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Hymns on Faith

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

2. The Pearl, Rhythm the Second

Whereunto art thou like? let thy stillness speak to one that heareth thee; with silent mouth speak with us: for whoso heareth the stammerings of thy silence, to him thy type uttereth its silent cry concerning our Redeemer. Thy mother is a virgin of the sea; though he took her not [to wife]: she fell into his bosom¹, though he knew her not; she conceived thee near him, though he did not know her. Do thou being a type² reproach the Jewish women that have thee hung upon them³. Thou art the only progeny of all forms which art like to the Word on High, Whom singly⁴ the Most High begot. The engraven forms⁵ seem to be the type of created things above. This visible offspring of the invisible womb is a type⁶ of great things. Thy fair conception was without seed, and without marriage intercourse was thy pure generation⁷, and without brethren was thy single birth⁸. Our Lord had brethren and yet not brethren, since He was an Only-Begotten. O solitary one, thou type exact of the Only-Begotten! there is a type of thine in the crown of kings, [wherein] thou hast brothers and sisters. Goodly gems are thy brethren, with beryls and unions as thy companions: may gold be as it were thy kinsman, may there be unto the King of kings a crown from thy well-beloved ones! When thou camest up from the sea, that living tomb, thou didst cry out, Let me have a goodly assemblage of brethren, relatives, and kinsmen. As the wheat is in the stem, so thou art in the crown with princes: and it is a just restoration to thee, as if of a pledge, that from that depth thou shouldest be exalted to a goodly eminence. Wheat doth the stem bear in the field; thee doth the head of the king upon his chariot carry about. O daughter of the water, who hast left sea, wherein thou wert born and art gone up to the dry land, wherein thou art beloved: for men have loved and seized and adorned themselves with thee, like as they did that Offspring Whom the Gentiles loved and crowned themselves withal.

It is by the mystery of truth that Leviathan⁹ is trodden down of mortals: the divers put him off, and put on Christ. In the sacrament of oil¹⁰ did the Apostles steal Thee away, and came up. They snatched their souls from his mouth, bitter as it was. Thy Nature is like a silent lamb in its sweetness, which if a man is to lay hold of, he lifts in a crucial form¹¹ by its ears, as it was on Golgotha. He cast out abundantly all His gleams upon them that looked upon Him¹².

Shadowed forth in thy beauty is the beauty of the Son, Who clothed Himself with suffering when the nails passed through Him. The awl passed in thee since they handled thee roughly, as they did His hands¹³; and because He suffered He reigned, as by thy sufferings thy beauty increased. And if they shewed no pity upon thee, neither did love thee; still suffer as thou mightest, thou hast come to reign! Simon Peter¹⁴ shewed pity on the Rock; whoso hath smitten it, is himself thereby overcome; it is by reason of Its suffering that Its beauty hath adorned things above and things below¹⁵.

Notes

ab. p. 39.
S. Let thy type reproach
See adv. Scrut. xviii. §. 2. §. 3.
The Gnostics represented the Holy Ghost as the Mother of God the Son, (see Hahn’s Bardesanes, p. 62.) a notion perhaps derived from the Jewish Cabbalistical writers, who called Him the Church above. See Molitor Philos. der Trad. ii. §. 269.) and which seems to have been held by several heretics at different periods. See Origen in S. Joan. Tr. ii. §. 6. (who quotes the Gospel according to the Hebrews for it.) Constit. Apost. ii. 26. Aust. de Trin. xii. 5. xv. 48. Jerom. on Isai. xl. v. 11. Epiphan. Hær. xxi. §. 2. and xxx. §. 17. At this heresy St. E. is probably here glancing.
This opportunity may be taken for observing, that St. E. does not in these Rhythms tie himself down to one heresy at a time, but often glances at others. So also in treating of the Gnostic heresies he alludes to the Anomoeans, (see note i. on p. 87. and on adv. Scrut. i.) as also in treating of the Anthropomorphites. It may be well to add, that in the Pearl, type and antitype are so intermixed as to create, to our minds, some confusion in the word. E.g. the words ‘Virgin, whom the sea took not to wife,’ allude to a title of S. Mary akin to ‘Maris Stella:’ the last syllable of Miriam being taken as a separate word. See above, p. 86. n. f. end
Pearls, be means, have their beauty by nature and so are like Christ: other stones must be graven and so are like created natures. See iv. §. 4.
S. a great type
adv. Scrut. xviii. §. 4.
ab. p. 21. n. q.
Leviathan; on Job 41, 4. Here ‘he shews that in the fulness of time the Messiah will conquer Satan: for these two marvellous beasts (Behemoth and Leviathan) are a type of Satan.’ And on Isaiah xxvii. 1. after first interpreting the place of the Assyrian and Babylonian king, he proceeds: “But by a little type the prophet shadoweth out glorious mysteries, pointing out also that day in which God visited and redeemed the world, and destroyed the works of Satan. But to Satan doth the prophet therefore give many names, because his works are manifold.” This indeed is the common explanation of Leviathan. See Corderius on Ps. 103, 26. p. 97.
The word here used for ‘Apostles’ means also ‘naked,’ upon which double meaning St. E. plays throughout, in a manner very common in the Hebrew Scriptures. See Glassii Philol. Sacr. p. 1335. ed. Dathe. The oil is here obviously looked upon as a channel of grace. On Joel ii. p. 252. he writes as follows: ‘The presses also shall abound with wine and oil; He promises that He will give an abundance of corn and wine and oil, after that He hath accepted them, and hath destroyed the Assyrians that came against them. Mystically, however, this is fulfilled by the Messiah, Who gave to His people that He redeemed, i. e. to His Church mystical corn, wine, and oil; that is to say, corn which is type of His Holy Body, and wine His reconciling Blood; and oil again stands for the sweet ointment, whereby the baptized are sealed and clothed with the armour of the Holy Spirit. I will pour My Spirit, &c. i. e. on the house of Hezekiah, who have had a prophecy of the Redemption which they were to have, from Sennacherib; and this is a type of the Redemption which took place by our Lord’s means from Satan by means of the Holy Spirit, Who was shed forth upon His servants and handmaidens.” See Const. Apost. vii. §. 42. St. Austin (de Trin. xv. 46. and elsewhere) speaks of the visible oil as signifying the invisible Unction. Some think the use of the word Unction, for the gift of the Spirit, implies that Unction was the ordinary channel of it, which view St. E. seems to take with the Eastern Church in general.
adv. Scrut. xviii. §. 3.
This is perhaps a proof that St. E. was acquainted with that tradition mentioned by Origen in Matt. Comm. Series, §. 100. that our Lord looked differently according to the character of those with Him. Or it may refer merely to Zech. 12, 10.
See above, p. 36. ref. 2. where he notices another, not very obvious, type of the nails: and below, iv. fin.
S. Cephas
S. height and depth.