Church Fathers: Post-Nicene Fathers Vol 13: 33.02.03 Dissertation Part III

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Church Fathers: Post-Nicene Fathers Vol 13: 33.02.03 Dissertation Part III



TOPIC: Post-Nicene Fathers Vol 13 (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 33.02.03 Dissertation Part III

Other Subjects in this Topic:

If, with the Vatican recension of the Life, we read "Julian" for Valens, as the name of the persecutor of Edessa, the impossibility becomes yet more absurdly glaring. For Julian died in 363, and before that year Ephraim had not migrated from Nisibis to Edessa.

It is no doubt possible that Ephraim may have visited Egypt,hyperlink as the Life affirms, before proceeding to Caesarea: as an anchorite he would naturally be drawn to the laud where the anchorite life had its origin and its greatest development. Yet it is hardly probable that, eager as he was to see Basil at Caesarea, he would, when setting out on his travels, have directed his course to Egypt first,-a country so distant, and lying in a direction so different, froth Cappadocia. This improbability would naturally fail to strike our biographer, who appears to have supposed Basil's Caesarea (if indeed he had any definite idea of its situation) to have been the maritime city of that name in Palestine. One can hardly avoid suspecting that this whole narrative of the visit to Egypt-unknown as it is to all authorities save our Life (in its twofold recension), and the shorter form of the same-may have been invented by some compiler or reviser, writing in, or for, one of the Egyptian monasteries of the Nitrian Desert, and seeking to gratify the Syrian ascetics who were numerous in that region, by making it the scene of an episode in the life of the most famous of Syrian ascetics. It certainly has the air of an interpolation, coming as it does between the description of Ephraim's longing desire to see Basil, and the narrative of the fulfilment of that desire by his visit to Caesarea. More particularly, as regards the story of the visit of Ephraim to the Nitrian Saint Pesoës (or Bishoi), it is to be noted that it is mentioned, not in the Parisian recension of the Life, but only in that of the Vatican ms. It is a significant fact that this ms., which is thus our only written authority for the alleged visit, was written (probably) about the year 1100, in the Nitrian monastery of "Amba Bishoi" (St. Pesoës).hyperlink On the other hand, it is to be added that a tradition of Ephraim's sojourn in Egypt, connecting him with Pesoës, lingered in quite recent times, and may probably still linger, among the monks, Syrian and Coptic, of the Nitrian region. Travellers of the seventeenth, and even eighteenth, century, tell of a tamarind tree which was shown to them within the precincts of the Syrian monastery of the Theotokos in that region, reputed to have grown from Ephraim's staff which he set in the ground on his arrival there, as he was about to enter the cell of Pesoës.hyperlink It is probable that this legend of the staff (which reminds one of that of the staff of St. Joseph of Arimathea and the Glastonbury thorn tree) may have grown out of the belief that Ephraim once visited the monastery,-which belief again may have been originated by the pious fiction of the compiler or interpolator of the Life in its Vatican form. It is easy to imagine how gladly a community of Syrian monks in this Egyptian solitude would listen to what professed to be a record of the greatest of Syrian monks, a recluse like themselves, the author of the Sermons to Ascetics which they had read or listened to, and of the many hymns which enriched their offices and quickened their devotions;-and how ready they would be to welcome as fact the story of his sojourn in their valley, and to imagine that a memorial of it survived among the trees of their garden.

5. Interval between Visit to Basil and Persecution by Valens.-The interval of four years or more, which the Life seems to place between Ephraim's return from Caesarea to Edessa, and the persecution of the Edessenes by Valens, is likewise impossible. For at Caesarea all agree that Ephraim found Basil Archbishop. But Basil was consecrated late in 370, and therefore Ephraim's first meeting with him, which was on the Feast of the Epiphany, cannot be placed earlier than January, 371. But the persecution took place probably in 371, or at latest in 373-thus reducing the possible length of interval to two years at most-probably to a few months. It may be said, however, that the biographer, though he relates the persecution after mentioning the four years' interval, does not mean to imply that it was subsequent in time to that interval. Bat it will be shown farther on (under next head) that the four years' interval is inadmissible, independently of the date of that persecution; inasmuch as Ephraim survived only three years after his visit to Basil.

6. Death of Basil before that of Ephraim.-The story of the lady who was sent by Basil to Ephraim, and by Ephraim back to Basil, only in time to see his corpse,-and of Ephraim's grief for Basil's death, cannot be accepted unless we set aside the consent of the chronologers, who agree that Ephraim died in 373,hyperlink -whereas Basil survived to 1st January, 379. It is true that there is extant among the Greek works ascribed to Ephraim, an encomium on Basil,hyperlink which seems to be genuine. This, however, is not to be regarded as an eulogium pronounced after Basil's death; but rather as a panegyric in which the living man is apostrophized.hyperlink We may safely conclude that the story, which rests on a basis of erroneous chronology, is itself a fiction.

But the story of Ephraim's helpful intervention and activity in a time of famine, which is undated, having early attestation, may well be accepted as true, and assigned to the winter of 372-3. The authorities who attest the date of his death as 373, place it in the month of Haziran (June);hyperlink and we may reasonably conjecture that the exertions and anxieties of the season of famine had told too heavily on a frame already wasted by years and by excessive austerities, and had thus hastened his end.

VI.-Rectification of the Vatican Text of the Life.

If the Life had reached us in its Vatican form only, it would have been necessary to correct one or two farther errors:

I. Date of his Baptism Mistaken.-According to the Vatican Life, Ephraim was baptized at the age of 28, after the surrender of Nisibis by Jovian. The surrender was in 363, and the age assigned to him would therefore make 334 the earliest admissible date for his birth-ten years after the Council of Nicaea, at which the Life records that he was present! The Parisian Life corrects this absurdity and shows how the mistake arose. The statement, in this version of the story, is that after quitting Nisibis, "he retired to Beth-Garbaia, where he had received baptism at the age of 18." By omitting the auxiliary "had" (which in Syriac, as in English, expresses the pluperfect) the Vatican scribe or editor introduces this blunder about the date of the baptism. It is probable that, without having any distinct knowledge of the date of the departure from Nisibis, he felt that Ephraim must have been more than 18 at this stage of the narrative, and strove to make the age cohere better with the time required for the events related, by changing 18 into 28.

2. Julian substituted for Valens.-The substitution of the name of Julian for that of Valens as the persecutor of Edessa, has been already noticed. That the story (with the incident of the martyr-mother with her two sons) belongs to the time of Valens, is established by the united testimony of Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret. The whole history is clear, and coherent with itself and with chronology, in the Parisian Life; whereas the Vatican version of it, by bringing Ephraim to Edessa in the reign of Julian, makes hopeless confusion.hyperlink It is to be noted that the names Julianus and Valens, so distinct as written in Latin, differ but little when transliterated (without vowel-points) into Syriac.

VII.-Chronology of the Life of Ephraim.Thus the fixed points for determining the chronology of Ephraim's life are:

1. The death of his patron, St. Jacob, Bishop of Nisibis, in 338, after the first siege of that city.2. The third siege, in which he was among the defenders of the city, in 350.

3. The surrender of Nisibis by Jovian, and its abandonment by its Christian inhabitants, 363; followed by Ephraim's removal to Edessa.

4. The consecration of Basil to the see of Caesarea, 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 Nicaea 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.hyperlink

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,"hyperlink -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 Nicaea in 325-in which it is borne out by Gregory Barhebraeus in his Ecclesiastical Chroniclehyperlink (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 Nicaea, it seems almost necessary to place his birth before Constantine became emperor.hyperlink

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.

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!"hyperlink 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 XIVth and XVth 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,hyperlink 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);hyperlink 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.hyperlink 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,"hyperlink and another of eight for the "Passion Week" (week before Easter), and the vigil of "New Sunday" (first alter Easter)-were and still are regularly read as lessons, as part of the offices of the Church;hyperlink 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.hyperlink 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)hyperlink 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)hyperlink "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.hyperlink

The imitation, however, is by no means complete; it is apparent in the general tone and manner, but does not extend to the form: just as the Greek version of Ephraim's Hymns, though faithfully reproducing his thoughts and literary method, makes no attempt to retain his metrical system; but is a rendering into what in form is prose of an original which is in verse. That this should be so is unavoidable, for Syriac metres are incapable of adaptation to the Greek language. Syriac literature, in all else imitative, here and here only has found out for itself an independent course. Elsewhere it leans on one side to the Hebrew model to which it was drawn by affinity of language and by the influence of the Old Testament; on the other to the Greek, as found in the New Testament and in the writings of the great Divines of the Alexandrian and Antiochian patriarchates, who were the leaders of religious thought for Eastern Christendom. In hymnody alone it struck out a line of its own; it set an example for the Greek-speaking Churches to follow, so far as was possible for them under the conditions above indicated. The Syriac Hymnody is constructed on the Hebrew principle of parallelism, in which thought answers to thought in clauses of repetitive or antithetical balance: but, unlike the Hebrew, its clauses are further regulated by strict equivalence of syllabic measure. But though in this latter respect it seems to approach to the forms of Western verse, ancient or modern, yet the resemblance is but superficial: Syriac verse is not measured by feet-whether determined by syllable quantity, as in Greek and Latin, or by accent, as in English and other modern languages. Thus the metre of Syriac poetry is substantially the "thought-metre" (as it has been well called) of Hebrew, reduced to regularity of form by the rule that each of the lines into which the balanced clauses fall, shall consist of a fixed number of syllables. There is no systematic rhyme; but the nature of the language which by reason of its uniformity of etymological structure abounds in words of like terminations, often causes correspondences of sound amounting to rhyme, or at least to assonance. The lines are very short; not exceeding twelve syllables, sometimes confined to four. Ephraim, though not the actual inventor, was the first master of this metrical system, the first to develop it into system and variety.hyperlink His favorite metres are the five-syllabled and the seven-syllabled. In his more elaborate poems, such as the Nisibene series, which are rather Odes than Hymns, the strophes or stanzas into which the lines are arranged are often long and of complicated structure, each strophe consisting of many lines (ranging from four up to fourteen or more) of various lengths according to a fixed scheme rigidly adhered to throughout the poem-sometimes throughout a group of cognate poems. In other poems, especially in Hymns intended for popular or ecclesiastical use, where simplicity of structure is suitable, the lines which compose each strophe, whatever their number, are of uniform length. So easily do the Syriac tongue, and the genius of Syriac literature, lend themselves to this scheme of short, syllabically equal clauses, that (as has been already stated) many even of the Homilies are metrical; arranged not indeed in strophes, but in continuous succession of brief stichoi, all of one and the same length-usually of seven syllables; a sort of blank verse, but a blank verse with no animating accents, no varying pauses. A Homily so constructed would fatigue the ear of a modern audience by its monotony: but inasmuch as some portions of Ephraim's Homilies were used in certain ecclesiastical Offices, probably recited in a sort of chant, it may be that in such use we have the explanation of their quasi-versified structure.

In point of literary value as poems, a high place cannot be claimed for these Hymns. Some of them indeed have much of the devotional fervor, and not a little of the human pathos, of the Psalms of David: others show something of the antithetic point and epigrammatic terseness of the Proverbs of Solomon. Yet the devout aspirations and confessions of the poet are too often forced and artificial in their utterance; in his funeral dirges we seem here and there to detect the false note of the professional mourner in the effort to exhaust all possible topics of grief; in all his poems he tends to prolong the series of his parallelisms to a wearisome length and with an iteration that, though laboriously varied, is tedious,-an iteration that has no precedent in the poetry of the Old Testament, save in one or two of the latest Psalms, such as the CXXXVIIth with its recurring burden "For His mercy endureth for ever," or the CXIXth with its artificial arrangement (often emulated in Syriac Hymnody) by which each of the twenty-two letters of the alphabet in turn is made to head each one of eight consecutive verses in praise of the Law of the Lord. On the whole, it must be admitted that the greater qualities of poetry, such as abound everywhere in nearly every writer of the Hebrew Scriptures,-of truth in rendering the inmost feelings of man's heart in words of absolute simplicity, of aspiration that rises without effort to the highest things of God-to these Ephraim's Hymns have no claim.

For these shortcomings in his poetry, two main causes may be assigned.

One is in the man himself,-or rather, in his mode of life. Naturally, he was prone to feel for and with his fellow-men; for the sorrows of the bereaved, the cares of the toiling poor whose lot (as he proved in the last and best episode of his history) moved him to sympathy and active succour. He can be simple accordingly when he deals with the homely facts of life. But the main tenor of his course was ascetic; he looked on this life and the life beyond-on man and to God-with a vision clouded by the gloom of unnatural solitude and self-mortification. An assiduous student of Scripture, he had an ear for its threatenings rather than its promises and consolations; dread and dismay entered into his heart more deeply than hope; the "Stand in awe and sin not" of the Psalmist was more familiar to his spirit than the "Rejoice in the Lord, ye righteous." The perpetual proneness to tears on which his biographers dwell with admiration, and which he seems to have thought it right to foster, has its reflex in his writings, in the hysterical overflow of his fears, his lamentations and his self-reproach. He had lived as an anchorite till his nature became morbid, and its moral fibre was weakened. But to reach the highest levels in religious literature, whether in prose or in poetry, a man must be sane, his mind healthy and strong,-with a health and strength sustained and exercised by wholesome daily contact with the lives of other men.

The second cause is to be found in the method, above described as his-developed though not actually invented by him, and made his own-which he chose as the vehicle of his thoughts and emotions. The "thought-metre" of the Hebrew poets was regulated (as we have seen) by balance of sense, not of sound-member answering to member, verse by verse, in equivalence or contrast of substance merely, not of verbal form: and in this metre, which has been happily likened to the alternating beat of a bird's wings as it mounts aloft, they had shown it to be possible to attain the highest reach of sublime expression of the utmost that man's spirit can conceive of God and Heaven. The Syriac Hymnists had the unhappy idea of effecting a compromise between their two contrasted models, the Hebrew and the Greek; and to this end they compelled their verses into conformity by syllabic measure, of sound, as well as of sense. This artificial structure has an effectiveness of its own, and is suited to the popular ear; but it is incapable of the elevation which the earlier and simpler method attained without effort. As its Semitic parallelism of substance excluded Syriac poetry from the variety in topic and largeness in conception of the Greek, so this grecized regularity of form hampered its efforts to rise to the upper regions where the Hebrew is at home. The wings are free and ample by whose regulated stroke Hebrew poetry is borne, and they carry it to the supreme height: in Syriac poetry the flight is too commonly low and feeble, because its wings are clipped. In the former we are conscious of a uniformity as of the unconstrained waves of the sea, following in a succession of endless change-a uniformity that is majestic: in the latter we detect the uniformity of the water-wheel, that with artificial movement draws up and dispenses the waters of the well in vessels of fixed measure-a uniformity that is mechanical and monotonous.

IX.-The Selections Included in the Present Collection.The specimens of Ephraim's compositions offered in these selections are:-

(1) The Nisibene Hymns, (2) The Hymns of the Nativity, (3) The Hymns for the Epiphany, (4) Three Homilies (i., On our Lord; ii., On Reproof and Repentance; iii., On the Sinful Woman).

Of (2) the Nativity Hymns, the first thirteen are reprinted from the version by the Rex. J. B. Morris (Oxford, 1847), made from the Roman Edition of the Syriac Works of Ephraim. The rest of the series as translated (sixhyperlink in number, making nineteen in all) were unknown when that edition was completed in 1743. These latter, and also (3) the Epiphany Hymns (with one exception)hyperlink have since come to light in the Nitrian collection of the British Museum, and were printed by Professor Lamy in his St. Ephraim (Tom. 1, cc. 1-144; Tom. II., cc. 427-504), 1882-1889. In the same edition (Tom. I., cc. 145-274; 311-338) were first printed (4) the three Homilies.hyperlink Our translations of these follow Lamy's text, with here and there a slight variation where errors seem to exist. These two series of Hymns belong to the ecclesiastical class: their titles appropriate them to two great Festivals of the Church, and portions of these are embodied in Syriac Rituals still in use. Of the two Homilies, the former was written for the Feast of the Epiphany, like the Hymns which precede it.

The Nisibene Hymns (1) are translated from the text as first printed by Dr. Bickell (1866), whose edition, like that of Dr. Lamy, rests upon mss. of the Nitrian collection.hyperlink They also were unknown to the Roman editors of the last century, and to the English translator of 1847; and they have not till now appeared in English. The series when complete consisted of 77 Hymns. Of these the first division (I.-XXXIV.) treat of the fortunes of the Church in Nisibis, Carrhena [Haran], and an unnamed city (probably Edessa).hyperlink The remainder (XXXV. to end) deal with the topics of Death and the Resurrection. The present selection comprises 46 of these, namely:-of the first division, the first 21, those which relate to Nisibis and which are the Nisibene Hymns proper; of the second division, two series-one of 8 hymns (XXXV.-XLII.) in which Death and Satan hold monologue or dialogue,-the other of 17 (LII.-LXVIII.), similar in character, but with Man as a third interlocutor.

X.-Probable Dates of His Works.

Of the compositions contained in this volume, none yields internal evidence of its date, except the Nisibene Hymns of the first division. Hymns XXXV.-XLII. (not included here), apparently belong to the later (or Edessene) period of Ephraim's life, and to the reign of Valens,-i.e., they are later than the year 363. The 21 Hymns which stand first in our collection may confidently be assigned to the year of the third siege (350) and the thirteen following years. Hymn I. was indubitably composed while the siege was still urgent; Hymns I. and III. immediately after the deliverance; Hymns IV.-XII. deal with the fortunes of the city and country in a troubled time of invasion that succeeded; the rest (XIII.-XXI.) treat of the four successive Bishops of Nisibis under whom Ephraim lived-Jacob, Babu, Valgesh, and Abraham. The last-named is not elsewhere recorded except by Elias of Nisibis, but the death of Valgesh is known to have occurred in 361.hyperlink The Hymns therefore which celebrate the accession of Abraham to the See (XVII.-XXI.) must be placed in the interval, 361-363, the latter being the year when Ephraim with all the Christian population of the city was driven out by Sapor. Hymns XIII.-XVI., being written while Valgesh was Bishop-for they compare him with his two predecessors-fall into the interval between the year of the siege (350) which they speak of as past,-and the year of the death of Valgesh (361). Bickell assigns IV.-XII. to the months of Sapor's invasion in 359; XIII.-XVI. to 358 and 359; XVII.-XXI. to 363, in the short space between Julian's death and the surrender of Nisibis.

It is probable that most of his Hymns that are definitely controversial belong, like most of his controversial writings, to the years of his later life, at Edessa. And as we have seen, the earliest of them that can be confidently dated. is not earlier than 350. But it would be hasty to conclude that he had composed no Hymns before that date, and that in the Nisibene Hymns of the siege we have the first fruits of the vine of his vision. In 350 he must have been over forty-perhaps over fifty years of age; and it is highly improbable that a fertility which proved to be so abundant, did not begin to manifest itself at a much earlier age; or that a literary offspring of such bulk and importance was all produced in the last five and twenty years of a long life. The earlier authorities concerning his life give no definite information on this head; and the Syriac Life is vague in its statements and untrustworthy in its chronology. The account given of Barhebraeus, a well-informed but very late writer (thirteenth century), can hardly be accepted as embodying any genuine tradition, but has probability in its favor:-"From the time of the Nicene Council (he writeshyperlink ), Ephraim began to write canticles and hymns against the heresies of his time,"-for few of his hymns are without a polemic spirit, though (as has been said) those that are purely controversial seem to be of a later period. A much later author indeed, Georgius "Bishop of the Arabians" (writing in 714) warns us that there is no evidence to assign any of Ephraim's writings to the twenty years' interval between the Nicene Council and the year 345-"especially (he adds) to the years before 337."hyperlink This writer, however, is here arguing in support of the claim of Aphrahat to be an independent author, against those who regarded him as a disciple of Ephraim; and he rests his case on the ground that whereas the Demonstrations of Aphrahat are (as we shall see presently) dated from 337 to 345, no composition of Ephraim's can be shown to have been written so early. And it must be admitted that the earliest date (as above noted) that can be fixed with certainty for any of Ephraim's innumerable productions in 350,-thirteen years later than Aphrahat's earlier Demonstrations. Against this is to be set the tradition of Ephraim's presence at Nicaea, implying as it does that even in 325 he had made himself a notable person,-and the probability that one who has left such ample proof of the copiousness of his literary gift, must have begun to exercise it before a date at which he would have passed his thirtieth year (supposing his birth to have been in 306), or even have entered middle life (if we place it at the beginning of the century). The two writers were unquestionably contemporary, and as yet no sufficient data have been discovered to determine to which of them seniority belongs.



Footnotes



41 The shorter Syriac Life agrees in affirming the fact of his visit to Egypt, but says nothing of its duration. No other authority, earlier or contemporary, hints at it.



42 Assemani, Biblioth Orient., I., p.46, note 1.



43 It is mentioned by Huntington (afterwards Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, and finally Bishop of Raphoe) who visited the place, 1678-9 (see his Epistolae, XXXIX., p. 60) : again by J. S. Assemani in 1715 (see reference in note 6). More recent visitors (Lord de la Zouche in 1837, and Archdeacon Tattam in 1839) do not speak of it.



Of the Nitrian monasteries (reputed to have once numbered fifty, or even more), the principal one, that of the Theotokos, whence the libraries of the Vatican and of the British museum have derived their most precious acquisitions of Syriac mss., belongs to the Syrian Jacobites, whose Church has always been in full communion with that of the Copts. A second belongs to the Copts; a third to the Greeks. The fourth (that of St. Pesöes) does not appear to be specially appropriated, but to be mainly Coptic, though (as appears above) not to the exclusion of Syrians.



44 See Professor Lamy's edition of Ephraim, II., coll. 94ff, for the authorities on this point,-of which the chief are:-The Edessene Chronicle (sixth century) and Jacob of Edessa (seventh century-cited bv Elias of Nisibis), both of whom give 373 as the date, as does also the early Chronicle contained in the "Book of the Caliphs." Jerome (De Viris. Illustr. cxv.) merely says that Ephraim died in the reign of Valens,-i. e. not later than 378, and therefore before Basil.



45 Opp. Groee., II., 289 ff.



46 See Lamy as above, coll. 84 ff.



47 On the 9th, according to Chron., Edes. and the shorter Life; the Vatican Life says the 15th; the Book of the Caliphs (see Land's Anecdota, Tom. I., p. 15 [Syr. text]) and most other authorities, the 18th ; Dionysius, in his Chronicle, the 19th (ap. Assemani, B. O. II., p.54).



48 It is to be regretted that neither the Parisian Life, nor the Nisibene Hymns, was before the writer of the article Ephraim in Smith and Wace's Dictionary of Christian Biography. The former would have warned him from being misled by the Vatican Life into the error of ascribing to Julian the persecution under Valens; the latter would have shown him that both versions of the Life confuse the first siege of Nisibis with the third.



49 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."



50 In Migre's Patrologia Graeca, CXVI I., p. 254.



51 I., 23 (Abbeloos and Lamy's edition).



52 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.



53 This passage is mistranslated in the Latin version of the Encomium, by P. F. Linus of Verona (in his Divina S. Ephraem Opera, Dillingen, 1562), from whom it has been borrowed by Gerard Voss for his Latin version of Ephraim (Cologne. 1603), and by the editors of Gregory's Works.



54 Not including Ruth, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther. It is not known whether he commented on Ecclesiastes and Canticles, or on the deutero-canonical books (commonly called "Apocrypha").



55 Lamy has supplied the Commentaries on Jonah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, and Haggai, with part of Isaiah and Lamentation-which was wanting from the Roman edition.



56 Both in the Armenian edition of Ephraim (Vol. II., Diatessaron; Vol. III., St. Paul), Venice, 1836: also in Latin,-the Diatessaron, in 1876; St. Paul 1893.



57 Of these the most complete copy is in ms. B. 5.18, Trinity College, Dublin (formerly the property of Archbishop Ussher), which has been used by Professor Lamy in his edition of three homilies (Tom. III. of His Ephraim, 1889.).



58 This remarkable distinction dates from the fourth century; it is noticed by St. Jerome (De Viris Ill., CXV.), writing within twenty years after Ephraim's death.



59 St. Hilary of Poitiers (d. 368) is reputed (see Isidore of Seville, De Off Eccl.) the earliest writer of Latin Hymns, and some extant Hymns are ascribed to him. But St. Augustine tells us (Confess. IX. 7) that at Milan hymns were first used, "after the manner of the Eastern Church," in the time when the Empress Justina was persecuting St. Ambrose (386).



60 Metrical Hymns of Ephraim, 1853.



61 Hymns of the Holy Eastern Church, pp.34, 35, 49 (1870). Note the contrast between the wide acceptance of Ephraim's Hymns, through the East, and the scanty survival of those of his contemporary, in the West.



62 A few exceptional Greek hymns may be pointed out of earlier date (e.g., that mentioned by St. Basil, De Spiritu S., XXIX; but the statement above made is in the main accurate. Anatolius, Patriarch of Constantinople (449-458) seems to have been the first to devote himself to the composition of hymns of the type above described. See Neale (as above).



63 Probably the earliest extant Syriac poem is the Hymn of the Soul (printed by Dr. Wright in Apocryphal Acts, p.174; also by Mr. Bevan in Texts and Studies, V. 3). Its metre, though less regular, is substantially the seven-syllabled of Ephraim. Whether Bardesan (or Harnionius) wrote in metres like those of Ephraim has been questioned; but if it is true that Ephraim's hymns were adapted by him to the tunes of Harmonius, it seems to follow that his metres were those of the hymns to which those tunes belonged.



64 From the Nitrian ms., 14506



65 Hymns 1-14 from mss., 14506, 14572; No.15 from the Maronite Breviary.



66 From mss. 14570, 14651, 17266; and a fragment from 14654 (printed in Tom. II., pp. xx-xiii.).



67 mss. 14572, 17141 chiefly; with a few others of secondary value. Five Hymns are lost (viii. and xxii.-xxv.), and part of two others (ix. and xxvi.).



68 Note the mention of Edessa in Hymn xlii. 1.



69 Chron. Edess., as above ; Chronol. of Elias Nisib.



70 Ap. Assemani, B. O. I. 116.



71 Ap. Forget, De Vita Aphraatis, lntroductio, p.22; see also pp.121-126 of Forget's Dissertation which follows; also p.5 of Introd.