The Hymns on Paradise

St. Ephrem’s most celebrated cycle, the fifteen Hymns on Paradise (De Paradiso), translated by Sebastian Brock in the volume that anchors this whole collection. This chapter sets out the great themes: Paradise imagined as a cosmic mountain rising in ascending levels to the divine presence at its summit; the redeemed sensorium, the fragrant air and overwhelming richness of the garden, condescending to the senses that cannot contain it; the Tree of Knowledge as a veil before the Holy of Holies; the eschatology in which the final Paradise surpasses the first; and, running through all, the robe of glory — Adam’s lost garment of light, restored to humanity in Christ.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father) / Syriac

A Cycle and Its Translator

The fifteen Hymns on Paradise (De Paradiso) are the best known of all Ephrem’s works in the modern West, very largely because of Sebastian Brock’s translation in the St Vladimir’s Seminary Press Popular Patristics series (no. 10, 1990) — the volume whose long introduction supplies the critical biography drawn on throughout this collection, and whose Syriac base is Beck’s edition (CSCO 174/175, Scriptores Syri 78–79, 1957, where the Paradise hymns are paired with the Hymns against Julian). They are a sustained poetic meditation on the Paradise of Genesis — its structure, its loss, and its restoration — and they gather into one cycle the central threads of Ephrem’s symbolic theology.

Paradise as a Cosmic Mountain

Ephrem does not imagine Paradise as a flat enclosed garden but as a cosmic mountain, encircling the world and the great sea, raised so high that the Flood reached only to its foothills (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction and translation). It is surrounded by a barrier and guarded by the Cherub with the flaming sword. Most distinctively, the mountain rises in ascending levels assigned according to spiritual attainment: as Ephrem describes in the second hymn, the lower slopes are for the penitent, the middle region for the righteous, the heights for the victorious, and the summit is reserved for the presence of God Himself — the Shekhina, the Glory, which cannot even be depicted (Hymns on Paradise 2.11; 3.1; trans. Brock). Each just soul is given its place “to the degree that accords with his labors”: Paradise is a graded ascent, not a uniform reward.

This structure is mirrored throughout creation and Scripture by way of typology. Ephrem aligns the mountain of Paradise with Noah’s Ark (its three decks) and with Mount Sinai (the people below, the priests around, Aaron part-way up, Moses on the heights, and the Glory at the summit); and the same threefold pattern answers to the threefold human person — body, soul, and spirit (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction). Above all, Paradise is a type of the Church: the graded mountain is the image of the worshipping community ascending toward God, and what Paradise is in figure, the Church is in present reality (see the chapter on Eve, Mary, and the Church).

The Sensorium of Paradise

One of the most remarkable features of the cycle is Ephrem’s treatment of the senses of Paradise. The garden so far exceeds ordinary perception that the intellect itself “grew dizzy and was stunned” before it, “as the senses were no longer able to contain its treasures” (Hymns on Paradise 6.2, trans. Brock). To make itself perceptible at all, Paradise “clothes itself” in the imagery of the earthly world, condescending to the weakness of our senses just as God condescends to clothe Himself in human names (the parallel with the robe of names is exact; see the chapter on types and symbols). In the ninth hymn the righteous are nourished not by ordinary food but by the very air, breath, and fragrance of Paradise — Ephrem exploiting the Syriac word ruha, which means at once wind, breath, and Spirit, so that the breath of Paradise is also the breath of the Spirit (Hymns on Paradise 9; trans. Brock). And this scent of Paradise is not sealed away: it flows out into the world through the Church, filling the Upper Room at Pentecost and issuing in the waters of Baptism (Hymns on Paradise 11.14; trans. Brock). The redeemed sensorium is thus not an escape from the body but its glorification — a healing of the senses so that they can at last contain the treasures they were made for.

The Tree, the Veil, and the Holy of Holies

Ephrem reads the two trees of Eden in a strikingly liturgical key. The Tree of Knowledge stands halfway up the mountain and functions as a veil, the curtain before a sanctuary: “clothed with an injunction, it served as a veil for the sanctuary,” and “its fruit was the key of justice” (Hymns on Paradise 3.5, trans. Brock). Behind this veil, at the summit, stands the Tree of Life, the Holy of Holies of the paradisal temple — which Adam and Eve, dwelling lower down, never even saw. The fault of the first transgression was, in part, a transgression of order: a grasping past the appointed veil toward what was not yet given, the very fault of the “investigators” projected back into Eden (see the chapter against the investigators). Ephrem further links, through a Syriac wordplay, the lance that pierced Christ’s side with the flaming sword that guarded Paradise, so that the wound of the Crucifixion reopens the closed garden. [Disputed: the exact locus of the lance-and-sword identification is variously placed in Ephrem’s corpus (the Crucifixion and Nisibene hymns as well as the Paradise cycle); the typology itself is securely Ephrem’s, resting on the Syriac pun on rumha, “lance/sword.”]

Eschatology: The Last Paradise Greater Than the First

Ephrem’s Paradise is not merely the lost garden of the beginning but the goal of the end, and the eschatological Paradise surpasses the primordial one. Because Baptism and the Eucharist now give the faithful access to the Tree of Life — which is Christ Himself — the Church already possesses, “truly but in a hidden way,” the blessings of the garden; the Tree of Life is “plucked at every Eucharist in anticipation of the eschatological Wedding Feast” (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction). Paradise stands between this world and the Kingdom, a threshold the redeemed are already crossing. The final state is richer than Adam’s first innocence, for it is innocence won back through Christ and crowned with the glory that the first Adam never reached — the summit, and the wedding garment, now open to those clothed again in the robe of glory.

Paradise and the Church Now

One of the most striking moves in the cycle is the way Ephrem collapses the distance between the Paradise of the past, the Paradise of the future, and the life of the Church in the present. Paradise is not only the lost garden behind us and the goal ahead of us; it is, in a hidden but real way, already present in the Church’s sacraments. The scent of Paradise blows into the world through the Church (Hymns on Paradise 11.14; trans. Brock); the Tree of Life, barred to Adam, is now Christ Himself, accessible at every Eucharist; the waters of Baptism restore the robe of glory that Eden lost. The Church, in Ephrem’s vision, is the place where Paradise is being given back — “truly but in a hidden way,” as Brock renders the characteristic phrase (Brock, Hymns on Paradise, introduction). This is why Paradise can be called a type of the Church and the Church an anticipation of Paradise: they are two phases of a single reality, the garden of God’s presence, lost in Adam and reopened in Christ. The believer does not merely hope for a distant Paradise; he already tastes it, in the Mysteries, as a foretaste of the wedding feast to come. The eschatology is thus also a sacramental theology: the last things are present now, in figure and in pledge, wherever the Church celebrates the Mysteries that carry the scent and the fruit of the garden.

The Healing of the Senses

Ephrem’s treatment of the paradisal sensorium deserves a second look, because it expresses a conviction that runs against a strong current in later Christian spirituality. Where some traditions would treat the body and its senses as obstacles to be transcended, Ephrem treats them as faculties to be healed and glorified. The senses fail before Paradise not because they are evil but because they are not yet whole; the garden overwhelms them, and so condescends to clothe itself in earthly imagery until they can bear its riches (Hymns on Paradise 6.2; 11.7; trans. Brock). The nourishment of the righteous by the very air and fragrance of Paradise (Hymn 9) is not a flight from embodiment but its fulfillment: a sensorium so restored that breath itself becomes food and the air becomes Spirit (the wordplay on ruha). This is of a piece with Ephrem’s whole defense of creation’s goodness against the dualists (see the chapter on hymnody against heresy): the body is good, the senses are good, and redemption does not abolish them but perfects them. The eschatological Paradise is a fully sensory place — fragrant, luminous, nourishing — because the redeemed humanity that inhabits it is a fully embodied humanity, its senses no longer dimmed but made at last able to contain the treasures they were created to receive.

The Robe of Glory

The thread that ties the whole cycle — indeed the whole of Ephrem’s soteriology — is the robe of glory, the theme Brock has made central to the modern understanding of Ephrem (“The Robe of Glory,” The Way 39, 1999; The Luminous Eye, ch. on the robe). Reading the “garments of skin” of Genesis 3:21 in light of a play between the Syriac/Hebrew words for “skin” and “light,” Ephrem holds that Adam and Eve were originally clothed in a robe of light, or glory, which they lost at the Fall, finding themselves naked. The drama of salvation is the drama of that robe: lost in Paradise at the Tree; then, at the Incarnation, the Word “puts on the body,” “puts on Adam,” and at His Baptism deposits the robe of glory in the waters of the Jordan; the baptized then “put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27), receiving the robe again in potential; and at the end they possess it in reality — the wedding garment of the marriage feast (Matthew 22:12) (Brock, “The Robe of Glory”; The Luminous Eye). Here Ephrem’s theology of symbol, his vision of Paradise, and his doctrine of salvation meet: the whole economy is a clothing and re-clothing of humanity in the lost garment of divine glory — the movement that the Orthodox tradition names theosis (see the Orthodoxy Guide on theosis). The exchange is summed up in the formula “He gave us divinity; we gave Him humanity” (Ephrem, in Brock, The Luminous Eye). The feminine dimension of this drama — Eve and Mary, the Church as bride and mother — is taken up in the companion chapter.

See Also

References

  • Brock, Sebastian (trans.). St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press (Popular Patristics 10), 1990. The translation of the 15 hymns with the introduction drawn on throughout (the mountain, the levels, the sensorium, the Tree as veil, the eschatology, the robe of glory).
  • Brock, Sebastian. “The Robe of Glory: A Biblical Image in the Syriac Tradition.” The Way 39 (1999). The classic study of the robe-of-glory theme.
  • Brock, Sebastian. The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of St Ephrem the Syrian. Cistercian Studies 124. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992. (The robe of glory; “He gave us divinity, we gave Him humanity.”)
  • Beck, Edmund (ed.). Hymnen de Paradiso und contra Julianum. CSCO 174/175 (Scriptores Syri 78–79). Louvain, 1957. The critical edition.
  • McVey, Kathleen E. (ed.). St. Ephrem the Syrian: Selected Prose Works. Fathers of the Church 91. CUA Press, 1994. (The Commentary on Genesis, exegetical basis of the Paradise narrative.)