Veneration and Doctor of the Church

St. Ephrem’s standing across the Christian world: his feast on January 28 in the Byzantine Orthodox calendar (and the various other dates of the Syriac, Roman, Coptic, and Assyrian traditions); his proclamation as a Doctor of the (Roman Catholic) Church in 1920; and the breadth of his veneration, which spans the Syriac Orthodox, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Byzantine Orthodox, the Eastern and Roman Catholic, and the Coptic traditions — making him perhaps the one Father commemorated most widely across both the Chalcedonian and the non-Chalcedonian churches. The “Harp of the Spirit” is honored by nearly the whole of apostolic Christianity.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father) / Syriac

The Feast: January 28 and Its Variants

In the Byzantine Orthodox calendar — the calendar of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Byzantine Catholic churches — St Ephrem the Syrian is commemorated on January 28. His memory is also associated with the “Saturday of the Venerable Fathers” in the Byzantine cycle. The other ancient churches keep his feast on different days, a reflection of his broad and independent veneration across the traditions:

Eastern Orthodox / Byzantine Catholic: January 28.
Roman Catholic: June 9 in the current (post-1969) General Roman Calendar — the traditional death-date (see the chapter on the Persian wars and his death) — having previously been kept on June 18 in the older Tridentine calendar, the date in force when he was named a Doctor of the Church in 1920.
Syriac Orthodox: a movable commemoration, the seventh Saturday before Easter.
Assyrian Church of the East: June 9.
Coptic Orthodox: 15 Epip (Abib), corresponding to roughly July 22.

[Disputed: the various traditions keep Ephrem’s feast on different dates (Byzantine Jan 28; current Roman Jun 9, formerly Jun 18; Assyrian Jun 9; Syriac Orthodox the 7th Saturday before Easter; Coptic 15 Epip); the multiplicity reflects independent calendars rather than disagreement about the saint.] The diversity of dates is itself a token of how widely and how anciently Ephrem is honored — each tradition having received him into its own calendar by its own route.

Doctor of the Church (1920)

On October 5, 1920, Pope Benedict XV, in the encyclical Principi Apostolorum Petro, proclaimed St Ephrem the Syrian a Doctor of the Universal Church — conferring “the title and the honors of Doctor of the Universal Church” upon “St Ephrem the Syrian, Deacon of Edessa” (Benedict XV, Principi Apostolorum Petro, 1920). He is the only Syriac Father to hold this title in the Roman Church, sometimes styled the “Doctor of the Syrians.” The distinction is the more striking for his rank: Ephrem is one of the very few Doctors of the Church who was never a bishop or even a priest, but only a deacon — a measure of how completely his teaching authority rested on his writings rather than his office (see the chapter on the deacon).

The encyclical’s language is worth noting both for its praise and for one point of precision. It hails Ephrem in exalted terms — as “most perfect imitator of St Stephen,” as “mirror of monks, leader of penitents,” as “the home and lodging of the Holy Spirit” — and it leaves his birthplace, Nisibis or Edessa, expressly uncertain (Principi Apostolorum Petro). It also calls him the “lyre of the Holy Spirit.” This is closely related to, but not identical with, his most famous Syriac epithet, the “Harp of the Spirit” (the encyclical’s image is the lyre) — a reminder to cite the documents precisely rather than to harmonize their wording.

“The Harp of the Spirit”

Ephrem’s most beloved title in the Syriac tradition is the Harp of the Holy Spirit (Syriac kennara d-Ruha) — the image of the poet-theologian as the instrument upon which the Spirit plays, sounding the praises of God in the Church. Sebastian Brock titled one of his anthologies of Ephrem The Harp of the Spirit after this epithet. [Disputed: the epithet “Harp of the Spirit” is Ephrem’s standard liturgical honorific; its attribution to a single originator (Jacob of Serugh is sometimes named, paired with a tradition that calls Jacob the “Flute of the Spirit”) is not confirmed, and it is better treated as a general title of the tradition than credited to one author.] Other titles the tradition gives him include the “Sun of the Syrians,” the “Pillar of the Church,” and simply the “Deacon of Edessa,” Jerome’s own designation.

A Deacon Among the Doctors

The 1920 proclamation repays a closer look, for it placed Ephrem in remarkable company on remarkable terms. The Doctors of the Church, in the Roman reckoning, are the relatively small number of saints recognized for the eminence and soundness of their theological teaching — a roll that includes Athanasius, Basil, the Gregories, Augustine, and the other towering minds of the patristic and later ages, most of them bishops, all of them priests at least. Ephrem joins them as the only Syriac Father among them and as one of the very few who held no sacerdotal rank at all (see the chapter on the deacon). The decision to honor him was, in part, a recognition of the Syriac tradition itself — an acknowledgment that the theological treasury of the Church is not exhausted by its Greek and Latin streams, and that a deacon writing teaching-hymns in Aramaic could stand among the greatest doctors of Christendom. The encyclical’s own uncertainty about whether he was born at Nisibis or Edessa (Principi Apostolorum Petro) is a small honest touch, and a reminder that even in the act of his highest honor the Roman Church acknowledged how much about Ephrem rests on tradition rather than record. The Doctor of the Syrians entered the company of the Doctors carrying both his glory and his uncertainties — which is to say, the whole of his real history.

The Liturgical Afterlife

Beyond the calendars and the titles, Ephrem’s deepest legacy is liturgical: he lives in the worship of the churches that revere him. In the Byzantine tradition his name is attached to the great Lenten prayer (handled in its own chapter), and hymnographic material in his manner pervades the services of the fast. In the Syriac churches, East and West, his madrashe and memre, and later hymnody composed in his metres and to his qale, remain part of the living liturgical inheritance — so that the worship of these communions is, in a real and continuing sense, shaped by Ephrem (see the chapter on the Syriac Christian world). This is the fulfillment of what Jerome already noticed in 392: that Ephrem’s writings were read in church after the Scriptures. The deacon who made the teaching-hymn the catechism of his people achieved the rarest kind of theological immortality — not merely to be studied, but to be sung, generation after generation, in the prayer of the Church. The Harp of the Spirit still sounds in the liturgy, which is exactly where its maker meant it to sound.

The Breadth of His Veneration

What is most remarkable about Ephrem’s reception is its sheer breadth. He is venerated across essentially the whole spectrum of apostolic Christianity — by the Syriac Orthodox and the Assyrian Church of the East, the two great Syriac communions divided by the Christological controversies of the fifth century; by the Eastern Orthodox (Byzantine) and the Eastern Catholic churches, including the Maronites and the Byzantine Catholics; by the Roman Catholic Church, which made him a Doctor; by the Coptic Orthodox; and even in the Anglican Communion’s calendar of commemorations. Because his life and his greatest work fall before the divisions of Ephesus and Chalcedon, Ephrem belongs to the common patrimony of the undivided Church, and the later splits did not undo his standing in any of the traditions that issued from it (see the Orthodoxy Guide on the pre-schism Church). He is, by a strong claim, the Father commemorated most widely across both the Chalcedonian and the non-Chalcedonian churches — a unifying figure in a divided Christendom, honored alike by communions that honor little else in common.

This breadth is fitting for the deacon whose hymns were sung after the Scriptures in the churches of his own day (Jerome, De Viris Illustribus 115), and whose teaching-hymns entered the liturgical inheritance of every tradition that traces itself to the Syriac and Greek East. The “Harp of the Spirit” sounds still, across boundaries that would have meant nothing to the man himself, in the worship of churches that agree on little but their reverence for him. The modern recovery of the historical Ephrem behind all this veneration is the subject of the companion chapter on modern scholarship.

References

Benedict XV, Pope. Principi Apostolorum Petro (encyclical), 5 October 1920. The proclamation of Ephrem as Doctor of the Universal Church; the “lyre of the Holy Spirit” and other epithets; the uncertain birthplace. (Vatican.va.)
Jerome. De Viris Illustribus 115 (392). Ephrem’s writings read after Scripture; “Deacon of Edessa.”
Brock, Sebastian. The Harp of the Spirit: Poems of Saint Ephrem the Syrian. Studies Supplementary to Sobornost. The anthology taking its title from the epithet.
Brock, Sebastian. St Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1990. Introduction — on Ephrem’s death-date and veneration.
Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (GEDSH), s.v. “Ephrem.” (Used to locate the feast-dates and titles across the traditions; cross-checked against the calendars.)
The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “St. Ephraem.” (Used for the older Roman feast-dates and the Doctor proclamation; cross-checked against Principi Apostolorum Petro.)