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 HUGOYE: JOURNAL OF SYRIAC STUDIES |
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HUGOYE: JOURNAL OF SYRIAC STUDIES |
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Vol. 1, No. 2 July 1998 |
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SPECIAL ISSUE: St. Ephraim the Syrian - I |
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A Single Human Being Divided in Himself: Ephraim the Syrian,
the Man in the Middle
Andrew PALMER [1] Much of western Syria had been fluent in Greek for six centuries by the time of Ephraim's birth (usually given as ca A.D. 306). Mesopotamia, in the northern, Roman, part of which he made his career (at first in Nisibis; after 363, for a short time, in Amida1 and finally, until his death in 373, in Edessa), was less hellenised, it is true. Yet Ephraim might certainly have learned Greek, had he wished to do so. There are distinct traces of Stoicism and of Platonism in his work, yet, as a theologian, he professed to have little time for Greek philosophy (TSF [Teaching-Songs (Madroshe) on Faith = Beck 1955] 2:24: 'Blessed he that neither tastes / bitter wisdom from the Greeks,/ nor spits out the simple words / of the men of Galilee!')2. It made the Transcendent a subject for a debate which had more to do with proving the virility of the participants, he thought, than with ascertaining the truth (TSF 87:1 and 4 - translated below). All the same, he seems able enough to engage in complex philosophico-theological argument, even though he does so in order to demonstrate its limitations. A good example is TSF 45, which I quote in full3: TSF 45 (unpublished translation: Andrew Palmer)
[2] In one poem (TSF 47) he portrays Moses, Daniel and Paul as having enjoyed the best education that Egypt, Babylon and Athens, respectively, had to offer, only to find true wisdom in the simplicity of God's self-revelation; compare TSF 47:6 ('Moses, who threw off Egypt's knowledge, wrote, / with simplicity, revelation's truth') with the autobiographical confession in TSF 64:11 ('Forsaking all else, / I applied my mind / to Holy Scripture, / lest I forfeit this / for words not written'). Ephraim may have been more educated than he admits. But, insofar as he wrote for the educated, he wrote to show them the way back to simple faith; and, insofar as he sang for the simple, he attempted (not always, perhaps, with complete success) to reduce complex arguments to simple terms4. [3] Certainly he was well-versed in the Scriptures. TSF 59:1 has a description of the memorisation of the Scriptures and fruitful meditation upon them which, taken together with the extraordinary scriptural resonance of Ephraim's writings (Brock speaks somewhere of their being 'drenched' with Scripture, Van Rompay uses the Dutch word wemelen - 'swarming' with allusions), may be understood as a description of the Judaic side of his education: Which man, groping blind, [4] Much of Ephraim's output was concerned with the interpretation of the Scriptures. There can be little doubt that he must have been recognised in his lifetime, though no doubt grudgingly by some, as one of the leading authorities in this field. Certainly after his death, once the Council of Constantinople (A.D. 381) had vindicated his dissident theology and declared it Orthodox, he became the great interpreter of Scripture, at least for some at Edessa. In his contribution to the next issue of Hugoye (Vol. 2, No. 1), Bernard Outtier informs us that the Armenians, having invented a script for their language in the early fifth century at Edessa, translated first the Scriptures and then Saint Ephraim's commentaries on them. No other Syriac commentator existed, apparently, who was worthy to be set beside him. There was a school of thought in fifth-century Edessa which came to prefer a different style of scriptural exegesis; but it had to import this from another linguistic milieu, by translating the works of Theodore of Mopsuestia (died 428) from Greek into Syriac. This corpus became the basic teaching tool of the Church of the East (often, though misleadingly, called 'Nestorian'), which, while revering Saint Ephraim as 'the Great Teacher', uses 'the Interpreter' (par excellence) to refer to Theodore. [5] Considering how central the Scriptures were to the life of the Church, this expertise as an exegete ought to have given Ephraim an important place during his lifetime in the increasingly Christian society of the fourth-century Roman Empire. He ought to have been a Bishop, like most of the other Fathers of the Church, expounding the Scriptures from his Throne. There are indications, however, that he forfeited the episcopacy because he was too otherworldly and did not curry favour with the rich and powerful. The TSN [Teaching-Songs Concerning Nisibis; also known as Carmina Nisibena = Beck 1961] 13 and 14 contain high praises of James, the famous bishop of Nisibis (308/9-ca. 338), and of his two successors, Babu and Vologeses, written shortly before the death of this last (around 359), which do not neglect to mention that the author has been the disciple of all three. TSN 15 and 16 defend the aged Vologeses against his detractors. At a later date Ephraim may have regretted his defence of this bishop, which was apparently as insincere as it was unprofitable. He is a scathing critic of 'spinelessness' in a leader - precisely the fault of which Vologeses was accused (TSN 19:14; VHF [Verse-Homilies on Faith] 6:195-98). [6] The praises (TSN 17-21) of Abraham, who succeeded Vologeses, are mixed with claims that the 'fat ones of the herd' (wealthy laymen) were gratified by his appointment, which changed nothing in their selfish (cf. Ezekiel 34:21) 'grazing' arrangements, while the 'community of the under-shepherds' (the clergy) were pleased, because their dignity was enhanced by promotion (TSN 17:3). Describing himself as 'the dregs of the flock' (the diocese), who has 'not withheld what is due' (a song of praise for Abraham), Ephraim finds consolation in the fact that he still has an influential platform: God, he says, 'has made me his harp' (TSN 17:13). In fact, he was now able to exploit the prophetic potential of his liminal status, on the fringes of the sacred area, in the midst of the people, representing the social conscience which was so sadly lacking in the higher echelons. TSN 17:8 suggests that Abraham's appointment excited envy. It looks as though Ephraim may have hoped to be the successor to Vologeses (Abraham, though also a disciple of all three of his predecessors, was a younger man), if only in order to delegate management and jurisdiction and consecrate himself to a life of prayer, as he recommends (with more idealism than realism) to Abraham. His later writings (e.g. TSF 87) contain satirical passages on the ambition of the priests of his time. Ephraim, it would seem, was marginalised. Having toadied to bishops and Christian emperors while (we may surmise) he cherished the hope of office for himself, he now became a dissident. His new stance was more honest and more pessimistic (or rather, since pessimism is a sin, more eschatological): his poetry gained power and a bitter edge. He decided that the pride of the worldly was of a piece with the arrogance of the rationalistic theology (Arianism) taught by many of the most favoured exegetes of the time. Be not dismayed, you catechumen, if He had not spoken a word against the Arian Emperor Constantius, whom he praises fulsomely in his Teaching-Songs Against Julian, composed in the early 360s; but he became an outspoken, though necessarily guarded, critic of the Arian Emperor Valens in the TSF, composed in the early 370s5. [7] The kind of training in public speaking he received can only be investigated through his works. We hear of the 'School of Nisibis', which is said to have been founded by Bishop James before 338; but it is only from the late fifth century that we begin to know something of its curriculum6. He lived in an age which set a high value on the ability to speak well and to persuade. The sons of wealthy houses received many years of training in this art, which involved learning how to use body-language as well as words. The Church could not afford to ignore rhetoric, though it must have been wary of the danger to the truth inherent in a skill developed for use by both the prosecution and the defence in a court of law and by opposed parties in the political arena. Like Isocrates and Cato, the Church will have stressed the necessity for the speaker to be a good man as well as a fine stylist. But it will have had no scruples about taking over the existing arsenal of verbal and gestural techniques and adapting them to its purpose. Ephraim, 'God's harp', evidently benefited from a considerable training in rhetoric, one which was certainly acquired, in part, from reading the close study of the Scriptures; and which owed a great deal to the traditions of Aramaic-speaking Mesopotamia, Jewish and Christian; but which may also have been enhanced by a certain acquaintance with Cappadocian Christianity. Basil of Caesarea studied rhetoric at Athens and recommended a discriminating use of classical Greek literature in a Christian education. [8] It is legitimate to reserve judgment as to the historicity of Ephraim's reported personal acquaintance with Basil of Caesarea7; certainly, the Vita is no work of sober history. Yet David Taylor's contribution to this issue of Hugoye will argue for a very considerable link between Ephraim and the Cappadocians, one which involved learning on the part of Basil and the Gregories, as well as Ephraim. And Caesarea is not so very far away from Amida. The mountains are something of an obstacle; but if Ephraim had traversed them, that would explain the vivid mountain-imagery in his poetry, where he evokes the image of of higher mountains, swathed in mists, beyond the foothills (TSF 42:12f; 47:4 etc.). If he had seen Mount Argaeus, the extinct volcano which threw up the extraordinary tufa landscape of western Cappadocia, that would explain his use of the image of the high mountain with the hidden summit for the unity of God, communicating through a hierarchy of heavenly command with the multiplicity of the low-lying physical creation (VHF 1:1ff; compare TSF 1:3; 6:1 etc.). There is no sky-scraping mountain in Mesopotamia. This imagery enters his poetry, if I am not mistaken, with the VHF, which would mean around 360. Now in 358 the city of Nicomedia, capital of Bithynia, was devastated by an earthquake Ammianus XVII 7). Ephraim wrote a series of verse-homilies about that catastrophe, which are preserved in an Armenian translation. Why should he have done that? Perhaps because he went there.8 In 359, Bishop Vologeses completed a splendid new building in stone at Nisibis. It still stands, with a Greek inscription naming the bishop and giving the date. This was a mausoleum for Bishop Jacob and at the same time, as the inscription tells us, a baptistery. When bishops added to the public buildings of their city, they commonly appealed to the Emperor for a subsidy. In order to do so they travelled to the Imperial Court and presented a petition. Such, at least, is the picture we get from sixth-century sources, such as Procopius of Caesarea and the Syriac chronicle written at Edessa in 506. It may be that the aged Bishop Vologeses took his best orator, Ephraim, with him to Nicomedia, which was frequently the imperial residence in time of war with Persia. If Ephraim accompanied his bishop in the capacity of orator, he may have travelled a great deal. There is nothing inherently unlikely, to my mind, about his having sailed, as well. To judge from his poetry, he had an intimate acquaintance with at least one of the great seas, with waves so big that they could wreck a boat, with sailors so skilled that they could yield to such forces and survive, with swimming, buoyed up against all expectation by the mass of the water in which one fears to drown, with divers coming up, fighting for breath, after only a few moments of exploration under water (TSF 25:8f; 81:11f; etc.). He might have acquired second-hand knowledge of these things from literature or from the close questioning of travellers who passed through his city; but if so, he had a remarkable capacity for making other people's experiences vividly his own. [9] Later in this paper I shall give some examples of Ephraim's skills. But before doing that, I want to say something about the performance of his musical works9. A teaching-song, or madrosho, consists of a series of verses, or stanzas, each followed by a response, which is usually the same throughout. The singer would stand on a platform set squarely in the middle of the nave and intone the stanzas, addressing himself sometimes, as the people's teacher, to the congregation and sometimes, as the people's representative, to God. After each stanza, the congregation would sing the response, almost always consisting of praises to Christ and, through Him, to his Father. For example, TSC [Teaching-Songs on Christmas = Beck 1959] 1 consists of ninety-nine two-line stanzas (to be sung to a melody known as 'The Confessors') designed for the vigil of the Feast of the Nativity, beginning with scriptural teaching about the anticipation of Christ in the Old Testament (TSC 1:1-60), continuing with specific admonitions about the proper way to keep vigil (TSC 1:61-83), and ending with general exhortations to behave in a christian way, at Christmas ('On this day'), of all times (TSC 1:84-99). After each stanza was repeated the response: 'Glory to You, Son of our Creator!' In one of the verse-homilies transmitted in an Armenian translation, Ephraim describes how this worked in the church of Nicomedia, destroyed in the earthquake of 358. (The passage is translated from the Armenian by Renoux 1975 and by Renhart 1995; when it is translated from the French or the German into Syriac, it falls naturally into Ephraim's favourite verse-homily couplets consisting of twice times seven syllables.) In the middle of the church The 'instruction' and the 'explanation' should be understood as descriptions of the content of a teaching-song and the 'giving in return' of praise describes the alternation of the teacher's stanzas and the congregation's responses. There is a perfect match between this description and TSC 1. [10] Ephraim seems to have taken the revolutionary step of forming a women's choir to lead the congregation in these responses; but he is also reported, by Jacob of Serugh, to have made women mallponyoto, 'teachers', in the church. This would mean that they had actually gone up on the platform and sung the stanzas which contain the teaching. Since the platform was in the middle of the nave, they could do this without going up into the sanctuary, where only males could go, and even, if the nave was already divided into a women's section at the west and a men's section at the east, without leaving the women's half of the church-building. This could be the explanation of Ephraim's custom of sometimes writing the stanzas as if they were spoken by the City (of Nisibis, or of Bethlehem), personified as a woman, by Mother Church, or by Mary. These Teaching-Songs were perhaps designed to be sung by a woman 'teacher' (not by a man, as in the performance of TSC 15 accompanying this paper); in some cases a male teacher may have alternated with a female teacher (e.g. TSC 2), the response giving them time to change places10. A good example of a teaching-song which was most probably designed for performance by a female singer is TSN 4. The eleventh stanza seems to refer to the high voices of the women, mingled with the low voices of the men in the bleating refrain: savra-a-a-n hwi shura-a-a-n ('Our Hope, be our Wall!') - here very freely translated to achieve the same effect. I quote stanzas 1, 3-4, 7-8, 10-12, 23 and 27-28, as the parts most clearly suited to be sung by a woman. The first stanza recalls the persistent woman of Luke 18:1-8; the last evokes the City of Nisibis and Mother Church, and suggests that the person who speaks the words of the teaching-song may be identified with both of these:
[11] The teaching remained a male product, however, and these 'female voices' teach that the man is head of the woman (TSC 16:16), that women are weak and immoderate (TSN 6:16), that male jealousy is a necessary defence of women's virtue and a proof of love (TSN 6:13, 15), even, perhaps, that God's punishments are like the blows her lovers, compelled by her husband, inflict upon an unfaithful woman in front of her children (TSN 5:4), etc. The repeated references, placed by the poet in the female singer's mouth, to the nakedness and the victimisation of the protagonist (whether the city of Nisibis, as in TSN 6, or the pearl, as in TSF 83) seem to pander to the imagination of the male spectators in a way that is never reciprocated with reference to a male protagonist. Impotence, with Ephraim, is a favourite metaphor for the intellectual limitations of human beings (e.g. TSF 75) and sexual potency is a metaphor for faith (e.g. TSF 21 and 25). This entails imagining God, for the moment, in the role of a female (which Ephraim frequently does) and thus endowing the feminine sex with an aura of power and mystery. I am neither saying that Ephraim underestimated the power and the mystery of women, nor that he hated women for this power. He seems to have been extraordinarily open about his interest for the risqué episodes involving women which are found in Sacred Scripture11. His strong sexual longings were redirected into an ardent aspiration to union with God (e.g. TSF 11:18f; 85:11ff) and, on a human plane, to the restoration of openness between the sexes through the espousal of continence. That this ardour embarrassed later generations of Syrian Christians will be shown by Sebastian Brock in his contribution to the next issue of Hugoye (Vol. 2, No. 1). For modern western readers, the powerful sexuality of his poetry, combined with its unswerving restraint, is a great part of its charm. All the same, outside the cloister, Ephraim was no social reformer. Jacob of Serugh, a noted woman-hater, celebrated Ephraim more than a century after his death, saying that 'the whole aim of his teaching was a new world in which men and women would be equal'12. For all that Ephraim, unlike Jacob, appears to empathise with women (often presenting himself, as poet, under the guise of a woman, as in TSF 10), this is a distortion of the facts. In fact, Ephraim co-opted women into a teaching establishment designed to reinforce the patriarchal status quo, rather than to reform it; which explains why Jacob was able to use him, cynically, to praise the mere shadow of equality - the promotion of women from absolute silence to the dignity of 'teacher', whereby they become the mouthpieces, after Ephraim, of male poets such as Jacob - as if it were real equality between the sexes. [12] The Teaching-Songs on Nisibis show that some, at least, of Ephraim's compositions were intended for the ears of married people, not only for the celibate section of the community to which he himself certainly belonged. The qaddishe, that is those consecrated to a life of celibacy in the service of God, numbered 'a quarter and a third' (that is, either between a quarter and a third, or - as Beck thinks - a quarter of the males and a third of the females) of the Christian community in Nisibis (TSN 19:6). They included both those who had never lost their virginity and others who had subsequently consecrated themselves to celibacy, whether because their spouses had died or for another reason13. How exactly the celibate members of the community lived is hard to ascertain. Ephraim does mention dayroto, which might mean 'monasteries' (e.g. at TSN 17:3; TSF 79:9). [13] It may well be that some of his works were intended only for these dedicated religious. The biblical commentaries, for example. The introduction to the Commentary on Genesis (Tonneau 1965: 3) suggests that there was a school in which the teaching-songs and the verse-homilies were studied and that the commentaries were intended as a brief guide to the fuller teaching of the songs: I did not at first wish to write a commentary on the first book, the Book of the Creation, for fear of having to repeat here what we have set out in the verse-homilies and teaching-songs; but under the pressure of the love of friends, we write briefly here, after all, that which has been written by us at length in the verse-homilies and teaching-songs. [14] These 'friends' are likely to be the 'Sons and Daughters of the Covenant'. These qaddishe would certainly have used the church more often than the lay-people. Brock infers from one passage of Ephraim (TSP [Teaching-Songs on Paradise] 6:8) that some of the faithful (probably this inner circle) took Holy Communion daily. Some of the teaching-songs were probably designed for use in these services. The Teaching-Songs on Virginity, for example. The other teaching-songs were probably collected into codices and deposited in a library where the members of this community could study them. The Fifteen Teaching-Songs on Paradise (TSP = Beck 1957; Brock 1990) were composed as a sequence and these must be among those referred to in the introduction to the Commentary on Genesis. And there is one much longer sequence of teaching-songs cast in its entirety from a single mould, displaying overarching structures which unite the individual songs by symmetry and contrast, by number and by pattern, by logical progression and by scriptural allusion. This is the Eighty-Seven Teaching-Songs on Faith14, which mirrors in some aspects of its overall composition the Six Verse-Homilies on Faith; for example, both begin with the image of God as a mountain unconquerable by Man and both end with the image of a city encircled by a wall. The last of the Eighty-Seven is translated below. [15] The verse-homilies were probably intended for recitation during long vigils in the church, in between the prescribed offices of the Liturgy. It is difficult to think of another context. They are composed of heptasyllabic lines (rendered by me into English iambic pentameters), paired as couplets and end-stopped, with irregular sections marked only by caesurae in the progression of the argument. The rhythmic monotony of the end-stopped couplets presumably corresponds to the repetition of a melodic line, with or without instrumental accompaniment, as in many balladic compositions around the world. But, although the verse-homilies imitate some of the characteristics of oral poetry (such as the threefold repetition of an idea with variations), they are much too intricate to have been composed in this way, nor are they genuinely formulaic. The Six Verse-Homilies on Faith were probably composed in Amida, as I said in the first note; but that does not mean Beck's project to infer from them something about the curriculum of the School at Nisibis is a pointless endeavour (Beck 1953: 59-63). The fifth almost certainly recalls that School (which may well have travelled to Amida, and so on to Edessa) and takes issue with some of the opinions formulated there. In the following translation words added to fill out the English metre are printed in italics:
VHF 5 (unpublished translation by Andrew Palmer)
[16] This relatively short verse-homily gives a convincing picture of a school with an integrated programme of learning, which incorporates natural science, geography, history, mathematics, philosophy, logic, rhetoric, theology and more. It is well worth going through it line by line. 'Those who teach and those who learn' (1f) presupposes a school with more than one teacher. This school has room for 'masters of the art of rhetoric' and for 'scholars' (9f), for students of widely different intellectual strength, 'the simple and the sly' (11f). In some sense the aim of all involved is to 'measure' things (17ff), to 'put one's finger on them', to 'get one's mind around' them, though they should not imagine that they can do this to God (25ff). The syllabus includes 'this creation - all that He has made' and 'the things that He has done' (31f), that is to say, natural science, in relation to theology, and history, understood as the sequence and the meaning of God's dealings with his world. The sources will consequently be Nature and Scripture, elsewhere referred to by Ephraim as the 'Two Books', both of which are studied in a christocentric way (hence the play on mshih, 'measured', and mshiho, 'Messiah'; compare also the number of the poem, five - in Syriac hamsho, almost an anagram of mshiho). The school encourages speculation. This has given rise to certain arguably false opinions, which Ephraim opposes with logic and rhetoric (the two cannot be quite disentangled and were called by the same name in Syriac: mliluto), as: That the Creator never stops creating. Having argued against this, Ephraim, after an artful digression, refers back to 'what we posited' (mo d-armin: note the use of the first person plural): 'The Creator does not make as much as He is able to create.' This, too, is speculative. The sentence 'Let us return to what we posited' (108) suggests a certain habit of disciplined logical debate, whereas the specious claim to be leaving 'what's unknown' and returning to 'what is known' suggests that the course of debates at this school is often swayed by rhetoric (109f). There is a tendency to derive morals from such speculation, but the moral derived in this case is only applicable to those who have learned the art of public speaking: from the idea that God does not create as much as He is able to create Ephraim derives the lesson that: 'A mouth which has the gift of speaking well should speak in moderation, all the same' (137f). The idea of moderation and self-regulation is related to the idea of measuring. Not only the quality of things, but also their quantity is of interest, though only Christ knows the quality and the quantity of God (166). Mathematical knowledge is the model for all other kinds of knowledge (173-82). The overall aim is to progress from the knowledge of things revealed (Nature and Scripture) to that of invisible things; mathematics is the prime example of how this can be done and of the unchanging truth which exists in the invisible realm and which can be extracted from that which is visible (183f). To learn this is to acquire great spiritual wealth (185f). The old should teach the young (187f). 'Virginity' is valued in this community as well, as a safeguard against the intrusion of a perverted mentality, which lacks self-discipline, repentance and humility (189f, interpreted in the light of the following verse-homily, VHF 6). But the knowledge pursued in this school is not without practical applications to the domination, by human beings, of their natural environment (191ff). Knowledge is power (197f), good taste (199f), skill (201f), eloquence (203f), good judgment (206f), persuasiveness (207f) and reason (209f). The model of the Man of Knowledge is the craftsman, himself the image of the Creator (217ff), with one crucial difference, which should always make him humble: The made one makes from other things a thing; [17] Ephraim wrote his works entirely for the Christian community. He never wrote for Jews or pagans, although he wrote about them. Having said that, there seems to have been a section of the Christian community that had not yet severed its connection with Judaism. They practised the circumcision of male children, respected the Sabbath as a day of rest and abstained from the foods described in the Book of Leviticus as unclean (once again, italics are used for words added by the translator for the sake of the English metre):
The ancestors of these people, to whom in particular, it seems, Ephraim addressed this verse-homily, may have been converted by missionaries from Jerusalem before the Gentile-friendly version of Christianity pioneered by St. Paul reached Mesopotamia. The epitaph of Bishop Aberkios of Hierapolis, who died late in the second century, suggests that he was one of the first Pauline missionaries to arrive in Nisibis: 'Having Paul as a companion, everywhere faith led the way'15. It was about the same time that the historical Addai probably came to Edessa and shortly afterwards that Palut was ordained in Antioch as the leader of the Church which afterwards became that of Nicaea (McCullough 1982: 24). Another group of Christians at Edessa said their apostle was Thomas, one of the twelve; even in Ephraim's time, they still referred to the 'Pauline' Christians as 'Palutians', as if they were a sect created by that man (Segal 1970: 81)16. This would explain why, in Eusebius' version of the Legend of King Abgar (Church History I 13), Thaddaeus (Addai, transformed into one of the Twelve) is the apostle of Edessa, whereas, when Egeria visited the city eleven years after Ephraim's death, she did so partly because she had heard that the apostle of Edessa was Thomas (Palmer 1982: 5f). The Greek inscription of Kirkmagara, outside Edessa, harmonises these conflicting traditions by saying that Thomas and Thaddaeus are the same (Segal 1970: plate 31b). All this fits the thesis put forward by Ferdinand Baur in 1831 and so ably defended, with many new arguments, by Michael Goulder (Goulder 1994): that Jerusalem Christianity, including all of the Twelve, was responsible for one mission, compatible with a kind of Judaism, and Pauline Christianity for another mission, drastically at odds with it. [18] In the middle of the fourth century there seems to have been a resurgence of confidence among the Jews of Mesopotamia. They perceived that the Christian community was disappointed in the record of the Christian emperors. The Cross had been vaunted as the new amulet of the Empire, guaranteeing security against the enemy. Yet there had been a long and damaging war with Persia, during which the city of Amida had been sacked. After the death of Julian, a Christian emperor had unnecessarily ceded Ephraim's own city, Nisibis, with all the territory to the south and east of it, to the Persians. This meant that the Jews in that area were not now prevented from making converts among the Christians (McVey 1989: 14f). The reign of Constantius had been marred by corruption in high places and many hasty executions of people whom informers had induced the Emperor to fear. Constantius himself had gone back on the policy of Constantine and endorsed Arianism, a doctrine, which, by compromising the divinity of Jesus, narrowed the gap between Christianity and Judaism. It was possible for the Jews to persuade some Christians that the whole religion of Jesus had been an aberrance. It was a tug-o'-war between the Jews and the Christian clergy, with the Jewish Christians as the handkerchief in the middle of the rope. As McVey says: 'Under the circumstances, relations between the two religious communities were bound to be strained.' In addressing the people on behalf of the clergy, for example in his Six Verse-Homilies on Faith, Ephraim vilified the Jews and demonised them. He wanted to make them as unattractive as possible to his congregation, whom he urged to abandon any persisting Jewish practices. In his triumphalist idea of the progress of Christianity towards the point at which the Church would be coterminous with the world, the Jews had no place. They should rightly have shrivelled up and died. They did not and their presence was a standing rebuke to Ephraim's triumphalism. Judaism could not be allowed to appear a viable option. (In the following translation, words added for the sake of the English metre are printed in italics.)
In considering the influence of Saint Ephraim, we cannot speak only of his influence for the good. We have to say, also, that he was largely responsible for the virulent anti-Jewish language which has ever since characterised the Syriac Liturgy. Understanding the historical context helps to explain why he used such inflammatory language against the Jews; it does not excuse him. Nor does the fact that this language had not yet led to large-scale physical violence against the Jews, tolerated or even ordered by a Christian State. Line 305 shows that the Jews gave the appearance, at least, of honouring their Christian neighbours, which makes Ephraim's ungentle behaviour even more culpable17. [19] Things became even worse for Ephraim's party when the Emperor was not only an Arian (as Constantius had been), but began (as Valens did) to enforce Arianism, sending recalcitrant bishops into exile and replacing them with Arians. Ephraim's best policy was then to identify the Jews and the Arians as equally dangerous enemies of the true faith and to call the remnant of true believers to resistance and possible martyrdom. This is what he does in his Eighty-Seven Teaching-Songs on Faith, which must have been composed not long before his death at Edessa in 373. It will be helpful, I think, to quote and translate the last of these in full at this point. We can then use it to discuss Ephraim's skill with words. Teaching-Songs on Faith 87 (unpublished translation by Andrew Palmer)
[20] In these skilfully composed stanzas we see Ephraim, the orator, manipulating the minds of his hearers through the varied use of the pronouns 'us' and 'them'. In the first stanza he creates a complicity between himself, the 'spectator', and those to whom he is relating what he has 'seen' (presumably the congregation in the church). Over against this 'us' stand the 'philosophers', like gladiators in the arena, at a distance. But when he says 'they were forced to make schisms' ('of the beam', or 'by the beam': my free translation renders the ambiguity: 'to split the very beam which made them partisans'), his hearers are likely to have thought of the circus factions, especially since the context (which at first suggests the refraction of a beam of light) makes one think of the colours of the rainbow and the factions were the Blues and the Greens (in living memory there had been Golds and Reds as well). The whole amphitheatre was divided in its allegiance to one or other of the teams of gladiators. So, in a sense, the 'us' includes the men in the ring and the 'them' includes the people on the spectators' benches. This ambivalence continues throughout the poem. [21] There follows the response, an acclamation of the Holy Trinity by the congregation; then stanza 2, in which the philosophers, now distinctly 'they', are depicted as trying to probe the mystery of the Trinity, instead of being content, like the congregation, to praise It. In stanza 3 the opposition is between the virtues with which 'we' (unspecified) are associated - faith, repentance and hope - and the envy of 'the Evil One', excited by the fact that 'we' possess the Jewish Scriptures, as well as to the writings of the apostles. 'We' evidently identify with the righteous figures in the Old Testament. In stanza 4 there is no explicit 'we', but 'they' are various foreign peoples - Egyptians, Hittites, Greeks - who have infected the Chosen People (the implicit 'us') with their blasphemous habits, ever since the Golden Calf. The latest of these bad habits is philosophy, which has infected the Church. [22] 'They' were always the instruments of Satan (stanza 5), who is envious of everything that is good (implicitly, of 'us'). He attacks the faith ('us') by shooting arrows at the priests ('them', although they belong to 'us') and thus infecting them with the love of power (stanza 6). It is common for those members of a community who share in power to be regarded as 'them' by the majority who lack power. Stanza 7 recalls the amphitheatre from stanza 1, only now it is the priests, not the philosophers, who are competing, and the object of their competition is 'that chair' (the episcopal throne). The suggestion is that these priests are the philosophers of stanza 1 and that ambition, not the love of the truth, is their true motivation. [23] There follows a satirical passage (stanza 8) on the many forms of ambition in young and old. All these, since the congregation is invited to laugh at them, are to be regarded as 'them', not 'us'. But in stanza 9 the 'new peoples' (Gentiles) take the place of the young, as against 'the old', who are the Jews. The majority among Ephraim's congregation would appear to have identified with the Gentiles. In stanza 10, the Jews are called 'foreigners', reversing the opposition of stanza 4, where the Gentiles were the foreigners and the Jews were the Chosen People, admittedly perpetuated as such in the Church, which is supposed to have inherited this status. 'God's own people' are now the Christians, but Satan now makes of them 'probers' of the Mystery of their faith. Ephraim is obliging his congregation to take a share of the blame for the arrogant rationalism which has swept through the Church. In stanza 11 he depicts the whole community of the baptised as infected; the stanza ends with three rhyming lines with the -an ending which indicates 'us': 'He has abused us; indeed, we have abused ourselves, because drink had intoxicated us.' [24]
The winnowed wheat and the robes of glory of stanza 11 are
followed by the weeded vineyard and the gathered sheep of stanza
12, all images of the saved. But the rot has established itself
inside these protected areas. Thorns are growing among the vines;
vast numbers of ewes (lay-people) are now infected and have gone
over to the enemy. The 'we' of the Christian community has now
been split again, into the 'them' of the traitors and the 'us'
of the faithful remnant. 'We', the faithful remnant, are again
present in the name 'our Saviour', given to Christ in stanzas
13 and 14. The way that 'they', the modern theologians, talk
about Jesus is to be compared with the way that other 'they',
the Jews, treated Him when He was on earth. By this polarisation,
the theologians are equated with the Jews as tools of Satan, the
enemy of all that is good, and 'we' are identified with Christ,
his intended victim. [25]
In another context (TSF 12:2) it suits Ephraim to
count himself as one among a number of teachers: 'all we who form
our fellow-men' - so some of them must have been among his hearers.
In stanza 15 of the present teaching-song he paints a picture
of 'their' poetic activity as the creation of Satan himself, who
plaits a 'Crown of Thorny Thoughts' with the help of rhetoric
and beguiling music, 'like teaching-songs'. He is describing
poet-teachers like himself, but he does not identify with them.
He is like an academic who curries favour with an audience drawn
from the general public by saying 'Beware of academics!'. It
is a risky strategy, but it can work. The public believes that
the speaker, being a professional, knows the techniques of professionals
well enough to see through them. [26] In stanza 16, doubt, inquiry and disagreements, which are characteristic of the intellectual community, are depicted as subtle modern instruments with which to torture Christ. In stanza 18 argument, questions and denial are added to the list, suggesting that to question Christ's status is to deny Christ. In the intervening stanza 17, Arrogance and 'her sister', Aggressiveness, are personified, along with other negative emotions, Envy, Haughtiness and Deviousness, and take part in a conspiracy against 'our' Saviour, which is compared with the ambush of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. (There is a pun on melko shqalw, 'they deliberated', and shqalw malko, 'they arrested the King', which Beck's German translation does not notice.) The way that this is placed between two stanzas which demonize the tools of the intellectual trade means that these negative emotions are also projected onto the philosophers. Stanza 20 adds that 'fools' (the word is derived from the same root as the verb 'to understand') find scientific inquiry full of sweetness, whereas in fact it is a dead end of falsehood and as bitter as the gall which Jesus refused to drink on the Cross. Ephraim pretends not to be an intellectual himself and writes like a rabble-rouser, encouraging popular prejudice against academics. [27] In stanza 21, 'we', whom the Roman State opposes in Ephraim's time, are placed on a par with 'them', the Jewish priests whose request, that the title on Jesus' Cross be altered, Pilate refused. But the mind does not accept this parallel as an identification. Instead, it associates the Christian priests mentioned at the end of the stanza with the Jews. The obstinacy of the civil authority is misdirected, the poet is saying; the Emperor should be like Pilate and oppose 'them', the priests, not 'us'. In stanza 22, the priests are depicted as acting in a way which is damaging to humanity itself in turning the Emperor's armed force against his 'walled cities'. This description fits Edessa, where Ephraim was writing, and invites the audience to identify their city with the faithful remnant of the Church which is still opposed to the Emperor's Arianism. The effect of this, especially when Edessa is multiplied into a number of 'walled cities', is to make those who attack that remnant look like enemies of the Church and of the Roman Empire itself, even if one of them is the Emperor. The solidarity which a country feels in the face of a threat to its security becomes the 'we', the Emperor and the Bishops - but especially the Bishops - the 'they'. [28] The last stanza evokes the healing of the wound which has opposed 'them' to 'us' in the Church and Empire. The poet calls upon 'our Lord' in the name of all, including the Bishops, the Emperors and the Walled Cities, and asks that, in one Church, the Bishops should support each other and the Emperors (turning the third person plural into a part of 'us'), and that internal concord should become, in Christ, an external wall of defence for 'us'. [29] It is a regular feature of Ephraim's rhetoric that he moves the boundaries in this way. It is very effective and must have been acquired by taking many pains. One would think that the art had been passed on to Ephraim by others who had already mastered it. I am suggesting that there was a school of rhetoric in Nisibis, where also such techniques as satire, innuendo, and allegory were taught. The style is highly mannered and crafted. I have taken trouble in my translation to try to replicate the effect of the ever-present assonance and wordplay which is part of this traditional art. [30] If one looks closely at the structure of the poem, one finds that the first stanza is strongly linked to the last and that themes are enunciated or hinted at in the first stanza which recur throughout the poem, now one of them, now another coming to the surface. One begins to see that Ephraim's description of his opponents' poetic art can also be applied to Ephraim's own art (including the 'hidden thorns', which are his uncharitable innuendoes about his fellow-intellectuals, his fellow-clergy and his fellow-poets). This compositional technique must also be a traditional art, for Ephraim's opponents are unlikely to have learned it from him. [31] In this poem, Ephraim attacks philosophy. Elsewhere he undermines science, saying that it is impossible to know everything about the natural world and so better just to praise the superior knowledge and power of God. He confuses the excitement of scientific discovery with the excitement of sexual discovery and condemns the first in terms designed by a repressive society for the condemnation of the second. Both kinds of excitement are, for him, dangerously undisciplined. He tries to divert the disapproval which his audience would have felt for a lack of discipline in sexual relations against the risqué theology of the moderns, by suggesting that both have the same psychological roots. [32] Yet Ephraim was also caught up into the youthful 'spirit of the age' which the stern patriarch in him condemned. It is no wonder that he felt himself to be 'divided' (TSF 20:17 - the passage quoted in the title of this paper). If he had been undivided in his patriarchal disapproval, his work would have been boring in the extreme. As it is, it is relieved and even made attractive by his daring and his love of new discoveries, things which he must have learned from the lively students at the School of Nisibis, of whom he professed to disapprove. It is because he is neither one thing nor the other that he sometimes short-circuits himself, claiming, for example, that the only reason why he has tried (again and again!) to paint pictures of God by comparisons with nature (which he now says cannot be done!) is 'to disorient arrogance' (TSF 41). He wants to have his cake and eat it. Subconsciously, perhaps, he saw himself as that Janus-faced idol placed by Manasseh in the middle of the Temple18. His station in the middle of the nave gave him a platform of intermediate status in the hierarchy of society. Standing amongst the people, while the rest of the clergy congregated in the Sanctuary in readiness for the Liturgy of the Faithful, he might seem to be a tribune of the people; but in fact he was a member of the clergy and consciously functioned as the official spokesman of the Church. There is an unresolved political ambiguity in his role, which infected all his attitudes. He seems to be a great manipulator of symbols; in fact, he was probably manipulated by them, subject to the conflicting influences of the two poles between which, as deacon on the bema, he took his stand19. The irony is that his work was and still is used to try to stifle, in the Syriac Churches, the very liveliness which makes him so stimulating and the very independence of mind which so often made him go against the stream of his time. His influence throughout the Middle Ages was very great, but by the processes of selection and edited dissemination, his ambiguity was removed. What remained was an unattractive Ephraim, a killjoy, whose perverted passion incited to kill Jews, an opponent of rationalism and of science, in short, an enemy of youth, tolerance, reason, truthfulness and progress. Fortunately, thanks to the bibliophilia of a certain abbot Moses, to the conservatory powers of the Egyptian climate and to the labours of modern editors, we can recover another Ephraim, life and laughter-loving, compassionate, philosophically minded, remarkably honest, delighting in invention. The real Ephraim was a mixture of the two, something which baffles comprehension, if we assume that, as a person, he must have had a fixed and consistent character. But it becomes quite easy to understand, when we see him as subject to conflicting forces by virtue of the pivotal position which he occupied in society, as symbolically ordered in the church. _______Notes
4
See Palmer 1993a; Palmer 1993b.
7
Amar 1988: sections 25-28, esp. 25.; See Brock 1990: 8 ('unhistorical').
9
An extract from a performance
of Ephraim's TSC [Teaching-Songs
on Christmas (or the Nativity)] 15 to the accompaniment of
the Celtic Harp, which took place at the Conference which gave
rise to this special issue, accompanies this paper. The melody
is of my own invention and has no claim to authenticity; but it
is true to the form of the metre, which consists of a central
section of sixteen syllables, framed by symmetrical opening and
closing sections of twelve syllables each. This Madrosho
(like TSF 49 and many others) lends itself to an imaginative
range of gesture. The comparison of the singer with a lyre, in
particular, suggests that the arms should be held like the horns
of a lyre, with the throat and mouth in the place of the strings
and the thorax as the sound-box (compare TSP 8:8; Brock 1990:134; Palmer 1993b:380).
14
See Palmer 1995b and Palmer, in preparation.
17
Compare Cerbelaud 1995b and the introduction to Cerbelaud 1995a. _______ References |
