Faith in History / Sean Gallagher

St. Ephrem passed on the faith through creating beautiful hymn texts

The Church doctors we’ve learned about up to now—SS. Irenaeus of Lyons, Athanasius and Hilary of Poitiers—were situated in the heart of Greco-Roman culture. They wrote in either Greek or Latin, the primary languages of the Roman Empire. And they lived in two of its key provinces: Gaul (present-day France), for Irenaeus and Hilary, and Egypt for Athanasius.

The next Church doctor we will explore lived in the borderlands of the empire in terms of geography, culture and language.

St. Ephrem was born around 306 in Nisbis, a city in present southeastern Turkey. Nisbis’ residents came from many cultures and practiced many religions. Ephrem appears to have been born to Christian parents and raised as a Christian.

Nisbis had been part of the Roman Empire for about five years at the time of Ephrem’s birth. And it wouldn’t stay that way for long. Rome and Persia fought over the city for decades when Ephrem was an adult, with it ultimately falling to Persia in 363.

Ephrem and other Christians in Nisbis fled and eventually settled in Edessa, a city with a strong Christian community further west in the same region of present-day Turkey (not to be confused with a major city of the same name in present-day Syria).

Ephrem was devout in his faith and became a noted teacher of it, founding a catechetical school in Nisbis and continuing that ministry in Edessa. Ephrem lived a kind of proto-monastic life and was ordained and remained a deacon at a time when the permanent diaconate was a common part of the life of the Church.

The language that Ephrem spoke and wrote was Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, a language that Jesus would have spoken. While a common language in that region of the Middle East and an important language for Scripture scholars today, it was not a dominant language in the empire of Ephrem’s day.

But his writings on the faith have been revered and studied enough through the centuries that Pope Benedict XV declared him a doctor of the Church in 1920.

In addition to the language in which he wrote, Ephrem also differs from other Church doctors of his time in that he isn’t primarily known for writing theological treatises. Instead, he is best known as a composer of hymn texts. More than 400 of them survive to the present day.

Ephrem created beautifully poetic texts that show many influences on him, from Greek science and philosophy to rabbinic Judaism. While there is a highly developed artistic quality to Ephrem’s hymn texts, he also approached his writing like the wise teacher of the faith that he was.

So, while he didn’t compose treatises related to the theological debates of his day, Ephrem made his contribution to them in his hymn texts, which became an effective way of passing on the authentic faith. This was especially the case in Nisbis and Edessa, which had so many religious ideas competing for their residents’ hearts.

As we continue our journey through Lent to the solemn celebration of our Lord’s passion, death and resurrection, these words of St. Ephrem about Christ might be good for us to meditate upon: “With the very weapon that death had used to kill him, he gained the victory over death. … Death killed natural life, but supernatural Life killed death.”

Ephrem died in 373 and has been revered as a saint for more than 1,000 years, long before the Church began to develop its canonization process in the Middle Ages. His feast day is celebrated by the Latin Church on June 9.
 

(Sean Gallagher is a reporter and columnist for The Criterion.) †