Bible and Poetry in Late Antique Mesopotamia

Ephrem's Hymns on Faith

Jeffrey Wickes

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780520972599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient Religion

Ephrem the Syrian was one of the founding voices in Syriac literature. While he wrote in a variety of genres, the bulk of his work took the form of madrashe, a Syriac genre of musical poetry or hymns. In Bible and Poetry in Late Antique Mesopotamia, Jeffrey Wickes offers a thoroughly contextualized study of Ephrem's magnum opus, the Hymns on Faith, delivered in response to the theological controversies that followed the First Council of Nicaea. The ensuing doctrinal divisions had tremendous impact on the course of Christianity and led in part to the development of a uniquely Syriac Church, in which Ephrem would become a central figure. Drawing on literary, ritual, and performance theories, Bible and Poetry shows how Ephrem used the Syriac Bible to construct and conceive of himself and his audience. In so doing, Wickes resituates Ephrem in a broader early Christian context and contributes to discussions of literature and religion in late antiquity.

PART ONE

Ephrem and the Late Antique World

1

Ephrem’s Madrashe on Faith in Context

This book studies the way that the poems collected in the Madrashe on Faith use the Bible to represent the poet’s world. The integrity of the literary body that stands at the heart of this book, however, deserves further discussion, as does the context of these poems within the late antique world. In this chapter, I first address questions of literary unity and dating related to the Madrashe on Faith. I then engage the question of Ephrem’s relationship to the Greco-Roman world. Finally, I piece together a plausible performative context for these poems, arguing that the Madrashe on Faith emerged primarily not in liturgical settings but in those of study.

DATING THE MADRASHE ON FAITH

The Madrashe on Faith is a collection of eighty-seven poems, drawing on thirteen different melodies and meters. It is a massive collection—the largest ascribed to Ephrem by far. It first appears as a unit, along with eleven others, in manuscripts dating to the fifth and early sixth centuries.¹ Given that Ephrem died in 373, this puts more than a century between his death and the manuscripts that contain the Madrashe on Faith. As Ephrem composed no extant prologues to accompany any of his individual madrashe or the larger collections, it is not clear how those of the fifth and sixth centuries relate to the poems that Ephrem composed and delivered in the fourth century.² He could have edited them himself or together with his disciples, or instructed his disciples on how to collect his poetry after his death.³ His disciples could also have edited the poems independently, or the process could have developed organically in the context of memorization, repeated liturgical use, and addition. All these options, as well as various combinations of them, are possible.⁴

In spite of these uncertainties of transmission, the Madrashe on Faith, unlike many of the other fifth- and sixth-century madrashe cycles, represents a fairly clearly unified collection from start to finish. The poems display a consistent rhetorical argument and develop a precise lexicon with which to articulate it.⁵ Ephrem may not have compiled this material himself and, as Blake Hartung has rightly warned, we must be careful not to envision the Madrashe on Faith (or any other of the collections) as akin to singular treatises composed by the poet himself.⁶ At the same time, there is no reason to assume that Ephrem did not compose them in response to a consistent set of issues.⁷ As we have already stated and will develop further in the following chapter, the poems in the Madrashe on Faith bespeak the particular concerns of the Trinitarian controversies of the mid-to-late fourth century.⁸ Beyond that loose chronological identification, however, it is difficult to date them precisely given the collection’s compilational character. If, as I argue in the following chapter, the collection as a whole bears the influence of Aetius and Eunomius, then a date in the 360s seems most likely. This is what Edmund Beck initially proposed, and I see no reason to challenge it on the whole.⁹ Yet, given the complexities of transmission, coupled with Ephrem’s tendency to refer to historical events in extremely cryptic ways, it is entirely possible that material dating to before 360 survives in the collection.¹⁰

Within the late antique world, the Madrashe on Faith can be contextualized in two broad ways. First, the poems suggest Ephrem’s general awareness of a Greco-Roman cultural context that spanned the late antique world. Second, they suggest that they arose and developed in contexts of study and theological discussion. The latter context further connects them to other pedagogical and ascetic movements in the late antique world.

EPHREM’S GRECO-ROMAN CONTEXT

Ephrem lived in two cities during his life, both within the broader colonia of the Roman Empire called Osrhoene.¹¹ The Aramaic culture of the Eastern Roman Empire in which he lived and died was marked by the influence of Greek language, literature, and art.¹² Though, to the best of our knowledge, Ephrem wrote exclusively in Syriac, he was surrounded by this Greco-Roman culture.¹³ In this book, I understand Ephrem to have been participating in a broader late antique Mediterranean culture, which, as it relates to Ephrem, can be identified as “Greco-Syriac.” On the one hand, this position can be taken for granted, as the earliest Syriac literary culture—the literary culture that preceded Ephrem’s own literary output—clearly was marked by a definite connection to that of the Greeks.¹⁴ As we will show below, Ephrem reflected this culture in certain obvious ways. More speculatively, we would expect that Ephrem—as an educated and prolific author, as well as the deacon for a bishop in a prominent Mesopotamian town—would have known at least some Greek language.¹⁵

Yet on the other hand, some scholars read Ephrem away from this Greco-Roman context.¹⁶ And, indeed, we must admit that Ephrem sits strangely with respect to Greek culture. Unlike the platonically tinged dialogue of the Book of the Laws of the Countries, or the romantic and Greco-novelistic character of the Acts of Thomas, Ephrem’s madrashe do not have any obvious precedents in Greek literature.¹⁷ In addition, none of his madrashe exist in Greek translation at all, much less suggest the kind of immediate Greco-Syriac translation activity in the Odes of Solomon and Acts of Tomas.¹⁸ On the level of language, Aaron Butts has recently shown that the Syriac lexicon of Ephrem’s Prose Refutations—arguably his work most indebted to Greek literature—bears less evidence of interaction with the Greek language than authors writing before him.¹⁹ Further, Yifat Monnickendam, in the course of arguing for Ephrem’s relationship to Greco-Latin exegetical traditions, concludes that if Ephrem did know any Greek, he did not know it well.²⁰

This evidence suggests that Ephrem did not know Greek in any substantial way.²¹ Some scholars have combined this fact with certain statements in Ephrem’s Madrashe on Faith to suggest that its author was, in fact, decidedly opposed to Greek culture.²² The source for this interpretation derives from a few lines, the most unambiguous of which reads, “Blessed is the one who has not tasted the bile of the wisdom of the Greeks”.²³ Coupled with Ephrem’s apparent ignorance of the language, this condemnation of so-called Greek wisdom may indeed suggest an active dislike of “Greek” on Ephrem’s part. Yet, as Sebastian Brock himself has noted, the phrase “wisdom of the Greeks” (ḥekmtâ d-yawnāyê) finds an exact parallel in Athanasius, where it polemically characterizes pagan thought.²⁴ A similar characterization appears in Alexander of Alexandria’s correspondence regarding Arius, where he accuses “Arians” of affirming “the impious doctrine of the Greeks”.²⁵ Brock thus suggests that Ephrem’s use of the phrase refers not to “Greek culture and learning as a whole,” but to an overly dialectical style of theology that elsewhere Ephrem associates with Aetius.²⁶ Certainly this seems to be the case, but this recognition has more immediate consequences for our discussion. Ephrem’s condemnation of the “wisdom of the Greeks” does not reflect a general anxiety toward Greek culture as a whole. Rather, the fact that Ephrem dismisses his opponents’ thought as “Greek” represents a polemical move especially characteristic of contemporary Greek literature.

Thus, while evidence suggests that Ephrem did not know the Greek language, we cannot say that he was unaware of ideas that had their origins in Greek literature and culture, or that he was in any way adversarial to Greek language and culture. In fact, if we momentarily move away from the specific question of the language and style of the madrashe, Ephrem, in fact, appears quite receptive to, and reflective of, ideas that emerged in Greek cultural contexts. Ute Possekel has traced a range of ideas through Ephrem’s corpus that clearly emerged in Stoic, Aristotelian, Platonic, and Pythagorean circles.²⁷ Monnikendam has argued that even Ephrem’s Commenatry on Genesis, long seen as a work primarily conversant with Judaism, betrays an awareness of exegetical debates that arose among Greek and Latin speakers.²⁸ Moreover, as Beck observed as early as the 1950s, and as I will demonstrate throughout this book, Ephrem knew the fourth-century Trinitarian debates quite well. I will argue in the next chapter that Ephrem’s emphasis on the unknowability of God reflected theological trends current in Antioch in the 360s. I have argued elsewhere that between his Memre on Faith and Madrashe on Faith, we can see Ephrem wrestling with core Eunomian ideas and potentially reacting to their developments.²⁹ These ideas developed among Greek-speaking writers, and so Ephrem’s engagement with them represent, ipso facto, an engagement with Greek culture.³⁰ Ephrem himself appears not to have known Greek, but his engagement with these issues suggests his close interaction with people who did. We can clearly see from the Madrashe Against Julian that he was aware of certain developments in Antioch.³¹ Given that our evidence shows the presence of a robust Greco-Syriac literary culture in Edessa, it is likely that participants in this culture transmitted these ideas to Ephrem, and Ephrem responded to them in his own idiomatic Syriac verse.

In the cases of certain philosophical, Trinitarian, or exegetical ideas, we ca...