To Train His Soul in Books: Syriac Asceticism in Early Christianity

Introduction

Introduction This volume of essays, a collection of studies on the work of Ephrem the Syrian and subsequent developments in Syriac-speaking asceticism, is a small sign of the respect and fondness its authors share for Professor Sidney H. Griffith . Some of the authors have worked with Sidney as his students, and others began as colleagues and are grateful to call themselves his friends. Compiling this volume in celebration of Sidney’s scholarly work and in view of his approaching seventieth birthday, they also know that they are representing many other scholars and friends who gladly would add their tributes to the life and work of this remarkable man. Sidney H. Griffith is well known among scholars as both a pillar of the international world of Syriac and early Arabic Christian studies, and of the Department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. His many friends know him as a scholar, as a priest, as an indefatigable traveler, as a devoted son, brother, and uncle, and as a lively and engaging conversationalist. The many students who have sat in his classrooms—principally around the broad tables of the library of the Institute of Christian Oriental Research at the Catholic University of America—know him as a kind but exacting teacher, and as one whose patience with a text and its students extends from week to week, and year to year. His natural environment is the classroom and the lecture hall, where he proceeds with stately leisure to discuss his discoveries or to respond to questions, and in this climate he radiates contentment. To students in at least one class—weary at the end of a semester— he was heard to wish fervently that the class would simply continue indefinitely, without respect to the inconveniently seasonal calendar of the university. Sidney is a bookman, an admirer of ancient librarians and interpreters, and xi a man profoundly at home around books. Those who meet Sidney in his office, in the northwest corner of the basement of Mullen Library at Catholic University , cannot miss his devotion to books. By the window is his desk, surrounded and surmounted with overflowing bookshelves. The surface of the desk itself is covered with papers—Syriac or Arabic texts he is currently reading, letters from correspondents and his own compositions. Like a wall, a tall bookshelf of the Corpus scriptorum christianorum orientalium volumes show their spines to any visitor, and obscure Sidney from sight. In front of that shelf are an ell made of two more desks, jammed against a row of filing cabinets. A visitor may be invited to sit for discussion at one of the chairs beside this public desk, but risks tripping over the library book truck, full of texts for the current seminar, between Sidney’s office and the seminar room next door. Even his jacket pocket holds a book—usually a paperback, and often a current novel. He has been an eager trader of recent books, swapping them with numerous friends. If anyone has lived with books, it is Sidney, and this love of books must have blossomed in childhood; more than one friend knows his delight in the used and new bookstores of Washington, D.C., Princeton, Cambridge, Chicago , and Oxford (to begin with). But even the very tools of writing can still make him happy—like many of his scholarly comrades of a certain age, he can still admire the rows of fresh notebooks, pens, and pencils in a local pharmacy, arrayed fresh and new for the new school year. As with his life in the church and in the priesthood, his life in books expresses Sidney’s stability—settled in the church, specifically, the Roman Catholic Church in the vicinity of Washington, he is also settled into the world of the university and the life of the mind. His frequent travels serve only to accentuate his love of home. Sidney was born on December 21, 1938, the first of the five children of the Griffith family of Gaithersburg, Maryland. He is a native Marylander, and has lived in the state of Maryland and the city of Washington, D.C., for most of his life. On both sides he is descended from old Maryland families—through his father, the Griffiths; through his mother, the Sappingtons. Through his father ’s family his roots are to be found in Baltimore; through his mother’s family he represents the English Catholic community of Southern Maryland. Sidney...