Types and Symbols: The Theology of the Raze

The heart of St. Ephrem’s theology: his vision of reality as a web of symbols (raze) in which created things and the words of Scripture really participate in the spiritual realities they signify. This chapter sets out the central concepts — the raza (mystery/symbol) that participates in what it points to; nature and Scripture as God’s two witnesses, the two books in which He may be read; and the “robe of names,” Ephrem’s account of how God, infinitely beyond every human word, condescends to clothe Himself in human language and metaphor so that He may be known and named at all.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father) / Syriac

The Raza: Symbol as Participation

The organizing concept of Ephrem’s theology is the raza (plural raze), a word of Persian origin meaning “mystery” or “secret.” It enters the biblical vocabulary in the book of Daniel, recurs in the Qumran writings, and is, as Brock observes, “very probably the Semitic term lying behind St Paul’s mysterion”; in Syriac its plural also denotes the liturgical Mysteries, the Sacraments (Brock, St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise, SVS Press, 1990, introduction; Brock, The Luminous Eye, ch. 3). For Ephrem the whole of reality is woven through with raze — symbols, types, mysteries — by which the hidden is made present in the visible.

The decisive point, and what separates Ephrem’s symbolism from mere allegory, is that for him a symbol genuinely participates in the reality it symbolizes. As Brock puts it, “for them a symbol actually participates in some sense with the spiritual reality it symbolizes” (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction). The raza is not an arbitrary sign chosen by convention, a label that could as easily have been another; it is a real point of contact between the visible world and the spiritual reality that shines through it. The water of baptism does not merely signify cleansing; it bears the hidden power (hayla kasya) of what it effects. The symbols of the Old Testament do not merely prefigure Christ in a literary way; they really carry, in advance and in hiddenness, the reality (shrara) that the Gospel will reveal. Ephrem’s whole vocabulary turns on the pair kasyutha / galyutha, the hidden and the revealed: the raza is the hidden made manifest, the place where the unseen breaks the surface of the seen (Brock, The Luminous Eye, ch. 3).

The Two Witnesses: Nature and Scripture

From this it follows that, for Ephrem, God has given humanity two great books in which to read Him: the book of nature and the book of Scripture. “St Ephrem speaks of the natural world and the Bible as God’s two witnesses,” writes Brock (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction). The locus classicus is in the Hymns on Paradise itself:

Nature and Scripture / might bear witness to the Creator: / Nature, through man’s use of it, / Scripture, through his reading it.
(Hymns on Paradise 5.2, trans. Brock)

The two witnesses agree, because the same God authored both. Every created thing — the sun, the seed, water, light, the pearl — is a raza through which something of its Maker may be perceived; and every page of Scripture is likewise a field of types and symbols pointing beyond itself to Christ. The created order is not mute matter to be exploited but a text to be read, “through man’s use of it”; and Scripture is not a flat record but a deep weave of mysteries, read rightly only by one who can perceive the hidden in the revealed. This is why Ephrem can teach theology through the most concrete imagery — a fish, a pearl, a vine, a wedding feast — without ever descending into mere illustration: the image is a witness, a real channel of the divine, not a decoration on a prior argument.

The Robe of Names

But how can the infinite God be present in finite symbols, or named in human words at all, given the unbridgeable chasm between Creator and creature that Ephrem insists upon so fiercely (see the chapter against the investigators)? Ephrem’s answer is one of his most beautiful and characteristic teachings: the doctrine of God “putting on names.” God, in Himself beyond all comprehension and beyond every word, condescends to clothe Himself in human language, taking up our names and metaphors as a garment, so that we who could never reach up to Him might have something to lay hold of. The classic statement is in the Hymns on Faith:

He clothed Himself in language, so that He might clothe us in His mode of life… the fact that He strips off and puts on all sorts of metaphors tells us that the metaphor does not apply to His true Being.
(Hymns on Faith 31, trans. Brock, The Luminous Eye, ch. 3)

The refrain of that very hymn captures the wonder of it: “Blessed is He who has appeared to our human race under so many metaphors” (Hymns on Faith 31; Brock, The Luminous Eye). The names and images by which Scripture speaks of God — that He is a shepherd, a king, a rock, that He grows angry or relents — are not literal descriptions of the divine nature but garments God puts on out of love, accommodations to our weakness. That God “strips off and puts on” these metaphors is itself a sign that they do not bind or define His true Being. This is the Semitic, poetic counterpart of the apophatic theology the Greek Fathers were articulating in the same generation: God is named truly, yet never captured, by the names He lends us.

Ephrem refines the doctrine further by distinguishing between names that apply to God truly and properly — the “perfect” or “exact” names such as Father and Son, which reveal real relations within the divine life — and “borrowed” names taken over from human usage, which clothe God in our terms without describing His essence (the distinction developed in the Hymns on Faith; see T. Koonammakkal, The Theology of Divine Names in the Genuine Works of Ephrem; Brock, The Luminous Eye, ch. 3, “the Garment of Names”). Even the proper names are given to us as gifts, not seized by our investigation; the borrowed names are condescensions, to be honored but never literalized.

Symbol Against Allegory

It is worth marking clearly how Ephrem’s symbolism differs from the allegory that the modern reader is likely to assume, because the difference is the whole point. In allegory of the looser kind, a sign stands for a meaning by convention or ingenuity: the detail of a story is decoded into a doctrine, and once decoded the sign has done its work and may be discarded. Ephrem’s raze are not like this. For him the symbol is not a cipher to be cracked but a real presence to be perceived; it genuinely participates in the reality it bears, so that the relationship between sign and thing is ontological, not merely literary (Brock, The Luminous Eye, ch. 3). The water of baptism is not a clever emblem of grace; it is the bearer of grace. The pearl is not an arbitrary illustration of the faith; it really carries something of the kingdom it figures. This is why Ephrem can pile image upon image without the effect of mere decoration: each image is a window, a place where the hidden reality actually shows itself, not a code to be translated away. The proper response to a raza is therefore not the cleverness that decodes but the wonder that perceives — the “luminous eye” of faith treated in the companion chapter. Ephrem’s whole theology asks not to be solved but to be seen.

The Mirror, the Light, and the Eye

Ephrem develops the perception of symbols through a cluster of images that Brock has gathered under the heading of the eye, the light, and the mirror (Brock, The Luminous Eye, ch. on “The Eye, Light and Mirror”). Creation and Scripture are like mirrors in which, for the eye made clear by faith, the hidden God may be glimpsed; faith is the light by which the inner eye sees; and the seeing itself is a real, if veiled, perception of the divine. This is not mysticism in the sense of an extraordinary rapture reserved for a few, but the ordinary vocation of the believer: to read the two witnesses rightly, to perceive the raze that fill the world and the Word, to see the hidden in the revealed. The symbols are everywhere — Ephrem’s universe is saturated with them — but they are perceived only by the eye that faith has cleared. The theology of symbol is thus inseparable from a spirituality of purification: to see God’s symbols truly, one must have the inner eye made luminous, which is the work of faith and of the ascetic life. Doctrine and devotion meet here, as everywhere in Ephrem, in a single act of believing perception.

The Supreme Symbol: The Incarnation

All of this — the participating raza, the two witnesses, the robe of names — converges on a single center. God’s self-clothing in names and symbols reaches its summit and its reality in the Incarnation, where the Word “puts on the body,” clothes Himself not merely in human language but in human flesh, and so becomes the supreme raza, the Mystery in which the hidden God is fully revealed in the visible (Brock, The Luminous Eye, ch. 3; and see the chapter on the robe of glory). Every lesser symbol — every type in nature, every figure in Scripture — points toward this one, and finds in it its truth. Ephrem’s whole theology of symbol is thus, in the end, a theology of the Incarnation: a vision of a God who so loves His creatures that He veils Himself in their world, their words, and at last their flesh, in order to draw them up into His life. That ascent is the theme of the chapter on theosis and the robe of glory, and the proper response to it — wonder rather than scrutiny — is the theme of the chapter against the investigators.

References

Brock, Sebastian. The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of St Ephrem the Syrian. Cistercian Studies 124. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992. Especially ch. 3 (“The Garment of Names”) — the raza, the divine names, the robe of language.
Brock, Sebastian. St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press (Popular Patristics 10), 1990. Introduction — the two witnesses; Hymns on Paradise 5.2.
Beck, Edmund (ed.). Hymnen de Fide. CSCO 154/155 (Scriptores Syri 73–74). Louvain, 1955. (Hymns on Faith 31, “He clothed Himself in language.”)
Koonammakkal, Thomas. The Theology of Divine Names in the Genuine Works of Ephrem. Moran Etho. Kottayam: SEERI, 2015. On the distinction of perfect and borrowed names.
Murray, Robert. Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 1975. On the Syriac typological tradition.