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Hymns on Faith

St Ephrem the Syrian, tr. Morris, 1847; selections

51. Rhythm the Fifty-first

Who is able to requite Thee for having humbled Thy Majesty unto all which is little¹, and having brought Thy Highness down to the limits of a lowly estate, and brought Thine own Life down to the rank of mortality². And Thy Richness came down and dwelt in all necessity, and Thou hast subjected Thy Lordship to the yoke of service³. Praises be to Thy goodness! Who, Lord, can gaze upon Thy invisibleness which came down to a visible state, and Thy concealedness which came to the light and to manifestation, and Thy retiredness came forth to boundless openness⁴, and Thy awfulness came to the hand⁵ of them that seized Thee. These things happened to Thee, Lord, because Thou wert Son of Man. Praises to Him that sent Thee!

Who would not be afraid, since though Thy rising and Thy Human Birth were so manifest, yet so incomprehensible is Thy Generation, that it hath baffled the investigators⁶. For there is that preacheth that it was a body only that Thou tookest: and there is that teacheth that it was a soul and a body: others have erred in thinking it was a heavenly frame⁷. Praises to Thy Generation! Lord, seal our mouth: since, if Thy revealed estate has baffled the wise; (for they have not been able to grasp Thy Birth of Mary, seeing the learned are divided into parties about⁸ Thy Birth;) if also men comprehended not Thy Humanity, who ever shall be equal to Thy Divine Generation? Praises be to Him that begot Thee!

Whatsoever is allowed, let us sing, Lord, upon our harp: let us not utter any thing thereon which is not permitted, seeing it is the harp of frail creatures. Neither are the sounds of it equal to the probing of Thy Generation; neither on harps⁹ high and spiritual of the highest Angels can Thy Generation be comprehended. Praises to Thy secretness! Lord, let my tongue be a pen for Thy glory¹⁰, and let the Finger of Thy grace mark out and write therewith words of edification. The pen, Lord, cannot, without one to hold it, of itself write at its own will. Let not my tongue slide off into speaking, without Thee, aught which edifieth not. Praises be to Thy teaching! It is audacity¹¹ in us to call Thee by a Name which is a different one from what Thy Father called Thee, who called Thee ‘My Son¹²’ alone on the river Jordan; and when Thou wert baptized, even Thou, the mystery of the Trinity baptized¹³ Thy Humanity, the Father by His voice, and the Son by His power, and the Spirit by His over-shadowing¹⁴. Praises to the over-shadowing of Thee! Who could deny the Threefold Names, whose over-shadowing ministered of old, by the Jordan? True is it that by the Names¹⁵ wherewith Thy Body was baptized¹⁶, that our bodies are baptized; and though there be very many Names of the Lord of all, He hath baptized us in the Father and the Son and the Spirit distinctly¹⁷. Praises to Thy Majesty!

Who would not be amazed at the painter, who if he painted even a common horse, when he should have added a head and the members, out of fear added them not? O foolish wise men¹⁸ that by questioning have counted a small thing that Generation which is not small, and though He is like One, yet have likened Him to many! Glory to the Son of our King!

Who hath seen in the subtle air a way akin to that way¹⁹ which a fowl wendeth²⁰, or a man walking as upon the back of the wind? The breeze is spread out, and made a path for that which walketh there, and admonisheth not to go at all outside of it²¹, for out of it is death. Praises be to Thy monishing! Lord, make me also to be fully instructed by that danger, and to be afraid of going beyond the boundary of my faith. Thy Truth is easy and straight: to them that believe, it is easy; and to them that are perverse, it is difficult.²² The simple disentangle themselves, and escape: the learned²³ err, and fall into the pit of disputatiousness. Oh that the Lord may lift them out! Praises to Him who findeth all!

From those His Names also the might of interpretation shone forth unto us. The Names of the Servant and Son of the Lord bear witness; for the name of servant teacheth that he is not the Son²⁴, as does the name of Son proclaim that He is not one of the fellow-servants²⁵. Of both their names preach without doubt. Praises to His Majesty! The bold one then that teacheth aught that is new let us reproach and say, that my faith is perfect. My gem²⁶ is entire, not needing thy grinding. It will not beautify in Thy furnace, since its beauty is from itself; and if it be graven, it is rejected from the crown of the King of Heaven. Praises be to Thy Kingdom!

Notes

p. 209, 10. and notes.
This passage might be adduced against the Aphthartodocetæ, who held Christ’s Body to be incorruptible, though it would also tell against a heresy of St. E.’s own time, that of Apollinaris, who held a similar doctrine. Vide G. Nyss. c. Apollin. 15. 24. 30. (‘what we are in essence, that was He who died for us,’) 42. (‘the Flesh being in its proper nature Flesh, but changed into the seed of Incorruption, as the Apostle says in 2 Cor. 5, 4.’) 53. and the note of Zacagni. Petav. de Inc. x. 3. Theoph. Reynaud. Christus. iv. 1. §. 2. Leontius Byz. quoted by Le Quien, ad Jo. Damasc. de F. O. iii. 28. and on Athan. p. 241, n. h. p. 243, n. i. p. 375, n. u.
p. 183, n. c. Vol. i. p. 493, b. p. 305. n.
R. xix. §. 2.
R. x. §. 4. 6.
p. 115, n. c.
These might be called various phases of Apollinarian error, though the former two were held by those of the Arian school, and though in the controversy with the latter the Fathers chiefly concerned themselves with establishing Christ’s Divinity. Apollinaris appears himself to have been driven from the first to the second, and from this perhaps to the third error here mentioned. See the Tract of Leontius de Fraud. Apol. in Mai’s Spicil. vol. x. for proof, from Apollinarians, of their subtle evasions of a definite form of error, G. Nys. ibid. 6. 13. Petav. de Inc. i. 5. and 6. x. 3. §. 1. and xiv. 3. §. 4. Le Quien ad Damasc. de Hær. §. 77. Coustant ad Hil. de Trin. x. §. 16. Mingar. ad Did. de Trin. iii. 8. Epiphanius, who complains that he could not get consistent accounts from them, (H. lxxvii. §. 20.) speaks as if what St. E. mentions last was the latest development, §. 25. “some of them have dared to say that His Flesh was consubstantial with the Godhead” —a position which would immediately follow from the assertion that He brought His Flesh from Heaven. The next words allude to this error, which of course involves a denial of the doctrine that Christ took His Flesh from the substance of the Blessed Virgin. Walchius, in his Historie der Ketzereien Th. iii. p. 223. observes that St. E. never mentions Apollinaris by name, yet cannot deny the truth of the story given in St. E.’s life by St. G. Nyssen, who mentions his sticking the pages together in Apollinaris’ book before a conference. This is worth noticing here as a proof that Apollinaris was personally known to St. E. as well as to St. Athanasius, St. Basil, and other great men of the day: which would make St. E. avoid naming him. Compare on St. Athan. p. 502. Ming. ad Did. iii. as above, and on p. 175, n. 1.
by their strifes divided p. 115, n. c.
Comp. Rev. 5, 8.
Ps. xlv. 1, 2. (to which St. E. here refers,) was often explained (as Basil mentions on the place) of the Father, who sends forth the good Word, it being taken to be spoken in the Person of the Father: conformably to which interpretation the Tongue would be explained of the Spirit as He descended at Pentecost. St. E.’s interpretation refers it rather (with St. B.) to the Gift of the Spirit, as in the following passage from his Comm. on 2 Sam. 23, 1. p. 433. “David wishes to shew the truth and verity, not only of what he is saying in this Psalm, but also of the rest of what he had preached in the Psalms by the Word and Revelation of God. For all the declarations which are written in the Psalms did he learn from God, who moved the tongue of David, and guided it as a writer doth his pen [reed]; as David also beareth witness in the Psalms, when he saith, ‘My tongue is the pen of a ready Writer.’”
or heresy, p. 127, n. f.
R. vii. §. 2, 3.
S. the threefold mystery n. h. p. 236.
The word for overshadowing is that used in Gen. 1,2. compare note m. p. 169. (where it is rendered ‘brooding,’) and n. h. p. 236. Here, as there seemed to be an allusion to St. Luke 1, 35. (in which the word Power is taken by some of the Son,) it has been rendered ‘overshadowing.’ For the River that baptized Him was a type of His Conception in St. E.’s view, p. 86, n. f. Perhaps by ‘ministered’ he means to imply that this was the beginning of the Christian, as the end of the Jewish, dispensation. Vol. ii. p. 185. “The long-suffering which was granted to this priesthood, (the Jewish,) and was granted also to it unto wickedness and violence, must needs be granted to it until His Son the Messiah, whose the priesthood is, should come, and bring it to a consummation in the Jordan by means of John.” Comp. p. 488, b. (above, p. 197, n. d.) and 495—6. Vol. i. p. 526, d. p. 532, e. (Jordan the mother and beginning of Baptism.) p. 534, b. The word ‘ministered’ has, however, the technical sense of pouring water upon the hands. See Ass. Cod. Lit. v. p. 221. and the Ch. Paraph. 2 Kings 3,12. from which this sense is doubtless taken.
ab. ref. 4.
R. xxxiii. §. 1. and 2.
[Syriac]. R. lxv. §. 3. The word perhaps means with a purposed distinctness, i. e. intending by the use of these Three Names in Baptism to mark that they indicated not essential but personal attributes.
S. Scribes
Wisd. 5, 11.
S. the way, the way of the fowl.
St. E. seems here to contemplate the atmosphere as of definite dimensions, so that life could not be sustained beyond it. The ancients commonly held the air to be surrounded by ether, or the quinta essentia, (the akas’a of the Indians.) See Olearius on Philostr. iii. 34. Sext. Empir. p. 136. Elias Cretensis ad Naz. p. 541. n. 16. Ideler Meteorol. veterum, p. 18. St. James of Edessa, a writer of St. E.’s school, gives the following account of it in vol. i. p. 120. “After this is the third circle of visible air, which is compounded equally of a mixture of air and of fire, and is in a continual state of combustion and ignition, for it is dry and subtle, and entirely devoid of all moisture: this is that which is called by the Greeks ‘Ether,’ a word which is explained to mean ‘ignited air,’ [see Hesychius and Etym. Magn.] which if not kept in order by compulsory boundary by Him who made it, what is there to stop its setting on fire, and consuming all that is near it, and making all moisture in things that exist to vanish at once.” Comp. R. xlii. §. 5. n. f. for the antitype here is intended. see R. v. §. 5.
R. l. §. 3.
S. Scribes
i. e. the name of servant shews that the Nature which appears outwardly, is not the Only-begotten Son who always is and was and is to come. The followers of Apollinaris made the flesh of Christ (as contradistinguished from His mind and soul) to be eternal and yet that which saved men as being servile in its nature. See Greg. Nyss. c. Ap. 40. To this perhaps St. E. here alludes. Comp. §. 1. p. 183, n. c. and Vol. i. p. 493, b. “Oh marvel unspeakable, which Esaias calls a wonder, that unto man his Lord came down and took the likeness of a servant, and made the servile nature commensurate as it were with the Divine!’ ii. p. 90, c. “He was called a servant by the Father when He came to fulfil His will in the salvation of men, and took the likeness of a servant in that He clothed Himself with our body.”
R. vi. §. 4. 5.
S. pearl. See Pearl ii. §. 1. n. b. Probably the word is here used generally for a gem, as rendered: for a pearl would be destroyed by heat, whereas it is said to be the practice with jewellers to get out flaws and specks from some gems by exposing them to heat.