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Hymns on Faith

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

78. Rhythm the Seventy-eighth

Shouldest thou at any time be minded to say that the Son knoweth not that hour which He does know well, since that hour is from His reckonings, He knoweth it, for by Him were all numbers framed¹. If it be [an hour] of the year, He knoweth it well, for by Him² the months of the year were framed as its limbs; if it be of the months, He is acquainted with it, since by Him were framed the days of the months as arteries³; and if it be of the days, it escapeth Him not, since by Him were divided the hours and the sabbaths and the⁴ weeks; and if it be of the sun, He is acquainted therewith, since it is He that hath trodden out for it the paths of winter and the steps of the summer; and if it be of the moon, again He knoweth it, for it is He that made the full moons, with the beginnings of the months. If it be in the height or the depth, it is in His fists: by His finger are all creatures sus⁵pended!

Compare the hour that He knoweth not with the Holy Ghost whom He doth know, [and see] whether is greater! and set forth clearly unto us the reason how and wherefore He concealed from Him the hour⁶ of His triumph⁷? If the reason why He concealed it from Him, was that He might be less than Himself, lest He should make Himself like Him by stealth, that conceit is very weak, and see how soon it is solved with a single word. For when that hour shall be revealed, and the trumpet hath sounded, and the triumph⁸ is going on, it⁹ shall be solved. Now then compare the two together, and the inequality will have become equality upon their assumption¹⁰. One of two things must be: if it be in the fact of His not knowing that He is inferior, then by knowing He will become equal, when He doth perceive it; or else if He be not advantaged when He doth perceive it, then of what advantage is it? for see though He does know it, He is still inferior, inasmuch as even Satan may know that hour¹¹, for when revealed, he will be ruined thereby. A mighty thing then is that hour to conceal from His Well-beloved, when even Satan may know it¹²!

Come then and hear the ground of His glory who is Lord of all, who is greater than all, whom all things depend upon! For the ground of the glory of God which has respect to us is His loving-kindness, which endureth for ever; and the ground of His glory¹³ in respect of His Son is His Paternity, which also is from eternity to all eternity. Oh, holy grounds, which neither towards creatures nor towards the First-born shall ever cease to act! Time is the ground of the hour of time¹⁴, and it is for a time, and with time itself its time passeth away. Mighty is the ground of His Makership, so that nothing made can ever be as great as its Maker! Mighty is the ground of His Paternity¹⁵, so that His Begotten can never at any time become the Begetter!

Of that hour there is yet another question for us to proceed to examine, since that former one hath been explained. And he that hath been induced by this gave thanks, and declared that our Redeemer also knew that hour¹⁶. He as it were whispered to us as in secret, that it was strife that framed it, and spoke it, that it might prevail therewith. Strife hath pleaded guilty, and truth prevailed! questioning hath ceased, and the crown hath come to the Conqueror!

Notes

The same argument was used by Gregory the Great, Ep. x. 39. (olim viii. 42.) against the Agnoetæ, as St. E. uses here against the Anomeans. Vide Massuet diss. iii. ad Iren. p. 121. Garnier ad Mercatorem i. p. 118. quoted by Wolf on St. Matt. Thomassin de Inc. vii. 3. §. 5. 4. §. 1. &c. 5 throughout, and Petav. ibid. xi. 1. §. 15. de Deo iv. 6. §. 6. It is worth remarking that our Lord says the Son of Man is Lord also of the Sabbath-day in a text to which St. E. seems to allude immediately. Texts, such as this, which transfer the attributes of Creatorship to the Manhood owing to the Unity of Person, illustrate the language of the Fathers when they transfer, as St. Greg. does, arguments used against Arians to meet Nestorian heresies.
R. l. §. 1.
There seems to be a reason for thus lingering over all the divisions of time one by one, in that heretics attempt to represent time as different according as it is heavenly or earthly, i. e. to make it as much as possible a mere mode of thought, not a reality, to which all creatures are subject. The Fathers, on the contrary, speak of it as a created thing, much as they may speak of created wisdom, not as if it had a separate subsistence of its own, but because it is essential to the notion of a creature, and distinguished creatures from the Eternal God who created them. See on L. Coquium, St. Austin de Civ. Dei, xi. 6. Confess. xi. §. 40. p. 30, n. d. Athan. c. Arian. i. §. 13. and p. 108, n. h. J. Martyr, p. 34. Cyril c. Julian, p. 32, d. p. 71, d. p. 265, c. and compare Basil, quoted above, n. c. p. 66. and on c. Scrut. iii. §. 1.
Mark 2, 28.
See Is. 40, 15.
See p. 300, ref. 4 and p. 358, ref. 11.
Hil. de Trin. ix. §. 60. “In what way is the Lord of glory (if the day of His coming were a thing He might be ignorant of) to be believed to have a Nature not yet determinate and perfect, which Nature hath not obtained the knowledge of its coming, while yet It is under a necessity of coming? At this rate ignorance of it would be an advantage to God, [i. e. the Father,] as it would take from Him the possession of the excellence of knowledge. And now what a double ground of blasphemy we shall have, if in addition to Christ’s shortcoming even to God the Father a fault is to be ascribed, in that He will have defrauded God the Only-begotten and the Son of His Love of the perception of this day, and from a feeling of grudging have envied Him the knowledge of the consummation that is to be, and when He was not minded to let the day and the hour of His Passion be a thing He might be ignorant of, yet denied to Him the hour of His excellency and brightening among His saints, and took away the perception of bliss from Him whom He indulged with a foreknowledge of His Death.” Pseudo-Dionys. of Alexandria, Eulogius, Greg. the Great, (as above,) and St. Austin, to whom St. G. refers, all take the ignorance of the day to be spoken of with reference to the Body of Christ, the Head putting His Member’s ignorance upon Himself, as if it were His also: upon the principle upon which 1 Cor. 15, 21. is commonly explained. Hence St. Hilary speaks of Christ being glorified in His Saints. This is important to notice, as shewing that the phrase, ‘the hour of His triumph,’ does not imply any accession to the glory of Christ’s Human Nature, even if St. E. were not reasoning on heretical premisses—There seems also to be an allusion here to the Arian notion, that the Son was incapable of advance, (on which see n. d. p. 314.) as if hinting at the inconsistency of that notion, with the necessary deductions from the assumption, they make that the Son really knew not the hour.
The root here used implies any solemn procession, as of a funeral: see vol. i. p. 259, c. ii. p. 379, d. 380, a. p. 541, b. iii. p. 251, f. 303, f. or of pilgrims coming to celebrate a Saint’s day, p. 354, b.—Of the knowledge of men at the Resurrection he says, ibid. p. 636, f. “The Resurrection brings men to birth full grown, and full grown knowledge doth it give them; for he whom his own iniquity hath not blinded, will know all things as God doth. Whatsoever is in Heaven, and whatsoever is in earth, every thing will he see in that veritable Knowledge which nothing escapeth.”
1 Cor. 15, 52.
as their word.
p. 359, ref. 1.
i. e. the heretics make the Son differ from God (so far as the text in question will help their cause) by the defect of a certain amount of knowledge, which amount of knowledge Satan has as much natural capacity for attaining when the time comes, as any other created being: therefore the difference between Him and Satan is not essential, but accidental. See p. 314, n. d.
R. lv. §. 3. n. c.
[Syriac]. It is not easy to suggest an English word which will answer to the use of this in all the places it occurs in this §. The word seems etymologically to have a passive and an active sense; ‘that which is brought in’ as fruits and the like; or, ‘that which brings in’ a pretext, or cause, or occasion. Then it is used for cause in all the senses in which αἴτιον is used in Greek, amongst which one is that by which the definition (λόγος or ratio) is said to be the cause of a thing being what it is, the formal cause. The word ‘ground’ has been kept in all places in the text for uniformity’s sake, though not altogether convenient. What St. E. seems to mean by the passage is: That when we speak of God’s glory, the conception we form of it must vary with the definition of it we have in the mind; which will be this or that, according as we refer to His relations to us, or to the relations to Himself which He has as subsisting in Three Persons. The text before us, contemplated in one way, will refer to God’s relations to us, it being the part of loving-kindness to hide from us knowledge which would only make us remiss in redeeming the time; contemplated in another way, will refer to the relations of One Divine Person to Another. For the text may be taken to mean, that the Son has no unoriginate knowledge of ‘the hour,’ but only derived with His Subsistency from the Father; (a mode of explaining the text not unknown, see Petav. de Trin. ii. 3. §. 6. and on Athan. p. 459, n. a. and R. lxxix. fin.) which would refer it to the Father’s glory. Time (he then proceeds) is the ground or formal cause of the hour; or in other words, time is the essence of the hour; but the Son is the Maker of time, (see n. b. p. 362.) and the notion of Makership precludes that of equality with a thing made, and so time, which is made, cannot be greater than the Son. In like manner, the notion of Fatherhood precludes that of unoriginateness in the Son also. Perhaps the last words refer to a view not uncommon in antiquity, that the expression, ‘My Father is greater than I,’ refers for the Father’s superiority to His unoriginateness. See Petav. de Trin. ii. 2. §. 2. St. E., however, seems to be referring to some work which he is refuting. See the next §.
c. Scrut. i. §. 12.
St E. here is evidently speaking of some one with whom he had had a controversy, and whom he had won back to the faith. Who it was, I am not able to discover. The two questions which he examines here are, (1) Whether Christ’s apparent ignorance of the day of judgment is inconsistent with His glory viewed as relative to man, or (2) whether that ignorance is inconsistent with the same viewed as relative to God. The latter (if I mistake not) he means to dispatch by saying, that, as He is the Maker of all things, and of time among them, and so cannot be a creature, He must be taken to be teaching in the text in question, that He derived His knowledge from the Father, and so is a distinct Person from the Father. The former he reserves for the next Rhythm, merely stating here that he had gotten his adversary to allow that our Redeemer also knew that hour. The words ‘our Redeemer’ are remarkable, as shewing that they had discussed, whether Christ (see R. lxxix. §. 1.) as such, i. e. considered as Man as well as God, knew that hour, and that St. E. had opposed the view held afterwards by the Agnoetæ; at least it is very unlikely that he should use such an expression of the Son, considered as God. Comp. R lxxix. §. 6.