Library › St Ephrem the Syrian › Hymns on Faith

Hymns on Faith

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

46. Rhythm the Forty-sixth

Be restrained ye daring ones, and go not on with meddling any more! The fish leaps along the boundary of its river¹, and passeth not over it: we have passed with our scrutiny the boundary of Him who is the Giver of our life. The Breath of the Gospel sustaineth us, the waters support the fish, the Scriptures² intelligent creatures. Within them is life, without them is death. He that dareth to go in, my son, where there is no air³, dieth, since there is no breath there to quicken him; that we may learn that we are not at liberty to go into hidden things. That Threefold Breath⁴ sustaineth thee, and if outside it thou shouldest go forth into scrutinizing, the gust from errors will fly to thee, and kill thee.

The fool rageth, saying, “Wherefore should God have a Son⁵; for if the True One begat⁶, it was either by His own Will or not by His own Will that He begat; and if it was by His Will, then was that which He begot no God; but if it was not of His Will, He denied Himself though free.” Wherefore is thine eye evil, because it was owing to His being Good⁷ that He begat? thou art envious of that in which He was not envious. Leave all these things, and seek what His Will is⁸. The Father willeth that thou shouldest believe that the Son is from Him: now if He willed this to be so, the Truth of Him agreed with His Name; and if He did not will it, it would have been opposed to His Name: the Name of Son were then a borrowed⁹¹⁰ one. Faithful is His Name, and true is the Name of His Son. Confess and fear not, since His Voice encourageth thee, His Voice is as it were a pledge¹¹ that gladdeneth thee touching His Son.

Thamar¹², inasmuch as her action was hard [to justify], took, in belief, the witnesses for her innocence. She took his pledge, that it might go forth and strive with him; for the silent ones went forth and justified her. Let a man learn then from Judah who was overcome by his own pledges, that if He blame thee, His writings are within thy reach¹³. For it is not another man that crieth, that thou shouldest doubt [thereof.] Moses and Elias were still and silent, and even he who baptized Him, as if he knew Him not¹⁴, gave place to the Father, that He might give a true account of Him. And if He blameth thee, repeat to Him His own words: He clave the Heavens open, and cried and clave strife asunder.

And if thou were to refute this, [and say,] that He calleth even the sons of men ‘sons,’ thou hast refuted that¹⁵ which refuted this: since he shewed the nature of man to be from the dust, and what the nature of the angels is He hath also shewn¹⁶. He cried of the Son that He is the Son, and of the Spirit that He is the Holy Ghost. He purifieth and putteth these very things into our hearts. He wittingly called mortals ‘sons’ (their body convicting them of having a created nature) that we might know that angels are our fellow-servants. Since, however, their nature was high above ours, they were not called at any time ‘sons of God¹⁷,’ that they might not confuse their name, by reason of their natures.

Go and call Adam earthy without questioning, and call Gabriel also spiritual: seal up in silence Those Three¹⁸. If a man asketh of thee, there is written for thee the nature of inferior beings as warranty¹⁹ for that of higher: but He hath not had it written for thee, that thou art to search into the Three! Refrain thyself, O foolish one, and follow Him wholly, and of all that He speaketh unto thee, look not whether it is suiting, since thy appreciation²⁰ [of it] sufficeth not to give aught unto Him. If thou approvest Him, hitherto it is but a little; and when thy faith is very great, worship exceedingly, in that He hath brought the truth of His words down to the ear that is of dust. Oh! wonder, that God should have humbled Himself to the dust, and should have given it the ornament of life, and enhanced it with freewill²¹, and delivered His Son up for us to shew unto us His love! But instead of being astonished that it was so great, (and if he had wondered and been silent, still that had been but little,) by the paltriness of their wranglings they have made light of the Glorious One.

They are called gods, but He is God entirely: they are called fathers, but He is the True Father: they are surnamed spirits, but there is a living Spirit. They who are called ‘sons,’ and ‘fathers,’ have borrowed names, which teach by the grace [given], that He is the One Father in Truth, who hath the Son in Truth²².

Notes

R. lxiv. §. 5.
R. xlv. §. 1. p. 279, n. d.
Ideler. Meteor. p. 25.
R. v. §. 5. R. lv. §. 2.
p. 133. R. lv. §. 3. R. lx. §. 1.
Didym. de Trin. i. 9. p. 8. “‘Did God beget willingly (they say) or not willingly?’ But we must first declare what their object is and make answer accordingly. Now their object is to raise an objection with the simple-minded from either alternative. For if they lay hold of the one, ‘It was not willingly that He begat,’ (not that any body does answer them so,) then they say, ‘God then submits to what He does not will in having begotten the Son, the necessity of nature bringing this about with Him;’ but if it be conceded to them that it was willingly that He begot, they rejoin, ‘So then the Son’s Generation depends upon the Father’s will, which confers subsistency upon Him in the way of creation.’” Ambros. de Fid. iv. §. 102. “They fabricate another impiety when they put the question whether it was willingly or unwillingly that the Father begat,—so that if we say willingly we may seem to allow the will to have a priority to the Generation, and they may reply that the Son was not coeternal with the Father, since something anteceded Him:....but if we answer that it was unwillingly that the Father begat, then we may seem to have made the Father incompetent.” Other passages are given by Petav. de Trin. ii. 549. St. E. meets this cavil by a practical observation: you question (he means) about God’s Will in matters too high for you; obey that Will in things plainly declared. Consider in settling your belief not what will satisfy an ambitious philosophy, but what on the whole it appears from Scripture to be God’s will that you should believe, what impression He intended to make. Compare what he says below, R. lxxiv. §. 1. upon another point, though with a similar practical tone.
p. 121, n. f. p. 231, n. b.
contr. Scrut. i. §. 44. ii. §. 6.
i. e. not a Name of Nature, but of Grace. See on R. xliv. §. 2.
R. liv. §. 1.
Mat. 3, 17; 17, 5. 2 Pet. 1, 17. &c.
See p. 38, n. b. p. 49, r. 1. St. E. means, ‘If you say the Father will blame you for believing without being able to state the doctrine in terms of human science, do you deal with Him as Judah with Thamar, and produce against Him His own pledges to shew that He is the Father.—Without a certain devotional affectionateness such applications of Scripture may appear irreverent: with it such applications are true to facts, to say the least.
S. within thee. comp. p. 279, n. d.
St. Austin, in Joan. Tr. iv. §. 15. thus states St. John’s seemingly contradictory account of himself. “See, my brethren, John is placed before your eyes, John the Baptist standing at the river; see the Lord is coming still to be baptized, as yet not being so! Hear the voice of John: Comest Thou to me? I have need to be baptized of Thee. See he now knows the Lord by whom He wishes to be baptized. When baptized the Lord ascends from the water, the heavens are opened, the Spirit descends: now it is that John recognises Him. If it is only now that He recognises Him, why was it that he said before, I have need to be baptized of Thee? but if it is not only now, inasmuch as he had known Him before, why is it that he says, I knew Him not, but He that sent me? &c. &c.” In Tr. v. §. 8. §. 11. he makes the main answer to this question to be that St. John knew Him to be Lord, but did not know that the ‘power of the Lord’s Baptism would not pass from the Lord to any man, but that the ministering of it would.’ This brings to the point from which St. E. starts in the next §. viz. the distinction between sonship by grace which the Son could give, and that by Nature which the Son has and none other.
John 1, 12.
See on R. xxi. §. 2. and Bas. de Sp. Sanct. xvi. quoted p. 120, n. c. Probably St. E. alludes to such passages as speak of the Angels being made spirits, and all the host of them being made by the Breath or Spirit of God’s Mouth. In what follows he means to say, that God purposely bestowed the name of ‘sons’ on mortal men and not on angels, that we might learn from the fact of such a name being bestowed on corruptible beings such as men, that the name has a derived sense, in which it does, as well as its true one in which it does not suit servile natures. This the bestowal of such a name upon embodied spirits proves more markedly. Angels on the contrary are not called ‘sons,’ that men might not confuse their name with that of the Son, which they were more likely to do ‘by reason of their natures,’ i. e. because they were incorporeal beings, as well as He.
The older writers (out of respect to the book of Enoch perhaps) applied the term ‘sons of God’ in Gen. vi. 2. to Angels. In process of time, Christians were led partly by reflection and partly by the necessity of opposing heresies to drop a notion, which is valuable only as a protest in favour of the duty of believing Scripture statements in simplicity, but was found incompatible with a scientific adjustment of such statements with other Scripture statements. No one perhaps was more explicit than St. E. in asserting that the expression must mean the sons of Seth. Thus he takes Gen. iv. 26. to mean the giving of the name of God to Seth’s tribes, now separated from those of Cain; he accounts for the dwindled state of Cain’s race which made Seth’s progeny giants to them by supposing (i. p. 49, d.) that the curse on their ground prevented Cain’s race from being else than dwarfed: he urges (ii. p. 456, a.) most ingeniously that if the production of giants requires the intervention of Angels, then the production of dwarfs must be supernatural; and p. 478. that if Angels could make women mothers, then devils could, and so would have imitated the Birth of a Virgin; that if God had intended the race of Angels to be propagated, He would have made them male and female; that, finally, the name of ‘sons of God’ may be accounted for, (i. p. 145.) by supposing the family of Seth to have dwelt apart (as some say) on Mount Hermon, and devoted themselves to a life of angelical devotion and contemplation.
S. Trine.
See n. e. p. 121. St. E.’s words imply, that one may argue from one order of creatures to another in some degree, but about God we must depend wholly on what He reveals.
R. lii. §. 3.
Vol. ii. p. 451. n. g. p. 235.
The Fathers argued that men were not properly fathers, since they attained the age at which they become so by degrees, and lost the power of being so again, their sons in turn going through the same course. See Athan. O. T. p. 192, p. 201. Below, R. lxii. §. 4. Vol. ii. p. 479, e. ‘He lifted man above every thing, seeing He was called and named God.’ i. p. 430, a. ‘It is plain that Angels and saintly men receive from God sanctification, illumination, and godship.’ So Clement Al. Strom. ii. §. 104. speaks of a ‘saint as becoming God Holy of holies.’ And vi. §. 113. ‘The soul having received the Lord’s might practises to be a god.’ Comp. §. 146. ‘He calls them sons and gods.’ vii. §. 56. Iren. iv. 38. §. 4. quoting Ps. lxxxi. 6. as does Justin M. c. Tryph. p. 353, b. (we are called and are true sons of God,) Orig. c. Cels. p. 128. p. 375. where he speaks of those honoured by God with the appellation of god, and partaking of His Godship. Athan. c. Ar. i. 39. and the note c. p. 236. O. T. Didym. de Trin. p. 139. (“Though there be but one God and Father, and one true Son, all of us through His goodness and profuseness are called after His Image gods and sons, not that we are so in truth, but according to that Ps. lxxxii. 6. &c.”) and p. 331. §. xlii. Basil de S. S. ix. §. 23. ‘the summit of things desired is to become god,’ and above, p. 120, n. c. c. Eun. iii. 5. G. Nyss. in Or. Dom. Vol. 1. p. 752. b. c. Ambr. de Fid. v. §. 22. Austin in Jo. i. §. 4. in Ps. xlix. §. 2. Cyril c. Nest. p. 41, c. p. 121, b. in Jul. p. 59. Spanh. &c.