Simple and Bold. Ephrem's Art of Symbolic Thought (review)

This revised dissertation represents a major contribution to Ephremic studies and to the expanding field of patristic epistemology. Reacting to and building upon the foundations of existing Ephrem scholarship, the author contends that to understand Ephrem one must lay aside the biases of the western theological tradition in order to acknowledge a different kind of intelligence—one conveyed through a distinctive mode of discourse that is experientially grounded in liturgy and driven by poetic symbolism and analogy.

Part One (Chapters One and Two) begins with a critical review of the history of modern scholarly reflection on Ephrem's thought. Although the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the publication and broad study of Ephrem's corpus, most approaches have been analytical and descriptive. Many interpreters have assessed Ephrem according to contemporary dogmatic agendas and western modes of thought. More recent students of Ephrem have sought to read him on his own terms. Their researches show that Ephrem is not so much a creator of theological poetry as he is a symbolical theologian who advances a compelling vision of God, humanity, and the world from within a framework of intelligence that differs from western "rational thought" yet is coherent nonetheless. For Ephrem, symbolic imagery is not merely a poetic device, a clever dodge, or even a concession to human weakness, but rather a necessary hermeneutic tool by which one may experience, conceive of, and represent the mysteries of God and faith.

Symbols, in all their elusive multivalency, are not just tools to aid understanding and facilitate communication, but are the main forms by which reality presents itself to human awareness as an object of knowledge—creation itself is "symbolical or sacramental in nature" (48). Consequently, Ephrem's rhetoric is characterized by oppositional polarities, creating tensions and apparent paradoxes. His purpose is to bring listeners or readers to inhabit the tense space of similarity and dissimilarity between certain apparent contradictions in order to promote "institutional unity and stability in the face of various forms of dissent" (62). In a liturgical context where the literary symbolism is rooted in ritual performance, Ephrem's analogical reasoning is calculated to appeal to deep, intuitive levels for the sake of community formation. The author proposes seeing Ephrem's notorious anti-Judaism and anti-Arianism in this light—as largely rhetorical moves, not for the purpose of attacking Jews or Arians, but to help the people of his church gain a firmer foothold on their own dogma in a world of competing beliefs. Hence, the common reliance on the Hymns on Faith and the Memre on Faith as the best places to see Ephrem working out his theology is misguided, since these texts have a relatively narrow, apologetic function.

Part Two (Chapters Three and Four) studies one set of polarities that the author sees as fundamental to Ephrem's understanding and use of language: word and silence. This polarity is grounded in the more basic polarity of the human and the divine. The belief that God is wholly other evokes an appreciation of the absolute gap between human consciousness and the divine, which Ephrem explores by means of numerous, interrelated antitheses, including that of reason and love. The author explicates Hymn on the Church 9 to show that the dialogue between reason and love promotes a type of religious discourse in which speech and silence may exist in balanced complementarity, avoiding the pitfalls of arrogance on the one hand and agnosticism on the other. The faithful interpreter will resist the urge to hold one pole while collapsing the other, choosing instead to handle them both fully. The resulting "paradoxical union of word and silence" (145) not only becomes the foundation of praise, but also constructs a connection between theological hermeneutics and morality, since the gap between human and divine has been negotiated by God's mercy in the gospel and therefore builds a particular moral framework.

Part Three (Chapters Five and Six) brings...