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Hymns on Faith

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

79. Rhythm the Seventy-ninth

Which, my son, is the most glorious¹ in the comparison, and which, again, is heaviest in the balance, that the Son knoweth not that hour or that He knoweth it? The Father who is great beyond comparison, He did declare; yet said that He knew not, and declared that He intended not to pry into, the hour, that by the hour² He might hinder, yea, that the hour might rebuke thee, bold man, from prying into the Lord of all hours. To Thee be glory, Thou Son Christ, who knowest all³ things!

By thine own self know that He knoweth, since He has prevented and tied up thy knowledge⁴: for thy free-will is a defiled handmaid, which, being in wine, spoileth exceedingly her Master’s treasures. Chains He prepared for her, gyves also He made for her, hedges too, and they surrounded her, and walls, and they encompassed her; and if these preserved her not, from all this her madness is made known. He knew that the families and tongues, and that the Greeks⁵, that are eager after hidden things, were to come to His discipline. For it was the net⁶ which collected those of every⁷ sort. His leaven⁸ bridled and brought the wild asses to His⁹ doctrine, and in order that they might not be confused in their race, by one yoke of truth¹⁰ He taught them one race of concord. He gave not a place to the light-footed, that by himself he might run apart from others. He gave not him that pryeth a place, that he might be loosened from the yoke of the faith; [upon] clerks and unlearned men, the subtle and the simple, upon all of them¹¹ the one yoke of equality was extended, even the yoke of His chariot¹², whereby the divided gain concord.

That we eat, and drink, and sleep, and rise, is of the free power of our will; the senses too possess free-will, in that they have power to do as they wish, yet not to do as much as they wish¹³. Thus beneath the yoke of love¹⁰ which is put on them, [and] of truth wherewith they are encompassed, is it, that they neither go astray, nor lead astray, seeing they obey the will of their guide. If where free-will does not exist, it yet does exist, to wit, in the family of brutes¹⁴, how much rather will it be found in its own abode, in man, who hath the motions of himself within his power¹⁵, that is bounden by the truth, yet free in his actions, and by perversion can transgress against the things that are good; but if he slip from off the verge of truth, to error is he degraded¹⁶.

One watcheth and [after] sleepeth, and when he sleepeth yet the reward of his watching¹⁷ is reserved for him; again, one fasteth and eateth in his season, yet his fast is not by any means lost to him by his eating. For food and fasting are both of them clean and fitting. Truth is single, yet error is the neighbour thereof; and if thou strayest ever so little¹⁶ a twinkling from it, that little is as an abyss¹⁸. There are different inclinations in one assembly, yet they are never blamed for being different; yet in one point they are blamed, if they are divided by rebelling against the yoke of the faith¹⁹.

And if even the senses are equally under one yoke; David wrote of man himself, that man is likened unto the²⁰ beasts. Oh, marvel that he should not even be like these²¹! Oh, confused courses amid the congregations! and disunited inclinations in the monasteries! divided questionings in the churches, and sickly minds in the assemblies²²! To whom then does the woe belong? for there is raging in the sea and shaking²³ in the dry land, because they have pried into the Creator, by whose hands they were stablished. Lo, by searching into Him [all] creatures have been troubled!

Lo, then the house of the Lord [the world] is fixed as a mirror²⁴ for His servants for instruction, and His creation pleadeth, and the number of it cannot be concealed from the Creator! When they have come to pry into Him they saw in ‘that hour’ His Humiliation shadowed forth, that they might feel ashamed some little, that they might by His lowly type feel restrained from His mighty Generation²⁵!

Look with these eyes of thy imagination at all the creatures²⁶, at every thing, which as a body are framed for that Stablisher of all things, and cannot be hidden from the Creator thereof. How can an image, my brethren, be shadowed forth, the limbs whereof are concealed from the artificer thereof²⁷? That hour cannot be concealed from the Wisdom of the Creator. Look, my brethren, at number which is framed as a body by Him that knoweth all things, and the reckonings thereof are in the type of limbs, and the times and the seasons are as its joints and bands, the hours are as it were its pourtraits, the years as its likenesses. And that hidden hour is the type of its mind, and as the remnant of its limbs are the months and the weeks and the days thereof²⁸. Who is there that would go astray, or be proudly lifted up, or who would loose his reason and make himself like the drunkards that have lost their understanding, so as to wander thus far, as foolishly to think that the image²⁷ which was garnished by the Very Father with the Finger of His Well-beloved, escaped His notice, even as though that glorious²⁹ hour could possibly be concealed from His Finger which shaped all things? If then this was impossible, it escaped not His Foreknowledge, and He prepared a place for it that it might be established therein, and a time when from being secret it should become visible³⁰. When it was not found, yet was it found by its Master, seeing it was kept in the treasury of His knowledge. And if it be hidden in the Root, it is not hidden in the Fruit which is in His Bosom³¹³².

Notes

This R. probably follows out §. 3. of the last R. God’s glory, in the first sense there mentioned, is shewn by His concealment of the hour more than by the disclosure of it, when such disclosure would do us harm. The sequel is very like the passage of St. Irenæus, a part of which is given above, p. 202, n. d.
§. 6.
p. 355, n. f. R. lx. §. 4. See Thomassin de Inc. vii. 6.
Or, ‘tied up thy knowledge beforehand.’ The sentiment intended is, that Christ’s foreknowledge is shewn by the fact, that He did not disclose the hour; by setting bounds, which the very men who pretend fully to comprehend God, cannot but be conscious are set to their knowledge, Christ shews that He knew beforehand the way in which man’s wilfulness would exert itself. Comp. p. 405, ref. 5.
p. 102, p. 112, n. g.
Ambr. de Fid. i. 8. (§. 57.) speaking of ‘In the Beginning was the Word, &c.’ makes a similar use of ‘the net’ to what St. E. does. “All heresies hath our fisher by this short chapter shut out;” and after mentioning Arius, Sabellius, Photinus, Eunomius, and the Manichees, he adds, “Thus hath our fisher included them all in one net, to make them unwieldy at fraud, though they were unuseful as a prey.” See also Hil. de Trin. ii. § 13 and §. 22 where he speaks of the Catholic Faith much as St. E. does here of Christ’s discipline or doctrine, [Syriac]. “A great thing is it that in that one faith there are as many remedies as there are diseases, and as many doctrines of truth as there are rivalries of falsehood. Let the names of the heretics be drawn together to one place, and all their schools step forward; let them hear of one God the Father made of none, of one Only-begotten Son, &c.”
Mat. 13, 47.
R. xii. §. 3. R. xxv. §. 5.
Ps. 104, 11.
R. xx. §. 4.
This passage implies that St. E. held the existence of certain fundamentals, as distinguished from matters of opinion, which he alludes to in §. 4. St. Austin, c. Jul. P. i. §. 22. “There are some points upon which even the most learned and excellent maintainers of the Catholic Rule do occasionally, though without disordering the fabric of the faith, fail to agree, and speak one of them better and more agreeably to truth on such and such a point than another will do. But this whereof we are now treating, pertaineth unto the very fundamentals of the faith.” Basil Epist 207. “Look well that ye strain not at a gnat, with a mighty precision about the key the psalms are sung in, while ye violate the chiefest commandments.....However, we allow of every thing, albeit that nothing is left unsearched out by God. Only let the essentials be secured, and silence the novelties coined about the Faith. Slight not the Hypostases: deny not the name of Christ.”
p. 285, n. a.
i. e. as the senses are used in subjection to our will, and our will again in subjection to certain limits, so in revealed matters is the Truth limited by God’s love. See n. a.
Comp. n. a. p. 325. n. k. p. 123.
S. the vessel of the notions of his soul c. Scrut. i. §.
R. xi. §. 3. 4.
p. 6. 7. comp. n. c. p. 295.
p. 244, n. a.
§. 2.
Ps. 49, 12.
p. 325, a.
R. lx. §. 6.
R. liii. §. 2.
p. 150, n. c. p. 205, n. b. p. 292, n. a.
§. 1. and p. 323, n. a.
c. Scrut. i. §. 2. comp. vol. ii. p. 442, e. in n. b. p. 106. R. lxxviii. §. 1.
p. 117, n. h.
R. lxxviii. §. 1.
p. 353, n. b.
p. 353, ref. 3.
Comp. §. 1. and p. 355, f. and R. xxvi. fin. c. Scrut. i. §. 3. Throughout this discussion St. E. argues as if the whole knowledge of the Father belonged to Christ; he does not make any distinction between the knowledge of His Human Nature and that of His Divine, but speaks as if he held that the Human Nature by virtue of Its union with ‘the Light which lighteneth every man that cometh into this world,’ had all knowledge of things to come. See Eulog. ap. Phot. p. 284. l. 40. Bekk. and J. Damasc. F. O. iii. 21.
p. 131. p. 354, n. e.