The poems collected in Ephrem’s Madrashe on Faith represent some of the many unique pieces of literature that emerged after the Council of Nicaea and in the wake of the conversion of Constantine. This period has long been seen as one of intense change in Christian history. These changes were manifest in the visible spaces that marked the empire, in the rituals that Christians practiced, in the ways theology was organized and managed, and in the literature that Christians produced.1 The council that Constantine convened—the Council of Nicaea—would bear fruit in the Mediterranean world long after the fourth century. In its canonization of a particular way of speaking about Christ, it would shape Christological discourse for the next millennium at least. Its precedent of an imperially supported Christianity would also live on, especially in the Byzantine Empire. At the eastern margins of the empire and into Persia, Nicaea would become a standard for all subsequent theology as well. Indeed, in the Christological controversies that erupted in the fifth century, northern Mesopotamian Christians spoke against Chalcedon precisely on the grounds that it had abandoned and tried to usurp the place of Nicaea.2
Ephrem would have been about twenty years of age when his bishop, Jacob, traveled to and from the Council of Nicaea. It is one of the great ironies of Ephrem’s corpus that he, on the one hand, never mentioned that council by name but, on the other hand, seems to have absorbed it so deeply into his way of understanding God and the world.3 In this sense, the poems collected in Ephrem’s Madrashe on Faith and the theological ideas he articulated within them very much developed in the shadow of Nicaea. The council loomed and found its way into the interstices of his literary body. But one never senses that Ephrem saw himself as a “Nicene” theologian in the sense that he aimed to defend the theology of that council or even to articulate that theology in concise and clear ways. Rather, the radical subordination of Christ to God the Father stirred Ephrem’s imagination so that he read the Bible differently. His effort to affirm the transcendence of Christ shaped the way he thought about the Bible and the world. This book has tried to examine that place in Ephrem’s poetry where theological controversy and the Bible met. I have argued that Ephrem processed these controversies, for himself and his audience, through the pages of the Bible, in the literary context of the madrasha. Ephrem sublimated the stuff of his world—the ideas, the texts, and political events—into a corpus of late antique poetry.
As Ephrem was cutting his teeth on the theological ideas affiliated with Nicaea, the Bible was also playing a key role in the broader religious culture of the Eastern Mediterranean. Philosophers and rhetoricians in Antioch and Cappadocia were fixating on biblical names and using the biblical text as a tool for theological speculation.4 In Egypt and Palestine, monks were reciting the words of the Bible in communal and personal prayer as a tool that united them with the divine in very real ways.5 In more educated Greek and Latin circles, poets were rewriting the words of the Bible in the meters of classical antiquity.6 Between Palestine and Persia, the Rabbis were using the biblical text as the infrastructure for the towering Talmuds that would come together in the following centuries.7
The fourth century was indeed a fruitful time for religious and literary life in the Mediterranean and its hinter regions. In this context of Christological and biblical debate, Ephrem produced a poetic corpus as impressive as any that survives from the late antique world.8 The poems he wrote were deeply immersed in the world in which they came into being. Ephrem was fully aware of the theological and literary trends developing in the broader Mediterranean world. His literary medium, moreover, functioned as a pedagogical genre. In its effort to shape a community pedagogically, Ephrem engaged in scholarly activities similar to those developing in communities throughout the broader Mediterranean.
The largest of his madrashe cycles—the Madrashe on Faith—reflected in a poignant way these three foci of Christian theological reflection—Christology, exegesis, and education—and did so through the genre of poetry. In this book, I have tried to trace these points of orientation and have argued that they reveal something about Ephrem as a reader and as a poet. Ephrem’s manner of interacting with the Bible was productive. His madrasha was not a commentary or a homily. In the madrashe, Ephrem represented a world in which the Bible and the particularities of the fourth century met in a relationship of likeness.
We see this first in the very rhetoric that gives the Madrashe on Faith their coherency, namely, their repeated condemnation of “investigation.” This language certainly developed in response to the fourth-century Christological debates and, especially, the culture of debate that played out in Antioch in the 360s. At the same time, the lexicon of investigation that Ephrem developed appears to have emerged from within the Syriac Bible. Ephrem used the resonances of the language of investigation to make a critique of his opponents. He argued that they were engaging in a form of discourse accessible only to God and were, in turn, subjecting God to that very discourse.
If Ephrem drew upon the Bible to produce the rhetorical lexicon that undergirded the Madrashe on Faith, he then refashioned the Bible as a whole in view of this rhetoric. While Ephrem never constructed a theoretical treatise about the Bible, the poems in the Madrashe on Faith betray a consistent way of imagining the Bible and arguing for a particular way of interacting with it. He chastised his opponents for building theological arguments on nonbiblical bases and complained that they approached the text with suspicion and mistrust. He argued that the Bible always meant more than it appeared to mean and saw biblical language as deeply metaphorical. Obvious metaphors he identified as “borrowed.” But even their opposite—so-called true names—had a metaphorical aspect. They were “true” only for a God always beyond the human capacity to grasp. I suggest that this way of viewing the Bible—as full of meanings that could never be exhausted and which shifted depending upon their readers—undergirded Ephrem’s own use of the Bible. For Ephrem, the Bible provided a lexicon with which to name the wonder of a God beyond human grasp and a world in which that God was always manifest. The madrashe became the place where Bible and the world—reshaped and rewritten in light of the audience—stood together.
Chapters four, five, and six traced three ways in which Ephrem directed his poetic exegesis—toward the construction of a self, an audience, and Christ. In his structuring of a self, Ephrem consistently rewrote the Bible to find appropriate models for his own poetic project. He articulated a performative “I” that negotiated the irony of his position as a prolific poet-theologian and rhetorician who nevertheless decried extensive words about God. To negotiate this ambiguous position, he drew on a range of symbols and metaphors. He found and developed an economic language within the Bible to present himself as broker between God and humanity. He latched onto psalmic associations of David with the lyre to present himself as standing in a Davidic lineage, as well as to underscore his own instrumentality. Finally, he subtly wrote his poetic “I” into biblical narratives, finding a space for himself among the Bible’s marginal heroes.
In crafting a poetic “I,” Ephrem accessed the Bible through its marginal characters. In constructing an “ideal audience,” he likewise found marginal places to situate that audience. He exhorted his audience to emulate the Magi, characters that within the biblical text emerged from outside the Roman Empire and offered gifts humbly and without extensive narrative attention. He also constructed the Bible as a visual scene and instructed his audience to look upon it with awe. This effort further suggests the pedagogical setting of these poems.
Ephrem also rewrote the narrative scenes of the New Testament to produce a picture of an unambiguously divine Christ. Ephrem did this in three ways. First, he read narrative scenes in which biblical characters confessed Christ as “Son” as testimonia that united the whole of the New Testament text. Second, he rewrote New Testament scenes in a general, universalist idiom, into which he embedded particular narrative details. Finally, he developed an exegesis by concordance, following the trail of biblical words to construct an apology for divine condescension.
In constructing these portraits of Ephrem’s poetry and his Bible, my aim has also been to show that Ephrem’s was a unique voice within the late antique literary world, yet at the same time thoroughly reflective of that world. Like other poets in the late antique world, Ephrem’s unique aesthetics can be off-putting at first, especially when viewed through a classical lens.9 Yet Ephrem, in many ways like the Latin poets contemporary with him, focused on the emotional development of single biblical passages while often eschewing larger narrative structure.10 Ephrem also, like the rhetoricians especially associated with the Eastern Mediterranean, developed a stylistic bravado full of shifts and exclamations to an audience, a style that finds itself at home in a world that valued big speeches intended to impress diverse audiences.11 Ephrem’s madrashe emerged exegetically, but in their use of the Bible they conceived of themselves as forging a link to the past and claiming that past as his community’s own.12
Ephrem’s Madrashe on Faith reveals a late antique poet negotiating his world through the lens of the Bible. His is a unique voice, and his corpus is one that deserves to be taken into account in studies of late antique literature generally. In this book, I have tried to guide the reader through one large piece of that corpus, one that is uniquely situated in its broader late antique world. In the poems collected in the Madrashe on Faith, Ephrem immersed himself in the world of the Bible and presented a rewritten Bible to his audience. From the world of books, he brought forth his own literary world.