Ephrem the Syrian

Ephrem was born about 306 at Nisibis, a fortified city on the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire, in what is now southeastern Turkey. He spent most of his life there, serving four successive bishops as deacon, teacher and catechist. He was never ordained a priest.

Nisibis was besieged three times by the Persians in his lifetime and held out each time. Then in 363 the emperor Julian died on campaign in Persia, his successor bought peace by handing Nisibis over, and the Christian population was forced to leave. Ephrem, near sixty, walked out with them. He settled at Edessa, the great Syriac-speaking Christian city to the west, and taught at the school there for his last ten years.

He wrote in Syriac, and he wrote almost everything in verse. His medium was the madrasha, a teaching hymn set to a melody, sung by a choir with a congregational refrain. He composed hundreds, cycles on the Nativity, on Paradise, on Faith, on the Church, on Virginity, on Nisibis, on the unleavened bread, on Julian. He also wrote memre, verse homilies, and prose commentaries on Genesis, Exodus and Tatian's harmony of the gospels.

His strategy was deliberate. The rival teachers of the region, Bardaisan and his son Harmonius, and the Manichaeans, had already put their doctrine into popular songs, and the songs were winning. Ephrem answered in kind. He trained choirs of consecrated women, the daughters of the covenant, to sing orthodox hymns in the churches of Nisibis and Edessa, and he gave them the melodies the heretics were using. Sozomen records it. Women singing theology in public worship, in the fourth century, was Ephrem's answer to false teaching.

His theology works by image rather than by definition. He distrusted the Greek habit of prying into the divine nature with philosophical terms, and he said so bluntly. He preferred types, symbols and paradox, the pearl, the mirror, the eye, the tree, the fire in the bush. Later Syriac tradition called him the Harp of the Spirit.

In 372 and 373 famine struck Edessa. Ephrem came out of retirement, organized relief, gathered money from the wealthy, set up three hundred beds for the sick, and distributed grain himself. He caught the plague from the people he was serving and died about a month later, in 373.

Rome named him a Doctor of the Church in 1920, the only Syriac writer on that list.

Sources: Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns (selections in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 13); Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History, III.16; Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "St. Ephraem".