Encomium on Ephraim 819–837

The parable in the divine Gospels, the mystical teaching of the lamp, moves me to the present subject. It loosens my tongue, enslaved by the muzzle of speechlessness; it levels the roads of thought in advance like tracks for horses; and it makes ready the many-formed chariot of speech to run on the highway, crying aloud somewhat as follows: “They do not light a lamp and put it under the bushel, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house.” And it adds the deeper meaning of this, saying: “So let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works.” Would it not, then, be blameworthy to veil oneself and be timid where the Master himself has bidden us be bold? For he has, as it were, lit a bright torch, brighter than the sun's, the way of life of the divine father whom we have set out to describe, and he does not want it hidden under the bushel of silence, but set high on the very summit of the church, so as to shine on all who move about in the house of the world, and so that those who see it may glorify the Father who is in heaven. We need not, then, stand in awe of that father's binding charge, lest the Master's ordinance be trampled. For we must take the beginnings of our praises from there, even though by his disposition the present undertaking has been placed outside the bounds of encomium. For to one who knows how to judge things well, that charge is not simply a bond forbidding us to crown with praises one who turned away from human glory; it is a bond that does not bind, a restraint that cannot restrain, driving those who love him toward the opposite. For the very means by which he aimed to escape our praises, walling off the attempt with a binding charge, are those from which we

take the starting points of our praises. Each of his excellences is a starting point for complete praise, but above all his taking no pleasure in praise. For he wished not to seem good but to be good. For this alone, then, even if he had done nothing else worthy of praise, it is right to praise him: that he bade such a farewell to praises as even to seal his rejection of them with a binding charge. For us this first opens the course of the speech, and assures us that we are not walking aimlessly or rushing down a precipice, but travelling the royal road, if we reason rightly that, had the wonderful man of God not seen that he was worthy of praise, he would not have forbidden those who wished to praise him. For no one who is not admired, while he is still alive, charges those who come after him to let his memory vanish into forgetfulness in spite of very great excellences. Besides this, one may also say that, just as Paul, the orator of grace, the bridal escort of the church, the mouth of Christ, did not lose the title of apostle by saying, “I am not worthy to be called an apostle,” but rather won greater glory by that very humility, so too our great father, judging himself unworthy of praise out of reverence, will accordingly be found worthy of it. Since, then, our law of the church knows how to crown those zealous for virtue from their pursuit of its forms, and among them especially those who have been spiritually exalted by the humble measure of their mind, according to what the Lord said in the Gospels, somewhat as follows, “He who humbles himself will be exalted,” those who record the virtues of the God-bearing father before us, and raise up his life before us as a living and breathing monument, are entirely free of blame and mockery and even of condemnation. The wise hearer will see the truthfulness of what has been promised, when after the speech he gathers up the varied forms of his virtues; out of these we will work, as it were, a single crown set in gold and flowered with many and various precious stones, and bring it as a welcome gift to the bride of Christ, the church. For she delights to be honored with such gifts when the yearly memorial of the righteous comes round. And now the course of time has brought Ephrem round for praise; and how will she not welcome his memorial with great joy? That Ephrem who is on the lips of all Christians. Ephrem the Syrian, I mean; for I am not ashamed of the race of the man in whose character I glory. Ephrem, the radiance of whose life and contemplation shone out into all the earth; known to almost everyone under the sun, and unknown only among as few as the great luminary of the church, Basil,

Ephrem, truly the spiritual Euphrates of the church, watered by which the whole body of the faithful yields the seed of faith a hundredfold; Ephrem, the fruitful vine of God, which bears the fruits of teaching like sweet grapes and gladdens the nurslings of the church with the fullness of divine love; Ephrem, the good and faithful steward of grace, who measures out to his fellow servants their portion of the words of virtue in due proportion, and manages the Master's household excellently. His race, his homeland, the distinction of his ancestors, the renown of his parents, his birth, upbringing, growth in years, bodily aptitude, fortune, crafts, and the rest of the grand themes collected for praises by secular speechwriters, we have judged it superfluous to bring forward, since we have not received the custom of praising divine men for such things. Even if he had praiseworthy qualities from these sources too in abundance, let us bind on him the crown of our speech from the things by which he made himself illustrious in life and in word. For praises belong to what is in our power, and rewards to what is freely chosen; but for the things listed, blame is unreasonable and praise unfitting. For how could he accept being praised for his race, who loathed all worldly nobility and was eager to become a child of God by taking up the best works? Or how could he take pride in a homeland, who reckoned the whole earth foreign to himself and turned away from the material creation as hostile, for the sake of the eternal blessedness laid up in heaven? How again could he be pleased by the renown of ancestors or parents, who trampled down all bodily attachment and was burdened by the very garment of the soul, that is, the poor flesh, as an obstacle to him on the swiftest courses of virtue? How at all would he wish to be praised for bodily growth and upbringing, or aptitude, or a craft, or any other contemptible occupation of life, he who was nourished from his earliest youth and grew up in the study of the divine Scriptures, watered by the ever-flowing channels of grace, and attained, to speak with the Apostle, to the measure of the stature of Christ? Knowing, then, that our great father does not delight in being magnified by things for which worldly people receive ridiculous praises, let us try, at least moderately, to honor him from his own labors; for speech cannot by nature stretch beyond its power. So, that neither speechlessness may fetter our longing, nor, walking a path foreign to the fathers, we may slip from the royal road by running along the byways, we will craft our speech with moderation. What, then, are his qualities from which we have proposed to weave the praise? Action and contemplation, which the swarm of particular virtues follows: faith, hope, love,

piety toward God, study of the divine Scriptures, purity of soul and body, constant tears, life in the desert, withdrawal from place to place, flight from what is harmful, unceasing teaching, unceasing prayer, fasting and vigils without measure, sleeping on the ground and hardship beyond words, poverty and humility carried to the extreme, almsgiving that lifted him above human nature, godly zeal against those who rage against piety, and, in short, everything that marks a man as one who lives according to God. With such praises our father is adorned; he knows what is said, he understands his own excellences, and he welcomes the words as bringing benefit, not to himself but to us, since even his bare name becomes an incentive to virtue for the earnest. For we have learned these things from no other source than what he himself scattered in his writings about himself. From these, like the praiseworthy bee gathering what is useful from many flowers, we have made this spiritual honeycomb. And he will surely not be angry with us for the attempt, since he no longer fears the evil demon (who tripped up many even at the very end of their contests); having once reached the waveless harbors of the bodiless ones, he is beyond storm and surge. Come, then, let us dwell a little in speech on each of the things listed, and show those gathered here what the wonderful man was like and to what measure of spiritual ascent he attained. In faith he was entirely right, never inclining away from true religion, as we have received both from his writings and from the church's estimation of him. For he abhorred equally the irrational confusion of Sabellius and the mad division of Arius. He stood within the boundaries of true religion, distinguishing in number but uniting in essence the one, unconfused, and all-holy Trinity, so as neither to reproach the Godhead with poverty in the Jewish manner nor to revel in a crowd of gods in the Greek manner, faults of which those who have behaved like drunkards about the incomprehensible Trinity are convicted. The irrational doctrine of Apollinaris he rejected so strongly that he made every effort to drive it out of every Christian soul. Moreover, with many demonstrative and scriptural arguments he stopped the gateless mouths of the Anomoeans, leaving us his God-taught words as the greatest security. If anyone wishes to see the defeat of the most audacious Novatus, let him look at his adversary's fall in the wrestling match of Ephrem's writings, in which he will find our teacher's superiority in power of argument as great as that of an all-round fighter over a child weak from tenderness. Not only did he refute by the right word of faith the weedlike heresies sown by the sower of evil at that time or before, but those that would

sprout wickedly later he foresaw with a prophet's eye and reaped them in advance. All his writing and poetry is full of these demonstrations. So the son of truth never strayed in mind from the truth. His hope was in God alone, from whom come the graces of the hopes laid up for the worthy. For practicing the psalm throughout his life in word and deed, he would say: “In him my heart has hoped, and I have been helped.” Because he hoped thus in the Lord, mercy will surround him; and his trust in him likens him to Mount Zion; and it places its possessor within the loftiest blessedness, as one may learn from the prophets themselves: David says, “Blessed is the man whose hope is the name of the Lord”; Jeremiah, “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, and the Lord will be his hope; and he will be like a tree flourishing by the waters, and will send out his root toward moisture”; and Isaiah, “The Lord is our King, the Lord is our Savior; he will save us. Behold, God my Savior is the Lord; I will trust in him and be bold”; and the blessed Paul exhorts and says, “Let us hold fast the promise of our hope, for he who promised us is faithful.” Nourished in this divine hope laid up for us, he despised all worldly things and longed continually for eternal glory. Love toward God and neighbor he kept so exactly that he could speak thus as he departed this life (it is good to bring forward the very words of the God-bearing father, since they are better than any proof): “Never in all my life,” he says, “did I revile the Lord, and no foolish word passed my lips. In all my life I cursed no one, and I never quarreled with any believer at all.” O blessed tongue, which dared to utter such a word, a word most fitting for angels alone, because their life is immaterial and free of strife, but to us who are slaves of the flesh strange, beyond nature, and hard to achieve! You might labor long searching the lives of those famed for virtue, and nowhere would you find such a sign of pure and spotless love as in the father whom we have set out to describe. If, then, love is the greatest of all the virtues, and blessed Ephrem achieved it as no other of the fathers did, and each will receive according to his works, we will leave it to others to draw the conclusion from this, so that we may not seem to compare fathers with fathers. For we have not taken up what was said for the sake of comparison, but only to set before the eyes of the many that our teacher, or rather the teacher of the whole world, reached the very top of the spiritual ladder of virtues.

Having made piety his merchandise in acquiring true wisdom (according to the saying in Job, “Behold, piety is wisdom”), through it (as we showed a little above in describing the purity of his faith) he ascended, as Paul says, to the third heaven, and has gained in the church an immortal memory and lasting renown. His study of the divine Scriptures he kindled from David's lamp, who says: “In my meditation a fire will be kindled.” For love of spiritual contemplation took hold of him and raised his longing into a soaring flame. Having studied the whole of Scripture, Old and New, and having lingered on such contemplations as no one else did, he interpreted all of it accurately, word by word, from the making of the world to the last book of grace, bringing to light the depths of hidden meanings, with the Spirit as his lamp. Not only did he drain the whole spiritual bowl of our own inspired wisdom and share it with others, but he also trained himself thoroughly in the worldly wisdom from outside, both in what concerns eloquence and correctness of speech and in what concerns depth of thought; whatever was useful he took up, and whatever was profitless he rejected, trading both action and contemplation on the scale of justice. Purity of soul and body he achieved as far as nature allowed, or rather even beyond nature, for it is a gift of grace. For he did not let his soul slip from the disposition that accords with right reason, but was truly a king in his soul, while in his body he shone with splendor. The change of the prostitute told in the story bears witness to what is said: Belial, the destroyer of mortals, used her as a bait of vice to deceive the enlightened man, but he fell so far short of his hope that the adulterous woman herself took her stand against that overweening evil one, changed by exhortations and turnings and the charms of divine words, and remolded for the better, so that she was shown to be chaste instead of licentious, modest instead of shameless, and pure instead of defiled. And when I am eager to speak of the ever-flowing stream of his tears, I truly feel like weeping, for without that no one could sail through the sea of his tears in words. For as breathing is natural to all people and always at work, so weeping was to Ephrem. There was no day, no night, no midnight, no hour, not the smallest instant, when his sleepless eye was seen dry, as he wept now for common faults and now for his own, as he said. With his groans he wisely channeled the streams of his eyes, or rather with floods from his eyes he called forth his groans. And the progress of both was remarkable, each seeming to be the cause of the other: for in him tears gave birth to groans,

and groans in turn gave birth to tears; and the cause was unknown to most. For since no interval of time separated them, but tears always followed groans and groans followed these again, a kind of circle came about, so that the beginning was unclear, and which was the cause of the other. Anyone who becomes familiar with his writings will see this. For he will find him weeping not only in his discourses on repentance, character, and good conduct, but even in his festal discourses, where most people are accustomed to show great gladness in their words. But he was everywhere the same, and was continually rich in the gift of compunction. That is why even now he calls nearly all who hear his words to the true life. Such power has his inspired word, mingled with tears. For what pitiless or stony-hearted person, hearing his words, will not be softened, cast off the hardness of his character, and grieve over his own vices? What person savage in character or beastly in his ways, giving ear to his teaching that profits the soul, will not at once become kind and gentle and a lover of good in his conduct? What person who makes a practice of delighting in the pleasures of life and shuns weeping, hearing a few of his words, will not lament and weep and come to remember what he has done in view of the coming recompense? “You are boiling a stone” is the outsiders' proverb for things that are impossible; but experience has clearly shown us this very thing. For this divine old man persuaded unbending and unyielding souls both to be on their guard and to obey. Who, reading his discourse on humility, will not at once hate all conceit, and even declare himself lower than everyone? Who, taking up his writings on love, will not be eager to run risks for love? Who, becoming familiar with his writings on virginity, will not strive to present himself pure in soul and body to God? Who, poring over his writings on the judgment, that is, on Christ's second coming, will not think himself standing at that tribunal, and, trembling, suppose that the final sentence is about to be pronounced against him? For so did this celebrated and most prophetic man set forth God's coming judgment seat that nothing was left of knowledge except to learn it by the event itself and by experience. Ever held by such pictures of the judgment, the blessed man fled the world and the things in the world; he went far off in flight, as the oracles say, and lodged in the wilderness, attending to himself alone and to God, and from there he received growth in the virtues. For he knew precisely that life in the desert frees the one who wishes it from worldly disturbances, makes him by its quiet a companion of the angels, and

lifts the mind, as far as is attainable, to the contemplation of God. When the Spirit moved him and arranged that he change from place to place for the building up of many, he did not disobey or resist; for he was obedient to divine commands, if anyone ever was. So he left his homeland, like the divine Abraham at the command, and came to the city of the Edessenes; for it was not right that the sun should be hidden under the earth for long. He went for two reasons: to embrace the holy places there, and, before that, to meet a learned man and either receive or impart the fruit of knowledge. On this journey, as the story goes, as he approached the city and was entering it, he met a prostitute instead of the man of learning he had prayed to meet; and since what appeared was other than he had expected, the encounter grieved him. So he stared at the young prostitute, vexed, as one disappointed in his hope; and she, seeing him staring at her, looked closely at him in turn. And the wise man said to her: “Tell me, woman, why do you stare at me so?” And she said: “It is consistent and fitting for me to do so, for I was taken from you, the man. But you, do not look at me, but rather at the earth from which you were taken.” Hearing this unexpectedly, the wise man admitted that he had greatly benefited, and he gave abundant glory to the incomprehensible power of God, who grants what we hope for even through what is beyond hope. Setting out from there for Caesarea in Cappadocia, guided by the Holy Spirit, he saw the great Basil, the mouth of the church, the golden nightingale of doctrine. Seeing him, the old man began to honor him with many praises. For with the discerning eye of the soul he saw a dazzling dove sitting on his right shoulder, supplying him with words of teaching, and Basil passing them on to the people. And Basil, initiated by the holy dove that taught him, perceived Ephrem's arrival and recognized that he was Ephrem the Syrian. And both were granted a timely spiritual meeting; so the trouble of the journey proved no loss to Ephrem. The natural integrity of his life showed him the way to flee what was harmful, teaching him foresight of the better and guarding against the worse, to admit those thoughts that were choice and pure and more profitable for choosing the good, and to reject those that most hindered the work of teaching. For the talent of the word had been given abundantly by Christ to the divine old man, and above all else he was bound to deposit it on the tables of the hearts of many. And he himself is found saying this about himself: that when he had just passed the tender age of childhood, he saw in a mystical vision a very fruitful vine spring up at his tongue, growing so large as to

fill the earth, and every bird of heaven that came to it was filled with food; and the vine itself, the more it was cropped and welcomed every bird, the richer it grew in clusters. Another man, one of those of great spiritual insight at that time, also bore witness to this concerning him. He said that he saw a host of angels coming down from heaven, carrying in their hands a scroll written inside and outside. And that divine company that appeared said among themselves: “Who ought to be entrusted with this scroll?” Answering, some put forward this man, others that, and others another, of the chosen men of that time. Then after examining them all said: “Truly these are holy and servants of God; but they cannot be entrusted with this scroll.” When they had named many of the saints of that time and were not satisfied with them, at last they said with one voice: “No one can be entrusted with this scroll except Ephrem.” And the seer is said to have seen this too: the divine angels handing the scroll to Ephrem. Rising at night, the man who had been shown the vision went to the church and heard Ephrem teaching in abundant speech seasoned with grace; and judging the vision he had seen to be true, he glorified God and was amazed at the rich gift of speech given to the saint. For such an abundance of wisdom had been granted him that the channels of his words were ever-flowing, yet slow in expressing his thoughts, not from sluggishness of tongue but from the density of his reflections, so that his tongue could match the speed of other men's thoughts, but not his own contemplations. For this reason the great old man himself, asking God for relief from the unstoppable gift of words, is said to have spoken thus: “Hold back, O Master, the waves of your grace.” For the abyss of teaching surging beneath his tongue did not let him bear the waves of thought that came one upon another, since the organs of speech could not keep pace with the hurried service. Nothing else interrupted his words but prayer alone; and words interrupted prayer, and tears the words, and prayer again the tears. And his discourse was about the Word, or to say it more fittingly, in the Word, continually occupied through all these with the contemplation of God. For having put the body to death together with its pleasures, and made it by self-control a slave to the ruling reason, he kept it, tamed in advance by fasting, unmoved toward what is improper but strong for what is profitable and provides for the salvation of the soul. Nor did the nights interrupt his course of virtue by deceiving him with the fancies of sleep. For receiving him sober from the days, they ran past and left him wakeful, since he made it his business that the hand of the ruler of this darkness should not find him sleeping. He took only as much sleep as was enough to live, so that the natural order might not be entirely

overturned and his poor flesh suffer a violent dissolution. Many things overturned sleep and drove it from his eyes, but above all sleeping on the ground, hardship, and every kind of bodily affliction; for it is by these above all that the weakness of sleep is naturally banished. He acquired a poverty as great as you hear the divine apostles had. So if anyone calls him the model of those who own nothing, he will not miss the mark. For we have his own most sweet and blessed words, which he left us as a teacher of poverty when he was about to depart for heaven, running somewhat as follows: “Ephrem never had a purse, nor staff, nor bag; nor silver nor gold; indeed, I acquired no other possession on earth. For I heard the good King say in the Gospels to his disciples that they should acquire nothing on earth. Hence I had no passion for anything of the kind.” So, disregarding glory and money, and loving above all what is better, here too he ran an equal race with the apostles. What witness shall we add to his humility, when all his words and writings expressly proclaim this virtue, though he pursued it in great abundance? For when could he who called forth tears with tears, who ate ashes like bread (so harsh and joyless was his diet) and mixed his drink with weeping, as the oracles say, strike the foot of his soul against the stone of pride or conceit? Or he who turned away from all human glory, and who, while still alive, was distressed when anyone praised him, changed color again and again, bent down to the ground, dripped with fine sweat, and was gripped by terrible speechlessness, as though shame had paralyzed his tongue? And as he departed to the blessed and endless life, he again forbade this very thing with a vehement charge, saying: “Do not sing a song over Ephrem; do not praise me; do not bury me in costly clothing; do not make a tomb apart for my body. For I have a covenant with God to lodge with the strangers. I am a stranger and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.” You have, then, clear evidence in abundance of this virtue too, as of the rest. The rule and law of truth will vote him not only a doer of almsgiving and compassion but also their teacher. For in his perfect poverty, having nothing to give the needy, he practiced almsgiving by rousing others to mercy with frequent exhortations. For truly his speech, even apart from his presence, was a key forged by God, opening