PART ONE
1
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 can clearly identify Ephrem as receiving and developing concrete concepts that had as their origin ideas in Greek-speaking literature. Yet, there are further ways that we can read Ephrem as participating in a broader late antique literary culture, one which need not be defined as primarily Greek or Syriac, with one language culture passively receiving the other. In chapter 4, I suggest that we can think of Ephrem’s presentation of self as akin to Greco-Roman prosopopoia. In chapter 5, I suggest that we can read his presentation of the visuality of the biblical text as a kind of ekphrasis. Throughout his corpus, moreover, Ephrem’s repeatedly develops arguments a minore ad maius.32 In none of these cases do I think sufficient evidence exists to prove his knowledge of the progymnasmata, and I do not see Ephrem parroting literary practices developed elsewhere.33 Rather, I draw parallels to these literary practices more immediately associated with Greco-Roman rhetorical culture to suggest his participation in a broad late antique literary culture.34 Scott Johnson, in his study of the presence of Greek language among Eastern Christians, has argued that scholars of Greek literature should attend not only to Greek as it was practiced in the central cities of the Roman Empire, but as it came to be received among non-Greek speakers, at the borders and beyond the Roman and Byzantine empires.35 Following Johnson’s lead, I would suggest that we can begin to think of Ephrem’s madrashe as relevant to scholars of late antique literary culture writ large, one in which a multiplicity of languages and styles merged to create new hybrid genres.36
COMMUNITY AND PERFORMANCE
I have argued that Ephrem’s Madrashe on Faith forms a unified body of poetry that emerged, for the most part, after 363 C.E. The material found within this collection manifests a unique Syriac literary idiom but also suggests a poet thoroughly immersed in the late antique world. I turn now to uncover the performative context of the Madrashe on Faith. Whereas scholars have primarily associated Ephrem’s madrashe with liturgical contexts, I argue that the Madrashe on Faith developed primarily for contexts of study. Having identified this context, I then suggest how it connects Ephrem to literary movements elsewhere in the late antique world.
Ephrem’s Madrashe: A Liturgical Genre?
In the past twenty-five years scholars have increasingly stressed the public and liturgical setting of the madrashe as a key to their rhetorical function.37 Following Peter Brown, who called them the “equivalent of the urban rhetoric of John Chrysostom,” scholars have presented the madrashe as “public events” designed to “win the allegiance of the Syriac-speaking populations” to the Nicene Orthodoxy of the Roman Empire.38 In Christine Shepardson’s interpretation, Ephrem’s decidedly public works crafted an audience that “left his church services each week prepared to see a world” that embraced Nicaea and forbade “Christians to celebrate the Jewish passover.”39 This emphasis on the public, liturgical role of Ephrem’s madrashe has rightly emphasized their status as musical and catechetical works, shaped by and responding to their audience, in both their form and their content. But it has also presented the madrashe corpus as more monolithic than it is in actuality. While a collection such as the Madrashe on Unleavened Bread likely arose in a liturgical context, the poetry compiled in the Madrashe on Faith rarely indicates its function in explicitly liturgical settings and instead suggests its Sitz im Leben as a blurred performative space between liturgy and study circle.
Ephrem himself tells us little about the context in which he performed his madrashe. The slightly later Syriac Memra on Mar Ephrem by Jacob of Sarug can help us somewhat, as can the sixth-century Syriac Life of Ephrem. Jacob’s Memra on Mar Ephrem was probably composed sometime before 494, in connection with the feast of Ephrem, which fell on the first Saturday in Lent.40 From a historical perspective, the short Memra on Ephrem is astonishing in its placement of women’s choirs at the center of Ephrem’s communal ministry, and Jacob devotes much of the memra to a theological justification of their existence.41 In this poem, Ephrem’s women are “teachers among the congregations” (malpānyātâ da-knûšātâ, line 42). They “sing praises with their madrashe” (line 46). To the extent that Jacob anchors this poetic performance in a specific liturgical context, it is that of the Paschal feast (lines 52–114): reflective of the women musicians in Exodus 15:20–21, Ephrem’s choirs sing at the feast of Pascha to proclaim the new order that Christ has ushered in. Aside from noting Ephrem’s general institution of women’s choirs, and their specific performance in the feast of Pascha, Jacob provides no specific details with which to reconstruct the liturgical use of the madrashe.
Yet Jacob also suggests a very basic division between Ephrem’s types of teaching: he taught to proclaim the resurrection (lines 52–114) and he taught to defeat heresies (lines 115–125 and 152–184). Interestingly, when Jacob speaks of Ephrem’s proclamation of the resurrection, he specifies the liturgical context—that of the Paschal feast. But when he speaks of Ephrem’s anti-heretical activity, he does not specify a liturgical context. Rather, he says that Ephrem “led women down to the doctrinal disputes” (ʼaḥet l-neššê l-darrâ d-malpānûtâ, line 152). Jacob provides no more detail about these “doctrinal disputes,” but his language suggests some other performative context than that of the liturgy.
The early sixth-century Life of Ephrem provides some further insight into the performative context of Ephrem’s madrashe. In the Life, Ephrem’s career as a poet does not appear until chapter thirty. There we are told that, after traveling to Egypt to meet Abba Bishoi and Cappadocia to meet Basil, Ephrem returned to Edessa, only to find it deep in the mire of heresy. Within the Life, Ephrem becomes aware of the danger of heresy when he stumbles upon a book of the teachings of Bardaisan and hears the catchy tunes constructed on their basis. The Life then states:
Seeing these heresies, and recognizing that their entire doctrine was foul, the blessed one feared that innocent sheep would be captivated by their alluring sounds (bnāt qālê maḥtaḥtâ). Aglow with the radiance of the Holy Spirit, he armed himself against them. . . . He took the arrangement of the melodies and songs (nsab leh haw mlaḥmûtâ d-qālê w-qînātâ) and mixed into them the fear of God, and offered to his hearers an antidote at once agreeable and wholesome.42
Echoing Jacob’s portrait, the Life says that Ephrem taught these madrashe to the daughters of the covenant, combining choir practice with more general catechesis. These daughters of the covenant, the Life continues, would gather in the church each morning and evening to learn the madrashe, and would sing them in the liturgy, at martyr shrines, and in funeral processions:
He appointed teachers (ʼaqîm b-hên malpānyātâ) among all the daughters of the covenant who regularly came to the holy, catholic church, and taught them madrashe. Evenings and mornings they would gather in church before the service (tešmeštâ). And at the martyrs’ shrines (b-bêt sāhdwātâ) and in funeral processions (b-lwayyātâ ‘nîdê) they would sing.43
While the Life as a whole clearly distinguishes liturgical from nonliturgical performative contexts, this passage suggests a blurring of these boundaries, as well as the boundaries between the liturgical and the pedagogical. The Life alleges that Ephrem would meet with the daughters of the covenant every morning and evening “before the service” (tešmeštâ) to teach them the songs that they would perform. It alleges, further, that Ephrem would appoint “teachers” (malpānyātâ) among these women. This offers a different way to imagine the context of the madrashe, in which the division between classroom and liturgy blurs. The Syriac Life and Jacob’s memra both point to contexts in which women were taught madrashe as part of a larger project of catechesis. In Jacob’s memra, this is connected to “doctrinal disputes.” In the Syriac Life, this is identified as preliturgical catechesis. Neither of these sources provide specific details about the performative contexts they identify. But these two points cohere with the evidence of Ephrem’s Madrashe on Faith, as well as comparative evidence from the Eastern Mediterranean for contexts of liturgy and study.
Liturgy and Study in the Madrashe on Faith
Before turning to the performative context of Ephrem’s Madrashe on Faith, it will be helpful to show that some of Ephrem’s madrashe obviously do derive from liturgical contexts. For the sake of clarity, we can chart the madrashe’s relationship to the liturgy using three basic criteria. First, and most important, what I would call a “liturgical madrasha” will typically reference a liturgical feast that we know existed in the fourth century. Second, a liturgical madrasha will draw on biblical lections connected with a feast.44 Third, a liturgical madrasha will repeatedly refer to liturgical rituals, primarily baptism and the Eucharist. While these criteria are by no means foolproof, they do allow us to speak clearly about what we mean when we call a madrasha “liturgical.”45
Using these criteria, it immediately becomes apparent that a number of Ephrem’s madrashe can indeed be considered “liturgical.” Those in the Madrashe on Unleavened Bread consistently refer to a well-attested, fourth-century liturgical feast (Easter) and base themselves on underlying scriptural lections (either a Passion narrative, the Passover and Exodus narratives from Exodus, or both).46 All exhibit very simple meters and syntax, and have as one of their core themes a critique of ritual practice.47 Similarly, those in the Madrashe on Nativity consistently indicate their use in a service for the Nativity and are replete with allusions to scriptural lections.48 Ephrem even playfully hints that his audience might be hearing MNat 1 while struggling to stay awake during a festal vigil (MNat 1:63–86). This evidence suggests that these madrashe were written for contexts of festal liturgy.
References to baptismal or eucharistic services are more difficult to chart, because Ephrem came to rely heavily on shared ritual practices in his polemics with subordinationist Christians. He thus references these rituals in madrashe that otherwise appear nonliturgical. For example, in MF 39, Ephrem speaks in passing against those Christians who have “divided” the baptismal font and have “strayed from that Greatness . . . into which they were baptized.” Within this poem, however, baptism features tangentially, and so it is difficult to argue on the basis of this single reference that the Madrashe on Faith arose in a liturgical context. In a poem such as MF 10, however, the Eucharist provides the central object of the poet’s reflection. It is thus entirely reasonable to imagine that it functioned within some sort of Eucharist service.
On the basis of this quick survey, we can see that some of Ephrem’s madrashe likely occupied liturgical contexts. Yet, unlike the material collected in Ephrem’s Madrashe on Unleavened Bread and Madrashe on Nativity, or like the eucharistic or baptismal madrashe scattered through his corpus, most of Ephrem’s Madrashe on Faith never allude to liturgical celebrations, never reference what appear to be underlying scriptural lections, and do not appear to have accompanied eucharistic or baptismal gatherings.49 Of the eighty-seven madrashe that make up the collection, only three focus specifically on liturgical topics—poems 10 and 12 both reflect upon the Eucharist, and poem 59 reflects on baptism. Another twenty-two madrashe reference liturgical feasts or practices in tangential or ambiguous ways. Of these twenty-two madrashe, twelve refer tangentially to baptismal or eucharistic practices as a way of polemicizing against variant Christological ideas.50 The remaining eight simply embed references to the Church, baptism, or the Eucharist in an ambiguous way.51
This leaves sixty-two of the collection’s eighty-seven madrashe that never refer to liturgical feasts, rituals, or actions even in the most tangential or ambiguous of ways. Liturgy simply does not factor into the content of these madrashe. What they do contain, however, is a preoccupation with topics that suggest contexts of study and discussion. Throughout the Madrashe on Faith, for example, Ephrem concerns himself with debates over philosophical ideas. He engages in twisting discussions of the nature of the soul and reflections on how this relates to human knowledge of God.52 He assesses what we can and cannot know about the nature of God, and develops complex metaphors to articulate the shared substance of the Trinity.53 He articulates a philosophically indebted cosmology and psychology.54 In general, rather than reflecting on liturgical feasts and lections, many of the Madrashe on Faith proceed through a speculative reflection on the natural worlds.55 Ephrem ends most of these madrashe with doxological exclamations and ultimately doubts human ability to arrive at a complete understanding of God. Yet, this doxological apophaticism reveals an understanding of debates about metaphysics and epistemology taking place elsewhere in the fourth-century Mediterranean. In spite of his repeated warnings against investigation, these madrashe betray his community’s interest in these speculative issues.
Alongside the madrashe’s concern with philosophical issues, they likewise engage in readings of biblical passages that were debated in the context of the fourth-century Trinitarian controversies, but which have no clear relationship to the developing lectionary.56 MF 53 focuses specifically on how one should interpret Proverbs 8:22, and generally on how one should read the Bible as a whole. Ephrem engages in a similar anti-subordinationist reading of Mark 13:32 in MF 79. Both Proverbs 8:22 and Mark 13:32 became, in the course of the fourth century, texts that authors worked through to argue against the Son’s inferiority to the Father.57 Unlike Ephrem’s exegesis of the Passion narrative in the Madrashe on Unleavened Bread, or prophetic passages in the Madrashe on Nativity, here Ephrem works through passages discussed and debated elsewhere in polemical treatises but does so in musical form. Likewise, in MF 6, he constructs a dense argument for reading Genesis 1 and 2 as evidence for the Trinity. In these madrashe, Ephrem uses the genre to engage his audience in academic and pedagogical discussions of problematic texts. As I argued in the introduction, Ephrem’s discussion of these fourth-century problem passages by no means sits at the heart of the Madrashe on Faith’s use of the Bible. Nevertheless, his occasional discussion of them suggests the quasi-philosophical, non-lectionary-based contexts in which these discussions took place. As with Ephrem’s concerns with philosophical ideas, this evidence, combined with the absence of liturgical cues, suggests the madrashe’s connection to an environment of philosophical and exegetical debate.
The “us” to which Ephrem repeatedly refers in these madrashe seems to have been one deeply invested in teaching roles within the communit.58 Often in these nonliturgical madrashe, he reflects on the place of teaching and teachers generally. The root y-l-p—“to learn,” or, in its Pael form, “to teach”—appears in the Madrashe on Faith approximately seventy-five times. The abstract noun yûlpānâ, “teaching,” appears thirty times. Using this language, Ephrem constructs teaching as a reified object, granted only by God: “Turn to me your teaching, for I have sought to avert myself, / but I see that I have harmed myself. My soul gains nothing / Except through converse with you. Glory to the study of you (šûbḥâ l-hegyānāk)!”59 MF 23 appears to speak to students who will then compose their own songs to teach others:
Measure your words, O blameless voices (qālê d-lâ met’adlîn).
Measure and sing songs undisputed,
That your song, my son, may be a delight
To the servants of your Lord, and your Lord repay you.
Do not sing damage to humanity.
Do not, through discussion, divide those who are united.
Do not place a sword—that is, investigation—
Among the simple, who have believed simply.
MF 58:7 similarly engages those who are themselves engaged in teaching and debate:
Speak what is profitable and explain the teaching.
Interpret what is beneficial and discuss what builds up.
Question the deniers and repudiate the crucifiers.
Investigate their Bible and refute their arguments.
Teach innocence, increase simplicity,
And bring ignorance to enlightenment.
In both of these examples, Ephrem is concerned that those who teach others not engage them in controversial topics—that the teaching be profitable and beneficial. This points to the likelihood that the poems in the Madrashe on Faith are engaged in a process of educating those who will educate others. Beyond that, however, Ephrem’s eschewal of what he calls “investigation” forms one of the most consistent, and one of the most interesting, themes of the Madrashe on Faith. It is a theme that I treat in depth in the following chapter. Here, however, it can help us further think through the use of the madrashe as tools for teaching. From one perspective, Ephrem’s apparent pessimism about the limits of the pursuit of knowledge seems an odd feature for a work engaged in a program of pedagogy. However, we can read these condemnations not as an attempt to shut down intellectual inquiry but instead to shape rhetorically the community that hears and sings them. Ephrem encourages his students to engage in an educational process with a full understanding of what can and cannot be known. By marking these limits, he can then guide them through a reading and discussion of the very ideas he, from a certain perspective, demeans.
The poems in the Madrashe on Faith connect to the church’s developing liturgical cycle in only the most tangential of ways. Instead, they suggest a blurred space between liturgy and classroom, in which pedagogical songs were used to debate difficult philosophical ideas, engage problematic and controversial biblical passages, and reflect on the role of teaching and teachers. Within this context, the Bible formed the primary lens through which Ephrem engaged his audience. The Syriac Life of Ephrem imagines the madrashe within a liturgical context but also hints at a blurred space that might have resembled a study circle or protoschool. It is in such a context that I suggest the Madrashe on Faith emerged. Yet defining the implied setting of a “school” is not straightforward. It is almost certain that no formal school, of Edessa or Nisibis, existed in Ephrem’s time.60 However, comparative evidence for literary communities elsewhere in the fourth-century Mediterranean, as well as slightly later evidence for the use of poetry in the School of Nisibis, reveal contexts in which poetry functioned pedagogically. This material can help us further envision the context of study in which the Madrashe on Faith developed. It can also help us better place Ephrem in a wider late antique context.
The Madrashe on Faith in Late Antique Literary Contexts
Ephrem was likely a member of the unique Mesopotamian ascetic group known as the bnay/bnāt qyāmâ (“the sons/daughters” or “children of the covenant”).61 The most specific discussion of this community comes not from Ephrem but from his older contemporary Aphrahat (d. ca. 345)62 As best we can tell, the “children of the covenant” was a loosely organized ascetic community that developed among Syriac-speaking Christians. These “covenanters” privileged decidedly ascetic behaviors—fasting, sleeplessness and vigilance, poverty, and chastity. The community consisted of men and women, a fact that Aphrahat’s Demonstrations makes clear.63 As both Aphrahat and Ephrem suggest, the members of the community established their own living arrangements.64 The evidence of these sources suggests that the social makeup of the community—where and when they met, how they were organized, and who oversaw such things—was not precisely structured. Thoughugh Ephrem never specifically identifies himself as a “son of the covenant,” he prizes the same ascetic virtues that Aphrahat hails in his Demonstrations.65 Moreover, if we place the witnesses of Aphrahat and Ephrem within the larger context of third- and fourth-century Greco-Syriac literature—the Book of the Steps, the homilies of Pseudo-Macarius, the earlier Acts of Judas Thomas, and the Pseudo-Clementines—we get the distinct impression that ascetic communities formed a crucial part of the broader makeup of Syriac Christian culture.66
Scholars readily acknowledge the ascetic character of early Syriac Christianity, but the trend has been to read Ephrem subtly away from it—to state all the things Ephrem’s community did not do: they did not flee the world, take formal vows, wear special clothes, or live in isolated communities.67 Yet an unintended consequence of reading Ephrem away from later ascetic ideals has been to read him away from the small, ascetic circles within which his Madrashe on Faith developed. There is much about Ephrem’s circle that we do not know, but one of its most obvious characteristics is nevertheless rarely identified: Ephrem’s circle was literary. Regarding Aphrahat, Adam Becker has argued that his corpus “must have come from a literate context in which the work of a homilist and the scriptural learning it entailed were not uncommon.”68 Certainly this can be applied to Ephrem’s circle as well: it was engaged in writing, reading, discussing, teaching, and singing; it was a circle for which he wrote line after line of sophisticated song. Much of this song, as we have seen, dealt with particularly bookish themes—philosophical ideas, dense exegeses of problematic passages, and exhortations to value but know the limits of learning. Because of the particularly bookish content of many of the madrashe, we can think of this small circle neither as the local parish nor as some kind of protomonastery, but as a protoschool, gathered to learn and pray. The small gatherings of iḥîdāyê (“single ones”), qaddîšê (“holy ones”), and btûlātâ (“virgins”) read, sang, prayed, discussed, and wrote. The ideals of their life were ascetic, but their asceticism was carried out in especially literary ways.
Scholars have speculated that Ephrem’s Commentary on Genesis functioned as a school text.69 The Commentary on the Diatessaron attests to this scholastic activity on an even more immediate level—it is a school text, both in the sense that it was written for a study circle, and it was added to by the students for whom it was written.70 In this work we can see Ephrem’s study circle in action—reading and discussing his ideas and amending them in organic ways. We can add to these school texts Ephrem’s Prose Refutations, a collection of memre that discuss the ideas of Plato and the Stoics, among others.71 But the bookish character of Ephrem’s writings extends to his madrashe as well. The Christological ideas articulated in the Madrashe on Faith reflect similar ideas being discussed in Antioch during the last decade of Ephrem’s life. With the evidence of the Madrashe on Faith, we can see Ephrem’s circle as one that communicated with thinkers and writers throughout the Mediterranean, and articulated responses in Syriac poetry and song.
Reading Ephrem’s Madrashe on Faith as emerging not only in liturgical services for popular audiences but also in smaller, ascetic, literary circles renders him a more coherent part of the fabric of Mediterranean religious life in the second half of the fourth century. In communities in Rome, Egypt, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Cappadocia, other figures were likewise imagining new patterns of communal life and using literature as one of the primary modes of articulating this communal identity.72 We may compare his experimental study setting to that of Gregory Nazianzen, for whom poetry, study, and liturgy also overlapped. In On His Own Verses, Gregory makes clear that in writing Christian verse he aimed to construct entertaining, occasionally musical, poems that would attract the attention of young people:
I wished to present my work
To young people—especially those who enjoy literature—
As a kind of pleasant medicine,
An inducement that might lead them to more useful things,
Skillfully sweetening the harshness of the commandments
(For a taut bowstring also needs to be relaxed).
Perhaps you are willing to give this a try? If nothing more,
These verses can be a substitute for songs and lyre-playing.73
Gregory’s lines clearly echo Christian justifications for the use of music in liturgy.74 Yet, Gregory is not constructing liturgical songs to compete with pagan songs, but paraliturgical poetry for sophisticated literary circles. On the basis of these lines, both Cecilia Milovanovich-Barham and Frederick Norris have argued that Gregory intended at least some of his verse to be sung—that, as Norris puts it, we have in portions of the Poemata Arcana a “poetic, musical catechism.”75
Gregory wrote these poems late in his life, after retiring to his Cappadocian estate to live out his own ideal of the Christian life.76 Throughout Cappadocia during the second half of the fourth century, we see concrete debates about how Christian communities should structure themselves—as circles of intellectual aristocrats (Gregory Nazianzen), as ecclesiastically monitored ascetics (Basil), or as working communities who have rejected the privileges of aristocracy (Macrina and Eustathios of Antioch).77 My concern is not with Cappadocian communities per se. Rather, the Cappadocian experiments reveal something instructive about communal life at the time: not only in Mesopotamia but throughout the Mediterranean the structures of communal life were still up for debate. Scholars have long noted compelling parallels between Ephrem and the Cappadocians.78 In this case, they all share a tendency to carry out debates about communal life and learning through literature. Gregory Nazianzen constructed his community through poems, Basil through rules and letters, and Gregory of Nyssa through the Life of Macrina. These works were not written for the population gathered in basilicas on Sundays but for experimental communities orienting their daily lives around prayer and study.
Unlike the Cappadocians, Ephrem spent his life working in urban contexts. Moreover, while the Cappadocians’ family structures played such a crucial role in the shape of their communities, we know little about Ephrem’s family background. But his madrashe engaged in many of the same tasks as the works of his Cappadocian colleagues and at roughly the same time—a time when the relationship between ecclesiastical structures and ascetic communities were hotly debated, and when both scholastic institutions and liturgical services were taking a more concrete shape. Literature played a crucial role in these debates and developing institutions. So as with emerging Cappadocian communities, we can reimagine Ephrem’s madrashe not simply as liturgical songs but as works of literature written, in part, for small literary-ascetic communities, at a crucial moment in the development of Christian communal identity in the empire. In the context of the Madrashe on Faith, Ephrem reflected on these issues through the pages of the Bible.
In addition to drawing out these scholastic aspects of Ephrem’s ascetic context, comparative evidence also shows how it articulated its identity in pedagogical modes, with poetic literary forms. Becker’s study of the School of Nisibis compellingly demonstrates the preponderance of such pedagogical modes of thought within Syriac Christian culture. This pedagogical key is sounded out even in the earliest Syriac sources, the Peshitta, which consistently represents Israelite leaders as teachers of the people.79 Becker notes, too, that Ephrem understands salvation and revelation in primarily pedagogical terms.80 In the later School of Nisibis, Becker also notes a subtle but persistent blurring of the boundaries between liturgy, poetry, and pedagogy.81 For example, the eighth Canon of Narsai insists that all students must participate continually in “writing, reading (hegyānâ), interpretation . . . and choral reading” (qeryānâ d-sî‘ātâ).82 The perspective given by this canon is that scholastic and liturgical duties overlapped. Becker confirms this in his general discussion of the school. As he notes, the mpashqānâ—“exegete”—not only studied and taught the Bible, he also led the choir (sî‘tâ).83 This role is spelled out in the Cause of the Foundation of the Schools, as it describes the career of Narsai: “[T]hat blessed man led the assembly for a time of twenty years, while daily leading the choir and giving interpretation” (383.11–14).84 Becker identifies the picture given here as one that witnesses “the conflation of scriptural meaning and liturgical action.”85 This conflation or blurring was achieved, moreover, at least until the sixth century, through the use of verse forms. It was precisely the verse memre that served both a liturgical and an exegetical function. Becker notes that in the course of the sixth century, poetry came to be replaced by prose in the schools, and this dichotomy is also reflected, as we have seen, in the portrait of the madrashe in Ephrem’s Life.86 But in the fifth century, it was the verse memre that functioned as the school genre par excellence. Ephrem’s madrasha engaged his community in a similar process of prayer and study, song and exegesis. Rather than imagining Ephrem’s madrasha as akin to a homily preached in a large urban basilica, we can think of it as a dynamic text, able to function as a communal, liturgical song in a Paschal feast, but also to engage literary-ascetic communities, immersed in technical theological debates, in a unique form of doxological pedagogy.
Against this backdrop, we can see Ephrem presenting the Bible to his audience in the Madrashe on Faith. In contexts of study, Ephrem reflected on the Bible itself, his own role as poet, the religious identify of his audiences, and the divinity of Christ. Yet, one idea, more than any other, united the contents of the Madrashe on Faith. It is to that idea that I now turn.