4. The consecration of Basil to the see of Cæsarea, late in 370, followed by Ephraim's visit to him there.
5. The deliverance of the Edessenes from the persecution of Valens (370-372), celebrated by Ephraim in a hymn.
6. Ephraim's death, 373.
To this list it would be right to prefix the meeting of the Council of Nicæa in 325, if the evidence of Ephraim's presence at it, along with St. Jacob, were sufficient. But it has no early attestation; and no writer prior to Theodoret (Hist. Eccles. II. 30) associates the name of Jacob with any incident in Ephraim's life.
The date of Ephraim's birth is nowhere directly stated, but it is usually assumed to have been early in the reign of Constantine (306-337), on the authority of the Vatican Life, which says, "In the days of the victorious Constantine, true believer, was born the holy man Ephraim." But the statement of the Parisian Life is less explicit, and is capable of a different meaning:--"He was in the days of the victorious Constantine." This merely implies that Ephraim (if the pronoun represent him) lived in the reign of that emperor. But it rather appears that Ephraim's father is meant, inasmuch as he is the subject of the immediately preceding sentence which describes him as a heathen priest; and the purport of the passage is, that the saint was the son of a man who not merely had been one of an idolatrous priesthood, but continued to be so after Constantine had acknowledged the Christian religion. [297]
The earlier authorities give no express statement on this point; but a late tenth-century Greek menologium, that of the Emperor Basil (Porphyrogenitus), says that he "continued from the reign of Constantine to that of Valens," [298] --implying as it seems that he was born, as the Vatican Life represents, after Constantine's accession in 306.
Considering, however, that the Life in both its forms affirms that Ephraim was brought by St. Jacob to the Council of Nicæa in 325--in which it is borne out by Gregory Barhebræus in his Ecclesiastical Chronicle [299] (who though a very late writer (1226-1286) had access to early authorities and judgment in using them)--it is hard to reconcile the chronology, for the improbability of the admission of a lad of nineteen, in any capacity, to that venerable assembly, is very great. If we accept it as a fact that he was chosen by Jacob to accompany him, and was permitted to be present among the Fathers at Nicæa, it seems almost necessary to place his birth before Constantine became emperor. [300]
Farther: the menologium above cited adds that he died "in extreme old age;" and the tone and tenor of his testament go far to confirm the truth of these words. But as he died in 373, he cannot have been more than 67 years old in that year if he was born in 306. No doubt 67 is a ripe age, but hardly sufficient to warrant the strong expression of the menologium. Without pressing its language unduly, we may surely take it as implying that he had passed the "threescore years and ten" of the Psalmist at the time of his death--in other words that he was born not later than the first or second year of the fourth century.
Thus by rectifying the text and rendering of the opening sentences of the Life, we relieve ourselves of the supposed necessity of placing his birth in or after 306. And his presence in the Council of 325, and his extreme old age in 373, concur in pointing to the beginning of the fourth century--if not to the later years of the third--as the probable time of that event.
However this may be, whether he was born in 306 or earlier, it is certain that by far the greater part of the long life of the "Deacon of Edessa"--all of it save its last ten or eleven years (363-373) was passed in his native Nisibis; and that he did not even attain the diaconate till he was considerably over sixty years of age, and within three years of his end.
[297] The passage is as follows: "Ephraim was a Syrian by birth. His father was of Nisibis, and his mother of Amid. And his father was priest in Nisibis of an idol named Abizal, which afterwards the victorious Emperor Jovian broke. He [or it, scil., the idol] was in the days of the victorious Emperor Constantine, true believer. But his father had this famous son, of whom is our narrative." The meaning may be that the idol was suffered to exist during Constantine's reign and after, till Jovian destroyed it: but it is now natural to understand it, as above, of Ephraim's father. The Vatican editor seems to have misunderstood his original, which the Parisian transcriber has preserved faithfully,--and to have altered it into accordance with his misunderstanding, by recasting the passage and substituting "was born" for "was."
[298] In Migne's Patrologia Græca, CXVI I., p. 254.
[299] I., 23 (Abbeloos and Lamy's edition).
[300] Gregory Barhebr. (Chron. Eccles., II., 10) mentions, but doubtfully, a tradition that Ephraim wrote a letter circ. 334 in which he took the part of Papas, the Catholicus, against "the Bishops of the East" who accused him of neglect and misconduct. If this be accepted, it is additional evidence for the early date of Ephraim's birth.
VIII.--His Writings: Their Characteristics.
Of the innumerable writings--controversial, expository, hortatory, devotional--which were for Ephraim the fulfilment of his dream in childhood, the fruit of the many years of literary activity that exercised his full heart and busy brain, enough remains to give an adequate idea of his powers and to amaze us by its variety and abundance. The exaggeration of Sozomen who reckons the number of lines written by him at "three hundred myriads" (three millions) is not to be taken as more than a rough guess at the probable total; but it is evidence of the impression made on the men of the generations to whom his works were transmitted by his fertility. That he himself was conscious of this gift appears in the fact that he records the dream and claims for his hymns and sermons that in them is to be found its interpretation. His faculty of speech, as Gregory informs us in a remarkable passage, though adequate to utter the thoughts of any other mind, was sometimes overborne by the rapid rush and abounding throng of the ideas with which his inspiration filled him, in such measure that he was forced to pray for the intermission of its flow, "Restrain, O Lord, the tide of Thy grace!" [301] Copiousness is the characteristic, and its excess is the chief fault, of Ephraim as an author. The Syriac language has great capacity for condensation; and the parallelism of balanced clauses which Syriac literature affects, conduces to brevity. But on the other hand, the Syrian mind has a tendency to amplify; amplification is the besetting sin of Syriac writers,--of Ephraim not least. And thus, while each sentence has the severe precision of an epigram, the manifold reiteration of epigrammatic clauses amounts to verbosity: one and the same thought or fact is presented in a long-drawn series of slightly varied aspects, with change of expression or at most of illustration, till the recurrence becomes tedious. This criticism is meant primarily for his hymns; but it applies also to too many of his metrical homilies (to be described presently). In all his writings, metrical or otherwise, this habit of amplification leads him, in handling the narrations of Scripture, to fill out their simple outline with elaborate detail that wrongs their beauty and dignity. Of such treatment, examples will be found in this volume, in some of the hymns (such as the XIV^th and XV^th On the Epiphany, and in the Discourse on the Woman who was a Sinner).
His extant works (some of which are known to us only in a Greek version), and those of his lost works of which the titles are recorded, divide themselves into three classes;--Commentaries on Scripture, Homilies (mimre), and Hymns (madrashe).
1. Commentaries.--His Commentaries belonged (if we may trust the Life) to his later years, after his migration to Edessa, when he was past middle life. There he is related to have begun his exposition (still extant) of Genesis, in the preface to which he refers to the homilies and hymns which he had previously produced (Opp. Syr. Tom. I., p. 1). He seems to have commented on almost all the canonical books of the Old Testament. His expositions of the Pentateuch, the chief historical books, [302] the Prophets (including Lamentations), and Job, survive, and have been printed (in the Roman edition of 1732-43, supplemented by that of Professor Lamy, of Louvain, Tom. II., 1886); [303] but those which he is recorded to have written on the Psalms and Proverbs, the books which may be presumed to have most influenced the religious spirit and literary form of his works, have not been preserved. None of the above, however, have reached us in a complete form, but rather as a series of extracts, apparently abridged, from the Commentaries as originally issued by their author. In commenting on the New Testament, he treated of the Gospels, not in their separate form, but in the continuous narrative known as the "Diatessaron" compiled from them by Tatian in the second century. This work, long lost, has been lately recovered in an Armenian version. His Commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul has likewise been preserved for us in Armenian. Both have been published by the Mechetarist Fathers of St. Lazaro; first in Armenian, afterwards in a Latin version. [304] In the present volume it has been judged best to include none of the Commentaries, inasmuch as the method and spirit of Ephraim's treatment of Scripture are shown adequately, and in a more interesting form, in his Homilies and Hymns.
2. Homilies.--The Homilies are very varied in character. Many are controversial,--directed against the Jews, against heathenism in the person of the Emperor Julian, against the heresies of Manes, of Marcion, of Bardesan, of the Anomoean followers of Arius. Others set forth articles of the Faith--the Creation, the Fall, Redemption by the Passion and Crucifixion of Our Lord, His Descent into Hades, His Resurrection, the Mission of the Holy Spirit, the Rest of Paradise, the Second Coming, the End of the World. Others are expository, treating of narratives 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" of St. Luke vii.--Others again are hortatory--calling to repentance, warning against sin, threatening future retribution, extolling virginity. Of the Homilies two--one doctrinal, of Our Lord; one expository, of the sinful woman, are given in this selection. It is to be noted that the Homilies are usually metrical in form, being written in regular stichoi (lines of uniform length). And some of them--for example, a series of nine for the "Rogation Days," [305] and another of eight for the "Passion Week" (week before Easter), and the vigil of "New Sunday" (first after Easter)--were and still are regularly read as lessons, as part of the offices of the Church; [306] a singular mark of reverence--extended, it seems, to the sermons of no other divine.
3. Hymns.--But it is in his Hymns that Ephraim lives,--for the Syrian Churches, and indirectly for the Christian world, of the East if not of the West. [307] Throughout Syrian Christendom, divided as it has been for ages--in the Malkite, 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 retain Syriac as the language of their ritual,--the whole body of public worship is shaped by his hymnody and animated with his spirit. It is literally the fact 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 (included in the present selection) are interwoven into the Baptismal Office; among the Funeral Hymns (which Dr. Burgess has made accessible to English readers) [308] are to be found dirges proper for the obsequies of each and all, lay and cleric, young and old, male and female. Nor is it to be doubted that it was from these Syriac offices that those of the Greek-speaking Churches derived this characteristic, common to both, by which both are differentiated from those of the West,--"hymns occupying in the Eastern Church" (as Dr. Neale observes) [309] "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 initiative in the development of ritual, appears from the facts that, though there is evidence of the use of Psalms and Canticles from Scripture throughout Christendom from the first, it is only with Ephraim's contemporary, Gregory Nazianzen, that Greek sacred poetry can be said to have taken shape,--and that his verses failed to gain a place in public worship. He wrote in the metres of the heathen classics; and it was not until a later day, and from the hands of other writers, working on other lines, that the hymns appeared which won their way into the Greek ritual,--hymns written in rhythmic prose, in what seems to be conscious imitation of the Syriac model. [310]