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Hymns on Faith

St Ephrem the Syrian, tr. Morris, 1847; selections

41. Rhythm the Forty-first

Who hath at any time seen a raven that was not single? or a hornet that ever companied with others? The virgin bee generateth in virginity, and the worm¹ in solitariness gendereth. The cloud also bringeth forth the lightning gloriously, and the spark from the midst of the flint appeareth marvellously. The pool of waters also swarmeth with insects by means of the sun, and convinceth the infidels, because it gendereth in purity like as the waters brought forth creeping things at the² beginning in chastity. Who would not wonder at all these, which are hidden, yet not suffocated; even the moles in the dust, and fish in the sea, and the babes in the womb. For by what motion is the iron of its own accord led to the loadstone³; and another kind of nature hath been found which is never scorched in the fire⁴, and many are the inventions also of stones, and roots, and medicinable virtues, and who hath been equal to defining and distinguishing their natures?

The solitary procreations which exist without intercourse⁵, which have natures too difficult for them that are enquiring, and investigations too subtle for them that pry into them, justify us in not prying into the mode of the Generation of the Lord of all⁶; and in not searching after the place, and in not saying the causes of It, and in not seeking after the time of It. And although there are a smell and a colour and a taste, which are beautiful and subtle, and cannot be touched by the hand, yet by the senses⁷ allied to them they may be comprehended; one is smelt, and another is tasted: but what sense is there akin to His Majesty, by which, as being related to Him, we may approach to the investigation of Him? Any thing that is not allied to us and of our race, who is able to search into? and who is able to scrutinize it? To Him it seemed good, and He revealed what His own Nature is: to Him it seemed good, and He became little, and humbled Himself, that He might shew Himself to us, and blend His Son with us, and mingle His Spirit with us⁸, and shew us His Love.

When upon a sudden that ass spake, Balaam saw the wonder, yet was slack to marvel at it, and omitted doing so, and (as though the mouth of the ass had the gift of speech by nature) forgot it, and pleaded with the ass. The⁹ Scribes let alone the miracle of the blind men that had their eyes opened on the Sabbath, and of the clay they¹⁰ mooted questions. If then thou art teachable, these things are to thy edification; but if thou be captious, they are for thy reproof; but if thou be daring¹¹, all of them are able to put thee to shame. Search, and look into thy humbled body, and be ashamed at the ducts thereof, since they are all defiled, and let thy blemishes be bridles to thy scrutinizings¹²!

When the wicked one hath made us to overflow¹³ with thoughts of himself, if he be a stranger to us, how is it that he as it were makes himself akin to us, so that his movements and spaces assimilate themselves to our mind, yea our intellect¹⁴, which is a high [faculty]? if then our wicked adversary be without reason, how by our reasons doth he abuse and lead us astray? For as for the Lord of natures, His Nature is hidden from all. Grant to me to form no shape¹⁵ of Thy Nature by the creatures. But if [by any one] it be shaped out so, in order to lead the daring astray, the Gospel is thy marvellous mirror, and in it the Threefold are seen without con¹⁶tradiction, since in Them the Apostles went forth and baptized without disputatiousness¹⁷. O Lord, let not my searching after Thee make my baptism¹⁸ of none effect¹⁹; for there is that hath made his baptism of none effect by his scrutinizing. And if he be made a disciple afresh and renewed, then it is right for him to be also baptized afresh; but if one be not so baptized, he sheweth, that it is because he found no new thing²⁰ that he abideth.

Notes

Similar reference to the mysteries of nature is made below, R. lviii. §. 1. R. lxiv. §. 3. contr. Scrut. i. §. 10. It is held I believe at this day, that the copulation of one generation of insects produces other generations with the organs of the females in such a state as to conceive afresh, without further intercourse. See Schubert Geschichte der Natur. iii. p. 64. Thomass. de Incarn. ii. 3. 10. Raynaud. Christus. iii. 2. §. 198. furnish similar instances to those in the text.
Gen. 1, 20.
St. Aust. de C. D. xxi. 4.
asbestos
p. 169, n. m.
R. i. §. 2. R. iv. n. e.
R. xxvii. §. 2. 3. R. xxxix. §. 2. contr. Scrut. i. §. 2.
R. xlii. §. 1. R. xl. §. 3. on Athan. p. 250, n. d.
Numb. 22, 22.
Pearl iv. §. 2. Matt. 9, 27. John 9, 1.
p. 128, n. f. and §. 4.
contr. Scrut. R. i. §. 8.
S. to swarm
Vol. ii. p. 316, b. “The intellect in the likeness of God dwelleth in the heaven of the brain; the spiritual faculties minister to it in the fancy which is its helpmate; in the temple of the heart doth this king of thoughts parade; before it run its ambassadors, understanding, and intelligence.” Hard as it is to find synonyms for the metaphysical words of one language in another, this passage may yet shew what St. E. means by [Syriac] intellect. The passage above may mean one of two things, either, how do Satan’s movements make themselves such, as to be undistinguishable from those of our own mind; or, how do Satan’s movements square themselves to all appearance to the changes of our mind, so as to meet objections, and start them as it were. (For some of the Fathers held that Satan could see such thoughts as were fully formed, and explicitly before our intellects. See on R. l. §. 5.) The latter is probably St. E.’s meaning, as he speaks of senses and their objects as akin to each other in similar language, comp. R. lxxv. §. 4. In either case a correlativeness or correspondence (such as is implied by the Greek τὸ εἶναι ἀντίστροφον) seems intended. The next sentence Ass. renders as if there were no ‘for;’ perhaps the connection intended by St. E. may be as follows: Satan is a finite being, visible in his entireness to angels: but that finiteness is the very thing which constitutes the difficulty before us. For as for the Lord of natures, He is not finite, is not capable of being embraced by any other mind, has no shape as we must conceive creatures to have, (see p. 187, n. b. and therefore there is no contradiction) involved in supposing Him to pervade the substance of other beings.
R. xliv. §. 5.
Mat. 28, 19.
p. 166, n. d.
p. 228, n. c.
Elsewhere he alludes in a similar way to his baptism, e. g. vol. ii. p. 444, e. “I have been taught and believed of Thee, that there is One in Thy Essence, yea, [and that One] coessential! I have heard and asserted, that the Father is One: I was baptized in the third place, in the Name of Thy Holy Spirit. I was taught the truth of them all.” At p. 524, f. the following occurs, which also bears on the text. “Remember me, Lord, I pray of Thee! If I have searched wantonly into Thee, by prying I have not done so: and daring too as I have been, in examining Thee, still I am not daring really Lord in so doing: and sinner too as I am, I am not, Lord, an apostate. Now then what advantage wilt Thou give me over apostates, if like them I am to perish. Since Thy truth is greater than error, therefore make Thy Gift to me the greater!”
St. E. probably means to put a dilemma. ‘Either you ought to rebaptize, or to allow you have nothing new to teach, new that is in the sense that the Gospel is a new dispensation, and so remain where you are. Perhaps it was a later development of Eunomianism which induced them to adopt, as they did, the former alternative. See p. 179, n. d.