The Character of His Writings

Of his countless writings of controversy, exposition, exhortation and devotion, which were for Ephraim the fulfillment of his childhood dream and the fruit of the many years of literary work that occupied his full heart and busy brain, enough remains to give a fair idea of his powers and to amaze us by its variety and abundance. Sozomen’s exaggeration, which puts the number of lines he wrote at three million, is not to be taken as more than a rough guess at the likely total; but it is evidence of the impression his fruitfulness made on the generations to whom his works were handed down. That he himself was aware of this gift appears from the fact that he records the dream, and claims that its interpretation is to be found in his hymns and sermons. His power of speech, as Gregory tells us in a remarkable passage, though equal to uttering the thoughts of any other mind, was sometimes overwhelmed by the swift rush and crowding mass of the ideas with which his inspiration filled him, so much so that he was forced to pray for their flow to stop: “Hold back, O Lord, the tide of your grace!”

Abundance is the mark of Ephraim as an author, and its excess is his chief fault. The Syriac language has a great capacity for compression, and the parallelism of balanced clauses that Syriac literature favors makes for brevity. But on the other hand the Syrian mind tends to enlarge, and enlarging is the besetting sin of Syriac writers, of Ephraim not least. And so, while each sentence has the strict precision of an epigram, the endless repetition of epigrammatic clauses adds up to wordiness. One and the same thought or fact is presented in a long-drawn-out series of slightly varied aspects, with a change of wording or at most of illustration, until the repetition becomes tedious. This criticism is aimed mainly at his hymns, but it applies also to too many of his metrical homilies, which will be described shortly. In all his writings, metrical or not, this habit of enlarging leads him, when he handles the stories of Scripture, to fill out their simple outline with elaborate detail that wrongs their beauty and dignity. Examples of such treatment will be found in this volume, in some of the hymns, such as the fourteenth and fifteenth On the Epiphany, and in the Discourse on the Woman Who Was a Sinner. His surviving works, some of which we know only in a Greek version, and those of his lost works whose titles are recorded, fall into three classes: commentaries on Scripture, homilies (mimre), and hymns (madrashe).

His commentaries belonged, if we may trust the Life, to his later years, after his move to Edessa, when he was past middle age. There he is said to have begun his exposition of Genesis, which still survives; in its preface he refers to the homilies and hymns he had written before. He seems to have commented on almost all the canonical books of the Old Testament. His expositions of the five books of Moses, the chief historical books, the Prophets (including Lamentations) and Job survive, and have been printed in the Roman edition of 1732 to 1743, supplemented by the second volume of the edition of Professor Lamy of Louvain, in 1886. But those he is recorded to have written on the Psalms and Proverbs, the books that we may suppose did most to shape the religious spirit and literary form of his works, have not been preserved. None of these, however, has reached us complete; rather they come as a series of extracts, apparently shortened, from the commentaries as their author first issued them. In commenting on the New Testament, he treated the Gospels not in their separate form but in the continuous narrative known as the Diatessaron, which Tatian compiled from them in the second century. This work, long lost, has lately been recovered in an Armenian version. His commentary on the letters of Saint Paul has likewise been preserved for us in Armenian. Both have been published by the Mechitarist Fathers of San Lazzaro, first in Armenian and afterward in a Latin version. It has been judged best to include none of the commentaries in the present volume, since the method and spirit of Ephraim’s handling of Scripture are shown well enough, and in a more interesting form, in his homilies and hymns.

The homilies are very varied in character. Many are controversial, directed against the Jews, against paganism in the person of the emperor Julian, and against the heresies of Mani, of Marcion, of Bardaisan, and of the Anomoean followers of Arius. Others set out articles of the faith: the creation, the fall, redemption by the passion and crucifixion of our Lord, his descent into Hades, his resurrection, the sending of the Holy Spirit, the rest of Paradise, the second coming, the end of the world. Others are expository, dealing with stories from the Old and the New Testaments, such as the life of Joseph, the repentance of Nineveh, or the story of “the woman who was a sinner” in Luke 7. Others again are exhortations, calling to repentance, warning against sin, threatening future punishment, praising virginity. Of the homilies, two are given in this selection: one doctrinal, on our Lord, and one expository, on the sinful woman. Note that the homilies are usually metrical in form, written in regular stichoi, that is, lines of uniform length. And some of them, for example a series of nine for the Rogation Days, and another of eight for Passion Week, the week before Easter, and for the vigil of New Sunday, the first Sunday after Easter, were and still are regularly read as lessons as part of the services of the church: a singular mark of reverence, given, it seems, to the sermons of no other teacher of the church.

But it is in his hymns that Ephraim lives: for the Syrian churches, and through them for the Christian world of the East, if not of the West. Syrian Christendom has been divided for ages into the Melkite, Nestorian, Jacobite and Maronite communities, from the Mediterranean to the Tigris and beyond, even to the Malabar remnant of the Syro-Indian church, all of which keep Syriac as the language of their worship. Throughout it all, the whole body of public worship is shaped by his hymns and filled with his spirit. It is literally true that the hymns of Ephraim go with every member of every one of these churches from the first to the last of his Christian life, from the font to the grave. The Epiphany Hymns, which are included in the present selection, are woven into the service of baptism. Among the funeral hymns, which Dr. Burgess has made available to English readers, are dirges suited to the funerals of every kind of person: lay and clergy, young and old, male and female. Nor can it be doubted that it was from these Syriac services that the services of the Greek-speaking churches took this feature, common to both, which sets them both apart from those of the West: “hymns occupying in the Eastern Church,” as Dr. Neale observes, “a space beyond all comparison greater than they do in the Latin,” so that “the body of the Eastern breviary is ecclesiastical poetry.” That the Syrian church, and not the Greek, took the lead in developing the church’s worship in this way appears from these facts. Although there is evidence that psalms and canticles from Scripture were used throughout Christendom from the first, Greek sacred poetry can be said to have taken shape only with Ephraim’s contemporary, Gregory of Nazianzus; and his verses failed to win a place in public worship. He wrote in the meters of the pagan classics. It was not until later, and at the hands of other writers working on other lines, that the hymns appeared that made their way into the Greek services: hymns written in rhythmic prose, in what seems to be a conscious imitation of the Syriac model.

The imitation, however, is by no means complete. It shows in the general tone and manner, but it does not extend to the form; just as the Greek version of Ephraim’s hymns, though it faithfully reproduces his thoughts and literary method, makes no attempt to keep his metrical system, but renders into what is prose in form an original that is in verse. That this should be so is unavoidable, for Syriac meters cannot be adapted to the Greek language. Syriac literature, imitative in everything else, here and here only found an independent path for itself. Elsewhere it leans on one side toward the Hebrew model, to which it was drawn by kinship of language and by the influence of the Old Testament; and on the other toward the Greek, as found in the New Testament and in the writings of the great teachers of the patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch, who were the leaders of religious thought for Eastern Christendom. In hymn writing alone it struck out on a line of its own, and set an example for the Greek-speaking churches to follow, as far as was possible for them under the conditions just described. Syriac hymn writing is built on the Hebrew principle of parallelism, in which thought answers to thought in clauses balanced by repetition or by contrast. But unlike the Hebrew, its clauses are further governed by a strict equality in the number of syllables. In this respect it seems to come close to the forms of Western verse, ancient or modern; yet the likeness is only on the surface. Syriac verse is not measured by feet, whether these are set by the length of syllables, as in Greek and Latin, or by accent, as in English and other modern languages. So the meter of Syriac poetry is essentially the “thought-meter,” as it has been well called, of Hebrew, brought to regularity of form by the rule that each of the lines into which the balanced clauses fall must have a fixed number of syllables. There is no regular rhyme; but the nature of the language, whose words are built so uniformly that it abounds in like endings, often produces matching sounds that amount to rhyme, or at least to assonance. The lines are very short, never more than twelve syllables, and sometimes only four. Ephraim, though not its actual inventor, was the first master of this metrical system, the first to develop it into a system with variety. His favorite meters are the five-syllable and the seven-syllable lines. In his more elaborate poems, such as the Nisibene series, which are odes rather than hymns, the strophes or stanzas into which the lines are arranged are often long and complicated in structure. Each strophe has many lines, from four up to fourteen or more, of various lengths according to a fixed scheme that is strictly kept throughout the poem, and sometimes throughout a group of related poems. In other poems, especially hymns meant for popular use or for the church’s worship, where a simple structure is suitable, the lines that make up each strophe, however many they are, are all of the same length. So readily do the Syriac tongue and the genius of Syriac literature lend themselves to this scheme of short clauses of equal syllables that, as already stated, many even of the homilies are metrical. They are arranged not in strophes, but in an unbroken run of short stichoi, all of one and the same length, usually of seven syllables: a sort of blank verse, but a blank verse with no lively accents and no varying pauses. A homily built like this would tire the ear of a modern audience with its monotony; but since some portions of Ephraim’s homilies were used in certain services of the church, probably recited in a kind of chant, that use may perhaps explain their half-versified structure.

In literary value as poems, these hymns cannot claim a high place. Some of them indeed have much of the devotional fervor, and not a little of the human tenderness, of the Psalms of David; others show something of the pointed contrasts and epigrammatic terseness of the Proverbs of Solomon. Yet the poet’s devout longings and confessions are too often forced and artificial in their expression. In his funeral dirges we seem here and there to catch the false note of the professional mourner, straining to exhaust every possible subject of grief. In all his poems he tends to stretch out the series of his parallels to a wearisome length, with a repetition that, though carefully varied, is tedious. It is a repetition that has no precedent in the poetry of the Old Testament, except in one or two of the latest psalms, such as Psalm 136, with its recurring refrain “For his mercy endures forever,” or Psalm 119, with its artificial arrangement, often copied in Syriac hymn writing, by which each of the twenty-two letters of the alphabet in turn heads each of eight consecutive verses in praise of the law of the Lord. On the whole, it must be admitted that the greater qualities of poetry, which abound everywhere in nearly every writer of the Hebrew Scriptures, are qualities to which Ephraim’s hymns have no claim: truth in rendering the inmost feelings of the human heart in words of absolute simplicity, and aspiration that rises without effort to the highest things of God.

Two main causes may be given for these shortcomings in his poetry.

One lies in the man himself, or rather in his way of life. By nature he was quick to feel for and with his fellow men: for the sorrows of the bereaved, and for the cares of the toiling poor, whose lot, as he proved in the last and best episode of his history, moved him to sympathy and active help. Accordingly he can be simple when he deals with the plain facts of everyday life. But the main course of his life was ascetic. He looked on this life and the life beyond, on man and toward God, with a vision clouded by the gloom of unnatural solitude and self-mortification. A diligent student of Scripture, he had an ear for its threats rather than for its promises and comforts; dread and dismay sank deeper into his heart than hope. The psalmist’s “Stand in awe and do not sin” was more familiar to his spirit than “Rejoice in the Lord, you righteous.” The constant readiness to weep, on which his biographers dwell with admiration, and which he seems to have thought it right to encourage, is mirrored in his writings, in the hysterical overflow of his fears, his laments and his self-reproach. He had lived as an anchorite until his nature became morbid and its moral fiber was weakened. But to reach the highest levels in religious literature, whether in prose or in poetry, a man must be sane, his mind healthy and strong, with a health and strength kept up and exercised by wholesome daily contact with the lives of other people.

The second cause lies in the method, described above as his, developed though not actually invented by him and made his own, which he chose as the vehicle of his thoughts and feelings. The “thought-meter” of the Hebrew poets was governed, as we have seen, by balance of sense, not of sound: member answering to member, verse by verse, matching or contrasting in substance only, not in the form of the words. In this meter, which has been happily compared to the alternating beat of a bird’s wings as it climbs, they had shown that it was possible to reach the very height of sublime expression of the utmost that the human spirit can conceive of God and heaven. The Syriac hymn writers had the unhappy idea of making a compromise between their two contrasting models, the Hebrew and the Greek; and to this end they forced their verses into conformity by syllable count, of sound as well as of sense. This artificial structure has an effectiveness of its own, and it suits the popular ear; but it cannot reach the height that the earlier and simpler method reached without effort. As its Semitic parallelism of substance shut Syriac poetry out from the variety of subject and breadth of conception of the Greek, so this Greek-style regularity of form held back its efforts to rise to the upper regions where the Hebrew is at home. The wings by whose measured stroke Hebrew poetry is carried are free and broad, and they bear it to the highest height; in Syriac poetry the flight is too often low and weak, because its wings are clipped. In the one we sense a uniformity like that of the free waves of the sea, following one another in endless change: a uniformity that is majestic. In the other we see the uniformity of the waterwheel, which with its artificial motion draws up the water of the well and pours it out in vessels of fixed measure: a uniformity that is mechanical and monotonous.