Fiery Medicine: St. Ephrem The Syrian and the Eucharist
Nisibis was at the utter east of the Roman Empire—the edge of the world, as far as many Roman citizens were concerned. Beyond lay the vast Sasanian Persian Empire, exotic, barbarian, and constantly at war with Rome. Indeed, Nisibis (modern Nusaybin in southeast Turkey) changed imperial hands fairly frequently. St Ephrem the Syrian (c. 307–373) watched his hometown withstand three Persian sieges, only to see it handed over to the Sasanians as part of a peace treaty in 363. He spent his last decade 100 miles to the west, in Edessa (now Urfa, Turkey).
Ephrem’s was a rich Christian life. Living in a deeply Semitic context, Ephrem spoke and wrote in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic closely related to Jesus’ own everyday language, and his biblical exegesis often parallels Rabbinic Jewish traditions. Ephrem was an ihidaya (similar to a monk) and a deacon, serving under four bishops, including a canonized saint (Jacob of Nisibis, d. 338). Ephrem authored biblical and theological treatises, but he is best known as a songwriter. His preferred method of teaching was through didactic chants called madrashe—usually translated “hymns.” These were sung by choirs of men and women under Ephrem’s direction.
Ephrem lived during a time of intense doctrinal controversy, and many of his hymns reflect this. Ephrem was probably in his late teens when, in 325, the great Council of Nicaea declared the Son “consubstantial with the Father”—a declaration that for decades to come would be debated or rejected by some, defended and refined by others, in a dizzying swarm of synods, alliances, and political maneuverings. Ephrem died in 373, the same year as St Athanasius of Alexandria, the greatest champion of the Nicene faith. Though he was a staunch supporter of Athanasius’s conviction of the Son’s full divinity, Ephrem expressed himself somewhat differently than his Greek- and Latin-speaking counterparts typically did.
When it came to the mysteries of Divinity, Ephrem never tired of warning against what he called “investigating” or “prying.” Awareness of God’s majesty and our own smallness should engender great humility and caution when we ponder God’s inner life.
What thing-made can investigate
Divinity? There is a chasm between it
And the Creator. (Hymns on Faith 69:11)[1]
But this is not the end of the story. The hymn continues,
Divinity is not far removed
From [its] possessions, for love stands between it
And creatures. (Hymns on Faith 69:12)
What bridges the gap between God’s transcendence and human finitude is not our ingenuity or piety: it is God’s overflowing love, reaching down to us in order to draw us to himself. Specifically, we are invited to “cross to [the] Father” (Hymns on Faith 6:17) through God’s eternal Word, made known in Scripture, in creation, and supremely in the Incarnation.
Ephrem loved to speak of God, in an act of incredible generosity, “putting on” human language or “names” like a garment to make himself visible to our minds and thus available to our hearts:
Let us understand: if he had not put on the names
Of these very things, he would have been unable to speak
With our humanity. With {what is ours}, he drew near to us.
He put on our names, to put on us
His way of life. He borrowed and put on our form,
And like a father with children, he spoke with our childishness. (Hymns on Faith 31:2)
These “names” through which God seeks “to put on us / His way of life” are found in Scripture, God’s written Word. Scripture alerts us, in turn, to the signs of that same Word in all creation, for it was made through the Word (John 1:3):
In every place, if you look, His symbol is there,
and when you read, you will find His types.
For by Him were created all creatures,
and He engraved His symbols upon His possessions. (Hymns on Virginity 20:12)[2]
God’s self-communication through his Word comes to fulfillment in the Incarnation. The Incarnate Word unveils the meaning of all the Scriptures and of the created world. The whole Bible and the whole creation thus become a sort of resplendent kaleidoscope, endlessly refracting the divine beauty of Christ, who reveals the Father’s unfathomable love by the light of the Holy Spirit—“an infinitely exciting world,” as Sebastian Brock puts it.[3] Scripture and creation give us a glimpse, that is, of Paradise—the indescribably lovely place of communion with God. Expelled because of sin, we can reenter Paradise through Christ’s self-gift on the Cross:
He came and took to Himself a body
which was wounded so that, by the opening of His side,
He might open up the way into Paradise. (Hymns on the Nativity 8:4)[4]
This “opening” is most powerfully accessible to us in the Eucharist, if only we have the eyes of faith to see it.
Let us look with the hidden eye
and see Him hanging from the Tree;
let our eyes behold the Blood
that flowed from His side. (Armenian Hymns 49:4)[5]
Consequently, the Eucharist brings us even now into the Paradise that is God’s life:
The spiritual Bread of the Eucharist
makes light and causes to fly:
the Peoples have been wafted up
and have settled in Paradise. […]
By means of the Spiritual Bread
everyone becomes
an eagle who reaches as far as Paradise.
Whoever eats the Living Bread of the Son
flies to meet Him in the very clouds. (Hymns on Unleavened Bread 17:9, 11–12)[6]
This recognition should fill us with tremendous awe and joy. Ephrem gazed with reverent gladness at the Eucharist through his biblical kaleidoscope, primarily focusing on the presence in the Eucharist of the “consuming fire” of divinity (cf. Deut. 4:24; Heb. 12:29). That same fire was in the coal that the seraph touched to Isaiah’s lips to purify them (Isa. 6:6–7). But Ephrem invited wonder at the contrasts between that scene and our reception of the Eucharist:
The Seraph did not touch the coal with his fingers.
It touched only the mouth of Isaiah.
[The Seraph] did not hold it, and [Isaiah] did not eat it.
But to us our Lord has given both. (Hymns on Faith 10:10)
The contrasts continue. Whereas the Bible recounts several scenes in which divine fire consumes the wicked, “The fire inside the bread you [Christians] have consumed and lived.” And whereas the divine fire consumed Elijah’s offering on Mt Carmel (1 Kgs. 18:38), “Your fire, O our Lord, we have eaten in your offering” (Hymns on Faith 10:12–13; emphases added).
Ephrem also loved to speak of the Eucharist as the Medicine of Life. Ephrem did warn of the death-dealing danger of unworthy reception of Communion.[7] But when the Eucharist is approached reverently, in a state of grace, rather than killing us (as well it might!), the fire of God himself heals us and fills us with his own life:
Let us consume in holy fashion that Body
which the People pierced with their nails;
let us drink, as the Medicine of Life,
the Blood which flows from His side. (Armenian Hymns 48:1)[8]
For Ephrem, because of God’s ineffable love and humility, the Holy Eucharist encapsulates and delivers to us the entirety of Christ’s mystery, prodigally sown in the field of the world and of the Scriptures, inviting us into the secret life of the Trinity. Suppose Ephrem is right. What reverence and adoration should such a gift elicit from us? What grateful joy should fill our hearts in the liturgy and in our Christian lives?
In an earlier post, we noted St Ignatius of Antioch’s description of the Eucharist as “the medicine of immortality” (Ephesians 20.2). Earlier, Ignatius wrote that the Ephesian believers “have been rekindled to life by God’s blood” (Ephesians 1.1; my trans.)—probably a reference to the Eucharistic chalice (see Trallians 8.1; Philadelphians 4.1). Ignatius thus saw the Eucharist as a fiery medicine of life, just as Ephrem would—a striking piece of continuity between two very different Fathers of the Church. In the next installment, we will make an even greater leap into what might seem a completely different world, and consider the Eucharistic teaching of the thirteenth-century scholastic St Thomas Aquinas.
