The Life as Expanded by Medieval Biographers, Part 1

According to this biography, Ephraim was a Syrian of Mesopotamia by birth, and by parentage on both sides. His mother came from Amid, now Diyarbakir, a central city of that region. His father belonged to the older and more famous city of Nisibis, not far from Amid but near the Persian frontier. There he was priest of an idol named Abnil, or Abizal, in the days of Constantine the Great, who reigned from 306 to 337. This idol was afterward destroyed by Jovian, who became emperor in 363, after the death of Julian had brought the Flavian dynasty to an end. Ephraim was born in Nisibis, which was then part of the Roman Empire. The date of his birth is not given, but it cannot have been later than the earliest years of Constantine’s reign. Though he was the son of such a father, from his childhood he was kept by divine grace, which “chose him like Jeremiah from his mother’s womb,” from every taint of idol worship and the impurities that go with it. He was to be, like Saint Paul, a “chosen vessel,” to spread the light of truth and to put out heresy. Further on, without fixing its time, the biographer records a sign of his future work, which Ephraim himself tells of in his “Testament” as belonging to the days “when his mother carried him at her breast.” In a dream or vision he saw a vine spring from his mouth. It grew so high that it filled all that was under the heavens, and it bore clusters on which the birds of the air fed; and the more the birds fed on them, the more the clusters multiplied. These clusters, the Testament explains, were his sermons, and the leaves of the vine were his hymns.

But his entry into the Christian fold was not to come without hindrance and suffering. One day his father found the youth talking with some Christians. He was filled with anger, beat him with a cruel and almost fatal severity, and went to the shrine of his god to seek pardon for his son by sacrifice and prayer. A voice coming from the idol rejected his plea. It warned him that his son was destined to be the persecutor of his father’s gods, and commanded that he be driven from home. The father obeyed. The son received the sentence with joy and went out from his father’s house, carrying nothing with him and not knowing where he was going. God guided his way to the famous and saintly bishop Jacob of Nisibis. He told Jacob his story, and the bishop welcomed him warmly and admitted him to the number of the “Hearers,” that is, catechumens in the first stage of their preparatory instruction. From the first he showed himself a diligent disciple, in fasting and prayer and in daily attendance at the teaching of the Scriptures. He was often at the bishop’s house. He imitated his virtues, caught his special notice, and won a high place in his love, as well as in the love of the whole church.

In his early manhood, however, a slanderous charge was brought against him that would have ruined his good name, had not a supernatural intervention been granted in answer to his prayer. A young woman of noble birth had been seduced by an official of the church who was also named Ephraim. He was a paramonarius, that is, a sacristan, or perhaps rather a steward. When she became pregnant and her fall was discovered, she accused Ephraim the devout catechumen, at the urging of her lover, of being the cause of her shame. Her father laid the matter before the bishop, who in great grief and dismay summoned his disciple to answer the accusation. At first the youth received it in stunned silence, but at last he answered: “Yes, I have sinned; but I beg your holiness to pardon me.” Even after this apparent admission of guilt, however, the bishop was not convinced, and he prayed earnestly that the truth might be revealed to him. But it was in vain: a more striking vindication was in store for the humble and blameless youth. When the child of shame was born, and the father of the young woman required Ephraim to take charge of it, he repeated his apparent confession of guilt to the bishop. He took the infant into his arms, openly went into the church carrying it, and begged the congregation with tears: “Pray for me, my brothers, that this sin may be forgiven me.” For some days he bore this burden of undeserved reproach. Then he saw the great scandal it was causing the people, and he began to reflect that his meek acceptance of the slander was doing harm. So on the following Sunday, after the eucharist had been given, he came up to the bishop in church in the presence of the people, carrying the infant under his cloak, and received his permission to enter the bema. This was not the pulpit but the raised sanctuary where the altar stood. Before the eyes of the astonished congregation he brought out the baby, held it up in his right hand facing the altar, and cried aloud: “Child, I call on you and charge you by the living God, who made heaven and earth and all that is in them, to confess and tell me truly: who is your father?” The infant opened its mouth and said: “Ephraim the paramonarius.” Having said this, it died in that same hour. The people and the bishop received this miraculous vindication of the wrongly accused man with amazement and tears. The father of the sinful mother fell on his knees and cried out for forgiveness. The real partner in her sin fled and was never seen in Nisibis again. Satan was put to shame, and Ephraim was restored to more than all the favor and affection he had enjoyed before.

Not long afterward the young disciple received a remarkable proof of how highly his bishop thought of him. When Jacob was summoned with the other bishops to the great Council of Nicaea, in the year 325, he took Ephraim with him as his attendant or secretary and brought him into that holy synod. We may infer that a youth so chosen must have shown an early maturity and zeal for the faith. His presence on this first great battlefield of the church’s war against heresy must have given a sharp spur to his work as a controversialist, and shaped his later life as a student and teacher of theology.

After some years his course of devoted study, obedience and piety was rudely broken by the alarm of war. Soon after the death of Constantine in the year 337, Sapor, king of Persia, was moved to seize the opportunity offered by the passing of the great emperor and the inexperience of his sons. He set out to recover the provinces on the Tigris that his predecessor Narses had ceded to Diocletian under the treaty of the year 297, and so to push his border westward beyond the line that for forty years had marked the eastern limits of the Roman Empire. To do this he had to take Nisibis, since the strength and position of that city made it a necessary safeguard for the frontier he was trying to reach. So he laid siege to it in great force. After the city had held out successfully for seventy days, he turned to a new kind of assault, by which it was very nearly overpowered. On his orders the river that flowed through it, the Mygdonius, was dammed and its waters held back, and then let loose, so that they struck the city wall in a destructive rush. The wall gave way, and Sapor prepared to enter and take possession. To his dismay he found his advance fiercely driven back, and he saw the breach filled by a new wall, manned and equipped with engines of war. By their unceasing prayers in the church and by their exhortations, the holy bishop Jacob and the devout Ephraim had spurred the garrison and the people to finish this work with incredible speed, and had won God’s blessing on its timely completion. But a more amazing sight than the newly built wall awaited Sapor. On the ramparts there appeared a figure in royal robes of radiant brightness. In outward appearance it was the emperor Constantius, though he was known to be far away, in Antioch. In blind fury Sapor attacked this majestic apparition with missiles, but he soon stopped when he saw that his attack was useless. His final defeat was brought about by Ephraim. Having first asked for and received the bishop’s approval, Ephraim climbed a tower from which he could view the besieging army. There he prayed to God to send a plague of gnats and mosquitoes on them, and to show by what tiny agents divine power could bring its enemies to ruin. The prayer was answered at once by a cloud of these insects, tiny but irresistible attackers, which came down on the Persian army. Maddened by this plague, the horses threw their riders, the elephants broke loose and trampled the men, and the camp was thrown into hopeless confusion. A storm of wind, rain and thunder, another chronicler adds, increased the panic. Sapor was forced to raise the siege and withdraw in disgrace and with heavy losses instead of success.

Soon afterward the saintly bishop Jacob died, in the fullness of his virtues and his fame, and Ephraim, in deep sorrow, conducted his funeral.

Our biographer then passes over the remaining years of Constantius and goes on to the accession of Julian in the year 361. He assigns the troubles of the years between to the reign of Constans, whom he supposes to have reigned after Constantius and before Julian, though Constans died before his brother Constantius. He records the persecutions the Christians suffered under Julian, the judgment that overtook Julian in his defeat and death at the hands of the Persians, the succession of Jovian, and the treaty Jovian made with Sapor, under which Nisibis was surrendered to Persia and emptied of its Christian inhabitants. Of Ephraim he tells us only that he raised his voice against Julian and his persecutions, and stayed in Nisibis until its surrender. He then withdrew to a place called Beth-Garbaia, where he had been baptized at the age of eighteen and had received his first instruction in the Scriptures and in the singing of psalms. When persecution arose against the church there, he fled to Amid, where he spent a year. From there he went on to Edessa, now Urfa, and as soon as he came in sight of the city he chose it as his permanent and final home.

As he was about to enter it, something happened that nearly all the accounts of his life tell, with variations, and that the historian Sozomen says was recorded in one of Ephraim’s own writings. Beside the river Daisan, which flows around the city, he saw some women washing clothes in its waters. As he stood watching them, one of them fixed her eyes on him and stared at him so long that he grew angry. He said: “Woman, are you not ashamed?” She answered: “It is for you to look at the ground, for that is where you came from; but it is for me to look at you, for I was taken from you.” He marveled at the reply and acknowledged the woman’s wisdom, and he left the spot saying to himself: “If the women of this city are so wise, how much more exceedingly wise its men must be!”

Other authorities give this story a somewhat different turn. Among them is Ephraim’s contemporary Gregory of Nyssa, who claims to have gathered the facts for his speech of praise only from Ephraim’s own surviving writings. According to them, Ephraim approached the city praying, and expecting to meet on his first entrance some holy and wise man whose conversation would profit him. The first person he met at the gate was a prostitute. Shocked and bitterly disappointed, he looked at her and was passing on. But when he noticed that she was looking at him in turn, he asked what her bold stare meant. In this version her answer was: “It is right and fitting that I gaze at you, for it was from you, as man, that I was taken. But do not look at me; look rather at the ground from which you were taken.” Ephraim admitted that he had learned something of value even from this outcast woman, and he praised God, who through the mouth of so unexpected a teacher had fulfilled his desire to be built up.

Some of these authorities tell of another woman of Edessa who approached the holy man. She expected that, even if she failed to tempt him to unchastity, she might at least provoke him to anger, a sin he guarded against no less carefully. He pretended to give in to her advances. But when she asked him to choose a place to meet, he proposed the open, busy street. When she objected to anything so shamelessly public, he replied: “If we are ashamed in the sight of men, how much more ought we to be ashamed in the sight of God, who knows all secret things and will bring everything to his judgment!” This reply moved the woman to repentance and a changed life. She gave up her sinful ways, and finally, as some add, withdrew from the world into a convent.

In Edessa Ephraim at first earned a humble living working for a bath-keeper, while giving his free time to making the Scriptures known to the pagans, who then made up a large part of the city’s population. But before long, on the advice of a monk he happened to meet, he was led to attach himself to one of the Solitaries, or anchorites, who lived in the caves of the nearby “Mount of Edessa,” a rocky range of hills now called Nimrud Dagh. There he spent his time in prayer, fasting and the study of the Scriptures.

But a sign from God was sent to call him back from his retreat to an active life in the city. A vision came to the Solitary under whom Ephraim had placed himself. As this man stood outside his cell at midnight, after prayer and the singing of psalms, he saw an angel coming down from heaven with a great scroll in his hands, written on both sides, and he heard the angel say to those standing by: “To whom shall I give this scroll that is in my hands?” They answered: “To Eugenius, the Solitary of the desert of Egypt.” Again he asked: “Who is worthy of it?” They answered: “Julian the Solitary.” The angel replied: “No one among men is worthy of it this day, except Ephraim the Syrian of the Mount of Edessa.”

At first the man to whom this vision came took it for a delusion, but he soon found reason to accept it as from God. Visiting Ephraim’s solitary cell, he found him writing a commentary on the book of Genesis, and he was amazed at the power of interpretation shown in the work of so untrained a writer. When this was quickly followed by a commentary on Exodus, the truth of the vision became plain. The Solitary hurried to the “School” of Edessa and showed the book to “the teachers and priests and leading men of the city.” They were filled with admiration. When they learned that Ephraim of Nisibis was the author, and heard of the vision that had revealed his merit, they went at once to look for him in his retreat. In his modesty he fled from them as they came, but a second vision from God compelled him to return. In the valley where he had tried to hide, an angel met him and asked: “Ephraim, why are you running away?” He answered: “Lord, so that I may sit in silence and escape from the turmoil of the world.” The angel replied: “See to it that the word is not spoken of you, ‘Ephraim has fled from me like a heifer that has pulled her shoulder back from the yoke.’” These are the words of Hosea 4, verse 16, and Hosea 10, verse 11, quoted loosely. Ephraim pleaded with tears: “Lord, I am weak and unworthy.” But the angel silenced his excuses with the Savior’s words: “No one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket, but on a lampstand, so that all may see the light.” These words are from Matthew 5, verse 15, and Luke 11, verse 33. Accepting the rebuke, Ephraim returned to Edessa, praying much for strength from on high to fight false teaching. There he was badly received. They taunted him as one who had run away in a hypocritical show of reluctance and was now coming back in search of empty glory and applause. He met this reproach with the gentle reply: “Forgive me, my brothers, for I am a lowly man.” At this they cried out against him all the more: “Come and see the madman, the fool!” He held his ground nevertheless, and taught many.

But this work, which his opponents could not put down, was brought to a sudden end by the overzeal of an admirer. One of the recluses of the Mount had occasion to visit the city. He saw Ephraim and followed him, crying out: “This is the winnowing fan in the Lord’s hand, with which he will clear his whole threshing floor, and the weeds of heresy. This is the fire of which our Lord said, ‘I have come to bring fire on the earth.’” These words are drawn from Matthew 3, verse 12, and Luke 12, verse 49. Hearing this, certain leading men of the city, heretics, pagans and Jews, seized him, dragged him outside the gates, stoned him and left him almost dead. The next morning he fled back to his cell on the Mount.

There he gave himself to refuting with his pen the heresies and false beliefs of his time, which violence had kept him from fighting with his voice. Disciples gathered around him, and a school formed itself under the teacher in his retirement. Our narrator records the names of Zenobius, Simeon, Isaac, Asuna and Julian; others add those of Abraham, Abba and Mara. All of these except Isaac are named with approval in his Testament, a document we will discuss later. But two others, Paulinus and Aurit, or Arnad, are denounced there as false to the faith. Into his account of this stage of Ephraim’s life the biographer brings the story of his famous dream of the vine, mentioned above, which foretold how fruitful he would be as a writer, as he relates it in his Testament. It will be given later, in his own words.

Remote and isolated as his home was, the fame of the illustrious Basil, archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, reached him there and stirred in him a desire to see and hear so great a theologian. He prayed for God’s guidance in the matter, and in answer a vision was sent to him. Before the holy table there seemed to stand a pillar of fire whose top reached to heaven, and a voice was heard from heaven, crying: “As you see this pillar of fire, so is the great Basil.”

Encouraged in this way, Ephraim set out on his journey, taking an interpreter with him, since he could not speak Greek. At first, however, according to the History, he made his way not to Cappadocia but to a seaport. The writer does not name it, but Alexandretta is probably meant. There he took ship for Egypt. On the voyage the ship met with dangers, first from a storm and afterward from a sea monster, but it was delivered from both by his faith. With words of power and the sign of the cross he rebuked the winds and waves into calm, and he killed the monster. Arriving in Egypt, he made his way to the city of Antino, apparently Antinoë or Antinoopolis, and from there toward the famous desert of Scete, in the Nitrian valley, then as now the site of many monasteries. Here he found an empty cave, and he and his companion made it their cell and lived there for eight years. His way of life in this retreat, and, as it seems, at Edessa too, was most austere. His food was barley bread, varied only by roasted grain, beans or lentils, or herbs. His drink was water, and his clothing was filthy rags. His flesh was dried up over his bones like a piece of broken pottery. He is described as short, bald and beardless. He never laughed, and he wore a sad face. Other authorities, Gregory especially, dwell at length and with admiration on his abundant and constant weeping.

In this Egyptian retreat, we are told, he proved a victorious opponent of the Arians. On his arrival he had looked for and found a monk named Bishoi, to whom, because of his special holiness, he had been directed by God before he left Edessa. He stayed with him for a week, and they talked together through a miraculous gift that gave each of them the other’s language. By this gift he was able to carry on controversy with Egyptian heretics, many of whom he won back to orthodoxy. Over one of them, an old monk who had been led into heresy by possession by a demon, he used a further miraculous power to restore him. He cast out the evil spirit and brought the old man back at once to his right mind and to the right faith. This gift of language, and Ephraim’s dealings with Bishoi, are told only in the Vatican form of the History, which adds that he not only spoke Egyptian but wrote discourses in that language. The other version represents him as having learned to speak Egyptian in the ordinary way. It should be noted that the name Bishoi, in Greek Pesoës, is known as the name of the founder, in the fourth century, of the monastery of Amba Bishoi in the Nitrian Desert, which is still occupied by a community of monks. In those secluded regions the tradition of Ephraim’s visit to Bishoi was still alive within the last century, and probably still lives. We will have occasion to return to this subject later.

When this long stay was over, he took up again his plan of visiting Basil, and left Egypt for Caesarea. Our narrator plainly supposes Caesarea to be a city on the sea, probably confusing it with the Caesarea that was the chief city of Palestine. Ephraim wanted his first sight of the great archbishop to be on the Feast of the Epiphany, and he managed to time his journey so as to arrive the day before that feast. On asking, he learned that Basil would take his part in its celebration in the great church, and so the next day he and his interpreter went there. On the same day, our historian adds, the commemoration of Saint Mamas was kept. At first, when he saw the great prelate in splendid vestments, attended by his train of richly robed clergy, the heart of the humble ascetic failed him. This man, surrounded by such pomp and splendor, could not be, he thought, the pillar of fire revealed to him in his vision. But when Basil went up into the bema to preach, Ephraim was quickly brought to another mind, though he could understand little if anything of the speaker’s eloquence. As he listened, he saw the Holy Spirit speaking from Basil’s mouth. Gregory says the Spirit was in the form of a dove, and so does the Vatican History; another account says it was in the form of a tongue of fire. Gregory says it hovered by Basil’s ear and inspired his words. Ephraim joined in the applause that each passage of the sermon drew from the audience, and so vigorously that, while others were content to give the cry of approval, “aha,” only once, he repeated it: “aha, aha.” Noticing this, Basil sent his archdeacon to invite the stranger into the sanctuary, but Ephraim modestly declined the invitation.

Another version of the story puts this invitation before the sermon, and credits Basil with a spiritual insight that perceived the holy man’s presence and knew who he was. Again the archdeacon was sent to summon him, this time by name: “Come, my lord Ephraim, before the bema; the archbishop summons you.” Amazed to find himself discovered, Ephraim gave way and praised God, saying: “Great you are in very truth! Basil is the pillar of fire; the Holy Spirit speaks through his mouth.” He begged, however, to be excused from coming into the archbishop’s presence in public, and asked to be allowed instead to greet him privately in the “Treasury,” “after the sacred offering.” So when “the divine mysteries” had been completed, the archbishop’s syncellus repeated the invitation, saying: “Come near, apostle of Christ, so that we may enjoy your presence.” He did so. In his shabby rags, silent and with downcast eyes, he stood before the magnificent prelate. Basil rose from his seat and received him with the kiss of brotherhood. Then he bowed his head, and even threw himself down on the ground before the humble monk, greeting him as the “Father of the Desert” and the enemy of unclean spirits, and he asked the purpose of his journey: “Have you come to visit one who is a sinner? May the Lord reward your labor.” Then he gave the holy eucharist to both the strangers.

In the conversation that followed, through the interpreter, Basil asked how it was that a man who spoke no Greek had followed his sermon with such applause. When he heard in reply of the visible appearance of the Holy Spirit, he exclaimed: “I wish I were Ephraim, to be counted worthy by the Lord of such a gift!” Then Ephraim asked a gift of him: “I know, holy man, that whatever you ask of God, he will give you. So ask him to enable me to speak Greek.” In reply Basil disclaimed any such power of intercession, but proposed that they join in prayer for the gift Ephraim desired, reminding him of the promise, “He will fulfill the desire of those who fear him” (Psalm 145, verse 19). So they prayed for a long time. When they had finished, Basil asked: “My lord Ephraim, why do you not receive the order of the priesthood, which befits you?” Ephraim answered through the interpreter: “Because I am a sinner.” Basil exclaimed: “I wish your sins were mine!” Then he told Ephraim to bow his head, laid his hand on him, and recited over him the prayer of ordination to the diaconate, inviting him to give the response. At once, to everyone’s amazement, Ephraim answered in Greek, in the proper form: “Save, and lift me up, O God.” From then on he was able to speak Greek easily and correctly. He still refused, however, the higher order of the priesthood; but his interpreter was ordained both deacon and priest by Basil before they left. Their stay lasted about two weeks. Other writers, however, call Ephraim a priest, and there is a passage where he himself seems to speak of himself as holding the priesthood. But Palladius, Jerome, Sozomen and others of the best-informed writers confirm our History. He is often called Ephraim the Deacon, as if to stress that a man so highly regarded never rose above that lowly rank.

Traces of Ephraim’s influence can be found in two places in Basil’s writings. It can hardly be doubted that Basil means Ephraim when he appeals to the authority of an unnamed man of great knowledge and judgment, “as closely acquainted with the knowledge of all that is true as he is far removed from worldly wisdom,” a “Mesopotamian,” a “Syrian.” He does this once in On the Holy Spirit, chapter 29, section 74, where he defends the familiar form of words, “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit”; and again in the second of his Homilies on the Six Days of Creation, section 6, where he explains the action of the Spirit on the waters (Genesis 1, verse 2). Basil says he learned from this man, in the first case, that “and” was to be put before the name of the Holy Spirit as well as before that of the Son. In the second case he learned that the Spirit is not to be thought of as being “carried upon” the waters, as the Septuagint has it, but as “brooding upon” them, to warm them into life, like a bird on her nest; and here the Peshitta gives the Hebrew more truly. The verb translated in these different ways is shared by the Hebrew and its sister language, Syriac. And Basil’s explanation of it is indeed found in Ephraim’s surviving commentary on that passage of Genesis; but Ephraim understands the “spirit” to be the wind, not, as Basil does, the Holy Spirit.

Ephraim’s return to Edessa was hurried by the news that in his absence no fewer than nine new heresies had appeared there. His way there lay through Samosata. There he fell in with a leading man of the city, a heretic, who was passing by with a train of young attendants. As the holy man sat by the roadside to eat his bread, these followers mocked him, and one of them wantonly struck him on the cheek. He bore the injury in meek silence, but it was quickly avenged on the one who struck him. A viper came out from under a stone he was sitting on and bit him, so that he died on the spot. His master and companions hurried after Ephraim and overtook him as he was begging his food in a village beyond the city he had just passed through. At their pleading he turned back with them, and by his prayers he raised the dead youth to life. When the nobleman and his followers saw this miracle, they were converted to the orthodox faith.

Once in Edessa, he threw himself at once into the struggle against the many heresies of the place, old and new, Manichaean and Marcionite as well as Arian. Of all the forms of error he met, the one that caused him the most grief and trouble was the one started about the year 200 by a Syrian, Bardaisan. Of this founder of a heresy he writes in one of his Nisibene Hymns, the fifty-first, which is not included in the selection that follows: