Orthodoxy in Verse

The positive face of St. Ephrem’s polemic: how his combat with the heretics served, above all, the constructive proclamation of the orthodox faith. This chapter sets out what Ephrem was defending — the Nicene confession of the Son’s full divinity against the Arians, the goodness of the one Creator and His creation against the dualists, the reality of the Incarnation against every diminishment, and the unity of the two Testaments — and how the teaching-hymn became the form in which the Church of the Syriac East confessed and sang its orthodoxy.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father) / Syriac

Polemic in the Service of Confession

Ephrem’s anti-heretical hymnody (treated in the companion chapter) was never an end in itself. The naming and refutation of error served a prior and greater purpose: the clear confession of the truth. In Ephrem, as in the best of the Fathers, heresy is the dark foil against which the orthodox faith is made to shine; the error is exposed in order that the truth may be proclaimed the more vividly. The Hymns against Heresies and the polemical strands running through the Hymns on Faith and elsewhere are, at bottom, hymns for orthodoxy as much as against heterodoxy — and it is worth setting out, positively, what it was that Ephrem confessed and sang.

The Full Divinity of the Son

The central dogmatic battle of Ephrem’s lifetime was the Arian controversy, and Ephrem stood squarely with Nicaea. Against the Arians, who made the Son a creature, generated in time and therefore lesser than the Father, Ephrem confessed the full and eternal divinity of the Son, consubstantial with the Father. His distinctive contribution was less a new argument than a new mode of defense: where the Arians sought to define and measure the Son’s generation, dragging Him across the chasm to the creaturely side where the intellect could grasp Him (see the chapter against the investigators), Ephrem insisted that the Son, being truly God, lies beyond the reach of such investigation, on the far side of the gap that no creature can cross. His orthodoxy and his apophaticism are one: to confess the Son as God is, for Ephrem, to confess Him as uninvestigable, adored rather than dissected. The Hymns on Faith are the great vehicle of this confession (Brock, St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise, SVS Press, 1990, introduction; Wickes, Bible and Poetry in Late Antique Mesopotamia).

The One Good Creator

Against Marcion, who tore the Creator God of the Old Testament away from the Father of Jesus, and against the dualists Mani and Bardaisan, who set a principle of evil over against the good, Ephrem confessed the one good Creator and the goodness of His creation. This is not an incidental theme but a foundation of his whole vision. Because the world is the good work of the one God, it can serve as the first of the two witnesses, a book in which the Creator may be read (see the chapter on types and symbols); because the body and the senses are good, Paradise can be a place of the redeemed sensorium, and the Incarnation a real assumption of real flesh (see the chapter on the Hymns on Paradise). The dualist denial of creation’s goodness would have collapsed the entire structure of Ephrem’s theology; his defense of the Creator is therefore the defense of his deepest convictions. The unity of the two Testaments — the single God and single saving plan running through both — follows directly: the God of Genesis is the Father of the Gospel, and the symbols of the Old Covenant really carry the realities of the New.

The Reality of the Incarnation

At the center of the confession stands the Incarnation, the supreme raza in which the hidden God is revealed in visible flesh (see the chapter on types and symbols). Ephrem sings the descent of God into the human condition in some of his most exalted verse — the Hymns on the Nativity above all — gathering up his whole typological vision around it: the Word who “puts on the body,” the new Adam born of the new Eve, the robe of glory deposited in the flesh and restored to humanity (see the chapters on Paradise and on Eve and Mary). Against any diminishment of the reality of God’s becoming man — whether the dualist recoil from matter or the Arian lowering of the Word — Ephrem insists on the wonder of a true Incarnation, in which the infinite God genuinely takes up finite flesh out of love. The epigram Brock highlights captures the exchange at its heart: “He gave us divinity; we gave Him humanity” (Ephrem, in Brock, The Luminous Eye, ch. on the Incarnation) — a formula that stands beside Athanasius, who died the same year, and that points directly to theosis (see the Orthodoxy Guide on theosis).

Orthodoxy as Doxology

There is a feature of Ephrem’s orthodoxy that distinguishes it from a merely defensive correctness, and it lies in the constant turn from confession to praise. For Ephrem, to confess the truth rightly is to be moved to doxology; the refrains of his hymns are forever breaking into blessing — “Blessed is He who…,” “Glory to Him who…” — so that the statement of doctrine flows directly into the worship of the God whom the doctrine names (see the divine-names refrain treated in the chapter on the teaching hymns). This is not incidental. It expresses Ephrem’s conviction that the right response to the mystery is not mastery but wonder (see the chapter against the investigators): the orthodox confessor, unlike the heretical investigator, does not seize the truth as a possession but receives it as a gift and returns it as praise. Orthodoxy and doxology are, for Ephrem, two names for one act. The faith confessed is the faith adored; the doctrine sung is the doctrine that bends the singer toward thanksgiving. This is why his polemic, even at its sharpest, never sours into mere contention: the heresy is refuted, but the refutation opens always onto the praise of the God whom the heresy had obscured. The end of the argument is not victory but glory.

A Standard for the Whole Church

Because Ephrem’s confession is the common faith of Nicaea, expressed in a Semitic and poetic idiom, he occupies a unique place as a witness to the unity of the early Church across its linguistic and cultural divisions. The Greek Fathers confessed the consubstantial Son in the language of ousia and homoousios; the Latin Fathers in the language of substantia; Ephrem in the language of paradox, symbol, and the robe of glory. Yet the faith confessed is recognizably one, and the readiness of the Greek-speaking Church to translate and revere Ephrem (see the chapter on the Ephraem Graecus problem) testifies that his contemporaries recognized it as one. This is part of why Ephrem can be venerated across communions that agree on little else (see the chapter on veneration): his orthodoxy belongs to the undivided Church, confessed before the divisions and in a form that transcends the particular vocabularies over which later centuries would quarrel. He stands as a standing demonstration that the one faith can be confessed in many tongues and many forms — and that the Syriac tongue, in his hands, confessed it as fully and as beautifully as any.

The Form of the Confession

What is distinctive in all this is not the content of Ephrem’s orthodoxy, which is the common faith of Nicaea and the undivided Church, but the form in which he confesses it. Ephrem’s orthodoxy is sung. The dogmas that the Greek Church hammered out in conciliar definitions and philosophical treatises, the Syriac Church received and confessed in Ephrem’s teaching-hymns — in metre and melody, with refrains taken up by the whole congregation and by the choirs of consecrated women (see the chapter on the women’s choirs). This is “orthodoxy in verse” in the fullest sense: not merely doctrine versified for ease of memory, but a whole tradition’s confession of the faith carried in song, so that to be orthodox in Ephrem’s church was, in part, to sing the right hymns. The polemic against the heretics and the proclamation of the truth are, in the end, the same act — the Church singing its faith, and in singing it, defending it.

See Also

• Bardaisan, Marcion, Mani — the polemical campaign of which this is the positive face
• Against the Investigators — the apophatic defense of the Son’s divinity
• Types and Symbols — the two witnesses and the supreme symbol of the Incarnation
• Eve, Mary, and the Church — the Incarnation in Ephrem’s typology
• The Teaching Hymns — the form in which Ephrem’s orthodoxy was confessed
• Orthodoxy Guide: Theosis — “He gave us divinity; we gave Him humanity”

References

• Brock, Sebastian. The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of St Ephrem the Syrian. Cistercian Studies 124. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992. On the Incarnation, the exchange formula, and Ephrem’s orthodox confession.
• Brock, Sebastian. St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press (Popular Patristics 10), 1990. Introduction — Ephrem and the Nicene faith.
• 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 confession in the Hymns on Faith.
• Beck, Edmund (ed.). Hymnen de Fide. CSCO 154/155 (1955); Hymnen contra Haereses. CSCO 169/170 (1957); Hymnen de Nativitate. CSCO 186/187 (1959). Louvain.
• McVey, Kathleen E. Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1989. (The Hymns on the Nativity on the Incarnation.)