Reading Saving Paradise: Chapter 4, Part II

New poems and hymns for worship

Ephrem the Syrian

'The Songbird of Paradise'

Ephrem the Syrian was born around the year 306 in Nisibis (today's Nusaybin - now on the border between Turkey and Syria, then on the border between the Roman and Persian empires).  

Born into a Christian family during the Great Persecution, Ephrem's life was marked by the wars of Rome and Persia.  He was baptized as a youth, and ordained a deacon. 

Appointed a teacher by his community, Ephrem began to compose hymns and write biblical commentaries. In his hymns, he sometimes refers to himself as a 'herdsman', to his bishop as the 'shepherd' and his community as a 'fold.'  

Ephrem was the greatest writer of his century on paradise. He spoke of paradise as a landscape that called humanity to live ethical, just, and joyous lives in the journey toward God.  His joy in paradise stands in contrast to the many difficulties his Christian communities faced under two powerful empires. 

After the fall of Nisibis to the Persians, Ephrem was exiled to Edessa, in eastern Syria.  When famine struck Edessa in 372, leaders of the city’s church asked him to lead the effort to alleviate it.  His writings and actions during the famine, and the epidemics that followed it, demonstrate his understanding of what living in paradise required.   

Ephrem organized food distribution and set up hospitals to care for the sick. He extended the church’s care to the entire city.  His poetry and hymns on paradise show us that he encouraged people to savor the mystery of the goodness of life until their last breath:

The breath that wafts

from some blessed corner of Paradise

gives sweetness

to the bitterness of this region…

That Garden is the life-breath

of this diseased world.

His poetry reveals a person actively working to ease the injustices, dangers, and hungers of this life through the healing balm of the church.

The assembly of saints

bears resemblance to Paradise:

In it each day is plucked

the fruit of Him who gives life to all;

in it … is trodden

the cluster of grapes,

to be the medicine of life. 

The term ‘medicine of life’ was a popular Syriac image for Christ as the physician - who healed diseases of the body and soul, and who even cured death.  Christ dispensed his medicine through the bread and wine of the Eucharist, and through the healing oil given at baptism. 

For his many theological insights, captured in thousands of poems and hymns, the Eastern church calls him ‘the Songbird of Paradise.’  To hear one of Ephrem’s hymns (sung to a modern tune but in Syriac, a modern version of Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyXcJmuxzm0

Who is Jesus?

Christians formed their ideas about Jesus Christ over three centuries of resistance to Rome.  John’s Gospel was a major influence, presenting Jesus as the incarnation of Wisdom and Word who existed with God at the beginning of creation.

Disputes about the nature of Jesus escalated in the 4th century. Constantine wanted a unified church, and called the council of Nicaea to settle these disputes.   But the council declared the divinity of Jesus Christ higher than the status of the emperor.  This placement of Jesus above the emperor contributed to the hierarchical structure of the church; the bishop derived his authority directly from Christ, not from the emperor.

By the 5th and 6th centuries, Christian art was placing worshiping Christians (not just the apostles) in the sacred space of paradise, presided over by the living Christ.  

 Christ presides over sacred space

The apse of St. Pudenziana, Rome - early 5th c.

In Rome’s St. Pudenziana Church, Christ sits on the throne of Jupiter, with his apostles dressed in togas and seated like a council of the gods. Note the 'winged creatures' of Ezekiel's vision, representing the four evangelists. 

Imagine coming to worship

in St. Pudenziana in the 5th c.

What would this mosaic say to you

about authority in the church?