem the Syrian: The Hymns on Faith. Fathers of the Church 130. CUA Press, 2015.