Ecumenical Commemoration
Deacon, Poet, & Doctor of the Church
June 10 · d. 373
also known as Ephrem the Syrian, Ephrem the Poet, The Harp of the Holy Spirit
Ephrem the Syrian was the greatest poet of the early church, a deacon of the Syriac-speaking world who taught the whole of the faith in hymns rather than arguments. He fought heresy with song, served the poor to his death in a plague, and left behind a body of verse so beloved that the church called him the Harp of the Spirit. He was named a Doctor of the Church in 1920.
Ephrem was born around the year 306 at Nisibis, a Roman frontier city on the edge of the Persian empire, today the town of Nusaybin in southeastern Turkey. He gave his life to the church of that city, and he gave it in an unusual office: he became a deacon, and a deacon he stayed, never seeking to be made a priest, content to teach and to serve at the lower rank all his days. What he had instead of rank was poetry. In an age when the great Greek and Latin fathers fought their battles with philosophy, Ephrem fought his with song, teaching the deepest things of God not by argument but by image, paradox, and music.
He had reason to fight. The city was full of the hymns of teachers the church judged to be in error, catchy songs that carried false doctrine into ordinary mouths. So Ephrem answered song with song. He wrote hundreds of hymns and trained choirs of women to sing them in the churches, so that the true faith might be as singable as the false. His images have never been improved upon. He could take up a single pearl and find the whole faith glittering inside it. On a certain day a pearl did I take up, my brethren; I saw in it mysteries pertaining to the Kingdom, he wrote, in J. B. Morris's old translation, and the longer he looked the more the small bright thing gave back. He saw nature, Scripture, and the sacraments as three harps on which the one God plays the same melody, and he taught his people to read the whole world as a fabric of signs pointing to Christ.
When Nisibis was handed over to Persia in 363, Ephrem went with the other Christians into exile and settled at Edessa, the city today called Urfa, where he spent his last ten years teaching and writing. He died there in 373, and he died as he had lived, in the service of others: a famine and plague had come on the city, and Ephrem spent himself organizing relief and caring for the sick until he caught the sickness himself. The harp fell silent, but the songs did not. Sixteen centuries later the church still sings the deacon of Edessa, who never rose in rank and never needed to, because he had given it something better than office, the faith set to music that a whole people could carry home and sing.
How we know Ephrem is, first of all, through his own enormous body of Syriac hymns, the madrāshê, teaching-songs on the Nativity, on Paradise, on Faith, on Virginity, on the Church, preserved in early Syriac manuscripts and corroborated by Armenian versions. Two near-contemporary witnesses fill out the picture: Jerome, who reports that Ephrem's writings were so esteemed they were read aloud in some churches after the Scriptures, and the historian Sozomen, who gives an early account of his life and his use of hymnody against heresy. The decisive fact for any reader is that a vast later corpus of Greek works was falsely attached to Ephrem's name in the centuries after his death, so the authentic Ephrem is the Syriac poet, recovered and translated in modern times above all by Sebastian Brock, not the "Greek Ephrem" of the pseudonymous writings. The miracles and ascetic severities of later legend are likewise absent from the earliest Syriac sources.
Ephrem is honored across the Christian world, East and West, as deacon, hymn-writer, and teacher. The Syriac churches have always held him as their own greatest voice, and the wider church received him as a Doctor when Pope Benedict XV named him so in 1920, the only Syriac father among the Doctors of the Church. His title, the Harp of the Holy Spirit, points to what the church most loves in him: that he taught theology as praise. His feast is kept on June 10. He is remembered for a thing that sounds simple and is not, that he made orthodoxy beautiful enough to sing, and that he served the poor with the same wholeness with which he wrote, dying among the sick he had come to help.
Further reading. The genuine Syriac hymns are best met in Sebastian Brock, St. Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns on Paradise (1990), and in Kathleen E. McVey, Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns (1989). For the theology, Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of St Ephrem the Syrian (rev. 1992), is the standard sympathetic study.
Online resources. Select hymns and homilies in the older public-domain translation are in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, volume 13, at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library; Brock's Hymns on Paradise has been scanned at the Internet Archive.
British (Received Pronunciation): madrāshê /məˈdrɑːʃeɪ/
Almighty God, you gave your servant Ephrem of Edessa special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52