Below is the slightly revised paper I delivered at NAPS 2025 in Chicago. It lacks the formal features of a written argument; perhaps when I have time, I will make it so.
Introduction
To begin with the obvious, it is not surprising that the writings of the fourth century deacon, St. Ephrem, have inspired a great deal of interest in the idea of poetry. Among the theologians of the early centuries, one is struck by the craft of his hymns, some 400 of which have survived up to today; while some of his prose commentaries have been lost, the remaining prose works seem to play second fiddle to the hymns. Many agree with or are at least sympathetic to Sebastian Brock’s estimation, that Ephrem is perhaps the greatest poet of the early centuries.
However, as the scholarship has progressed, the term poetry has come to possess a dual meaning, almost as if there are two conversations happening, sometimes but not always overlapping with each other; on the one hand, a great number of scholarship has explored Ephrem’s hymns in a formal, stylistic way. One might examine Ephrem’s indebtedness to the poetic forms and metaphors of the Bible, for instance, or to the semitic styles and forms more broadly. Likewise, the liturgical setting and metrical structure of his memra and madrashe bear much fruit. On this line of inquiry, poetry is often simply the conventional term whose commons features — the line-break, meter, melody, a penchant for word-play, the condensation or compaction of significance pressed into the images and metaphors — are the items of this study, their technical structure, their history, their influences and developments. In such studies, the typical understanding of poetry lies with the contrast between it and prose, where the primary formal structures are the line-break and meter. The work of Jeffrey Wickes reading Ephrem alongside the Bible is an excellent example of attention given to the literary features and biblical allusions which adorn Ephrem’s hymns, and ways in which these formal constraints may be echoed in the theology which Ephrem is developing. One sees this sense of poetry also scattered throughout the critical editions and translations and in variety of naming conventions, where his writings are called “verse homilies.”
Perhaps inevitably, another questions arises as a consequence of the research mentioned above: does the form of his writing, which Ephrem clearly dedicated a great deal of thinking to the perfection and development of, in any way shape or influence his understanding of the very theology he paints in such vivid imagery and creative meter? Is the form of Ephrem’s writing indicative of his theological vision. The move from considering the form in some sense “for its own sake,” to considering how the form informs (is a function of) the content marks the second sense of the term “poetry” in the scholarship.
This question is natural enough, and it might occur to people for any number of reasons. As it happens, in the latter half of the twentieth century, this very question did arise to several scholars, among them Georges Saber, Bou Mansoun (sp?), Sebastian Brock, and Kees den Biesen. To understand how they approached this question, however, it is important to appreciate what they were forming their answers in response to. It was not a passing query, does Ephrem’s poetry indicate something poetic about his theology? It was also shaped by the way in which a particularly influential scholar read Ephrem.
At the end of the 20th century, there was a flurry of interest in Ephrem, perhaps the first wave of what we might call modern Ephrem scholarship. The reason for such excitement and energy was in large part due to a substantial milestone having been achieved: after several decades of labor, Edmund Beck had completed the herculean project of critically editing the complete works of Ephrem, providing a German translation, and in his free time he wrote many articles and a few monographs on Ephrem’s writings and theology. The critical editions were the permission slip for serious work to begin from a common and reliable corpus, and while the attribution of some hymns remains dubious, in the main, it is Beck’s critical edition which are the unsurpassed foundation for Ephrem scholarship up to today. As some may well know, however, Beck’s legacy would turn out to be double-edged. While later scholars were forever indebted to the critical editions of Ephrem, they found themselves at odds with the conclusions Beck drew when he turned himself from editing to reading Ephrem. As den Biesen tells the story, Beck read Ephrem through the lens of mid-twentieth century Roman Catholic terms and systems. Despite having brought Ephrem out of obscurity into formal respectibility, Beck was disatisfied with the contents. “Essentially,” writes den Biesen, “Beck’s method consist[ed] in putting a great variety of texts side by side, in order to establish the precise nature of Ephrem’s dogmatic views and terminology according to the standards of traditional catholic theology.” (pg. 34 Simple and Bold). Beck found an author lacking in logical rigor, terminological clarity, and dogmatic precision, and so, Ephrem, newly made available to scholars, seemed less profound to the very scholar who made it all possible.
It did not take long before several scholars began what would become a drawn-out debate over the inherent quality and therefore the substance of Ephrem’s writing, revolving principally over Ephrem’s theology. Among these scholars was Georges Saber, who observed that Beck’s mistake is to “fit Ephrem’s doctrines in[to] contemporary theological models” (quote of Biesen describing Saber). Others, such Bou Mansour, Sebastian Brock, Robert Murray, and Kees den Biesen offered their own counter to Beck. While each offered their own vision, in more or less agreement with each other, it is significant that they held two commitments largely in common: 1) that Beck or any one else was mistaken to think Ephrem’s theology primitive or inferior or somehow lacking in richness and profundity and 2) that Beck was correct in his estimation of Ephrem’s writing as lacking such qualities as logical coherence or philosophical rigor or rational demonstration, at least to the satisfaction of Beck.
Definitions of Poetic Theology
Within this investigation, the term “poetry” became significant. It would be too expansive to consider all these scholars and the unique contributions and special characteristics with which they describe Ephrem’s theology as poetic. In what follows, I draw mainly from Kees den Biesen, whose expanded version of the above historiography is only one reason why his monograph, Simple and Bold, is an excellent aid for students and scholars of Ephrem.
Another feature we find in den Biesen and elsewhere are two ways in which Ephrem’s vision for theology is described as having a poetic nature.
For the first way by which Ephrem’s theology is described as poetic, consider this from den Biesen, from Simple and Bold: “Theology too seems to have suffered from a typical Western superiority complex and has for too long looked down upon such a “primitive” author as Ephrem, surmising that whatever quality it could discern was a matter of either uncomprimising orthodoxy, accomplished poetics, or unconcious performance. (In reality, we have only just begun to perceive and appreciate Ephrem’s art of symbolic thought. … His language is more than just “poetical” and his specific form of orthodoxy submits the clarity of well-defined terminology and logical demonstration to the clarity of a more comprehensive and superior form of intelligence.” He writes elsewhere, “Different from certain theological traditions of West-European Christianity, which over the centuries developed a strong bias towards philosophical terminology and rational thought, Ephrem considers any attempt to encapsulate the truths of Christian faith in fixed formulae and dogmatic definitions as inadequate and risky … He, therefore, develops a form of theology which is pre-eminently ‘poetic.‘”
Note that, behind the distinction between the western approach to theology and that of Ephrem, there is another distinction den Biesen is emphasizing, between ‘poetic’ meaning a set of stylistic or formal constraints in contrast with prose, and ‘poetic’ meaning a certain kind of theological outlook which need not imply the first sense of poetry at all. The distinction between these two senses of “poetry” is definitively established later when he remarks, “As we will see, Ephrem uses poetical language (also in a prose text like the First Discourse for Hypatius) not just as a literary means of expression that produces ‘theological poetry’, but first and foremost as a hermeneutic tool which develops a theological vision of God, humanity, and the world that can be called symbolical and, even when it is formulated in prose, ‘poetical’.” (pg. 33-34).
In addition to distinguishing poetic theology from what we might call theology incidentally written in verse, he writes elsewhere a kind of summary of what characterizes poetic theology, exemplified in Ephrem: “[He [Ephrem], therefore, develops a form of theology which is pre-eminently ‘poetic’,] in the sense that it exploits the means of strategies of the art of the word in such a way that it respects the limits of human understanding, the inaccessibility of God’s mystery, and … the silence which puts the human word in the right perspective.”
The first way of articulating Ephrem’s theology as poetic, therefore, is to draw a stark contrast drawn between the theology of the west, the only named exemplar of which is Edmund Beck himself, and Ephrem’s alternative vision for theology. Not only is Ephrem’s poetic theology different and in significant ways antithetical to a theological framework like Beck’s, it is also the superior sort, capturing the whole where Beck’s only includes a part, going behind the bounds of logical coherence or philosophical precision. Writing succintly in the same spirit, Sebastian Brock observed in The Luminous Eye: Ephrem “abhors definition.”
There is another way of articulating Ephrem’s poetic theology, which broadly speaking is the more positive of the two and appears often but not always as a feature of the first, negative description. It has to do with Ephrem’s use of images and symbols. For students first reading Ephrem and scholars going over his writings for the twentieth time, it is Ephrem’s frequent and brilliant deployment of word images, puns, figures of speech, and metaphors drawn from the Bible and elsewhere which strike one most immediately and lastingly. With such a wealth of images, there yet remains a way properly to understand what it means for something to be symbolic.
It was at this juncture that Paul Ricoeur appears, if only in the footnotes. Writing in the ’70s and ’80s, Robert Murray and Bou Mansour seem to have been the first to suggest a connection between Ephrem and the French Phenomenologist, (especially in Murray’s ‘The theory of symbolism in St. Ephrem’s theology,’ 1975, and Mansour’s Pensée symbolique, 1988). Since then, Paul Ricoeur’s thoughts on symbols were often used in order to elucidate the symbol in Ephrem. Echoing Murray, den Biesen observes, “after many centuries of failed attempts, it is at last possible to rightly appreciate the hermeneutics of this [Antiochene] traditions thanks to the new scientific tools by, Carl Gustav Jung, Paul Ricoeur, and Gadamer.” (pg 26). Reference is often made to the various features of symbols, such as polysemy, i.e., the multitude of significations inherent to or hidden within or latent in a single symbol, as well as the historical contextuality of symbols; if one keeps Beck in mind, one sees the usefulness of other qualities in the symbol such as when den Biesen notes how, ‘the symbol is always in danger of being subjected to some kind of reduction, especially to the deformation into a concept.’ (pg. 45). In these and other ways, during the first flowering period of Ephrem studies, what it meant to be symbolic was significantly influenced by Paul Ricoeur, having written only a few decades earlier than when his ideas would prove applicable.
Conclusion
As a brief review, it seems that today there exist two ways one might approach Ephrem, ways which are neither mutually exclusive of or necessary for each other, but which are sometimes entangled and sometimes not. The first is Ephrem’s poetry as opposed to his prose. This is a distinction with its own history, but which is commonly understood as denoting two different ways to put words on the page. The second is to view the mode in which Ephrem writes as a consequence of a deeper theological vision. The first way, as we mentioned earlier, is content to study Ephrem from a literary vantage, among other possible perspectives; one may catalogue the various meanings behind a term, or assess the literary value of some meter, or investigate other features of Ephrem’s text, all without entering into the second conversation, if one does not wish to, where Ephrem’s poetic theology and symbolism are at issue. Thus, if someone were to ask whether Ephrem wrote poetry, one of the first things one might say in reply is, “do you mean he wrote in verse, or that in his poetic theology he is breaking free from dogmatic constraints and bears an uncanny resemblence to Paul Ricoeur?”
I submit that, as Ephrem scholarship progresses, it would benefit from a re-evaluation of this second sense of poetry, and for a few reasons. Against the negative ways of describing Ephrem’s poetic theology, as not-western and not-dogmatic, two brief points. It should be observed first that, as a matter of what terms typically convey, there is at best a tenuous relationship between ‘poetic’ as described by den Biesen and the conventional use of the term ‘poetic’ as standing in contrast to prose. What, for instance, makes Ephrem’s theology “pre-eminently poetic,” as den Biesen puts it, is that it “exploits … the art of the word in such a way that it respects the limits of human understanding, the inaccessibility of God’s mystery, and … the silence which puts the human word in the right perspective.” Rather than immediately suggesting anything poetic, these qualities make up a very good definition of apophatic theology, a stance held by most theologians of any era, from Augustine, to John of Damascus, to Jacob of Serugh, according to which certain things cannot positively be said of God or the divine mysteries. Now, it is true that there exists in modern discourse on the nature of poetry a particular theory which sees poetry as the absolute and perfect embodiment of apophatic speech, two main proponents of which are Allen Grossman and Ben Lerner. This is one theory, however, in a constellation of many others, and it is doubtful that it agrees with Ephrem on the nature of language itself.
Another reason to reconsider the negative, oppositional sense of poetic theology requires we return to Edmund Beck, to be more precise, to the point where Edmund Beck and his disputants find themselves in agreement. That is, as we mentioned at the beginning, while scholars felt that Beck was wrong when he viewed Ephrem as primitive or inferior, they felt he was right that Ephrem displayed no pronounced adherence to logical consistency, philosophical rigor, or other such qualities held by Beck as important in order for Ephrem’s theology to be read dogmatically. This may, however, be a simple case of the absence of evidence supporting the idea of evidence for an absence. For instance, if by chance only the many hymns of John of Damascus made it safely through the threshing floor of history, we may not know him, as we do today, as the forefather to a kind of dogmatic approach to theology.
From the 7th century, we find another example. Among the works of Maximus the Confessor, are his collections known as The Ambigua. Writing in response to questions posed by a certain John and Thomas, Maximus set out to elucidate the writings of Gregory of Nazianzus who, according to Nicholas Constas, was one of the most frequently cited and influential theologians from the 4th to the 7th century. Among the Cappadocians, Gregory the Theologian is known for writing theology in, among other forms, poetry — here understood to mean verse. According to Constas, Gregory, “deliver[ed] himself of charismatic, near-oracular utterances whose laconic obscurity and polysemic allusiveness were not easy to grasp — and likely to be misunderstood — without informed analysis and interpretation.” (pg. xi of introduction to Ambigua, vol. I). Maximus set for himself the task of unraveling “the skein of [Gregory’s] language into an intelligible sequence of interlaced patterns, to break open the particle of dense matter and release a universe. …” (pg. xii of intro. to Ambigua vol. I). Like Edmund Beck, Maximus was capable of writing and thinking about theology from a dogmatic style, helping to shape the very technical diathelite theology. However, where Beck failed, Maximus succeeded, to see in poetry a truth in some ways more precise for being compact. Perhaps in his “dogmatic” disposition, Maximus was rational without being rationalist.
In both cases (of John and Gregory), poetry — that is, word images and metaphors written in meter with line breaks — did not imply something in opposition to other pedagogical or technical modes of theology, modes familiar to the several theological traditions of both west and east, but as something essentially helpful for and additive to a common project whose expression contains many forms. Beck may have been wrong, and precisely where he was taken to be correct. Perhaps there are ways of appreciating Ephrem’s verse other than developing a poetic theology that claims to supercede the constraints of logical coherence and eschews philosophical rigor.
This leaves the other, positive notion of poetic theology as the expression of a kind of symbolism. It certainly seems to be the case that Ephrem’s notion of what constitutes a symbol is far richer than one may find in some corners of modern theology, at the very least. Nonethless, to the degree that the first iteration of ‘poetic’ theology relied upon Paul Ricoeur, it seems iffy. In the first place, one cannot help but recall Georges Saber’s warning not to expect Ephrem to fit in terms of contemporary theolgy (quote) and ask why the same admonition should not apply to other schools of thought merely because they are opposed to a surge of rationalism. In the particular case of Paul Ricoeur’s concept of the symbol, at least some disentanglement is needed. Ricoeur and Ephrem do not always see eye to eye. To mention just example: within the symbol, Ricoeur sees a near limitless range of interpretations, including interpretations that are at odds with each other. It is in fact in the nature of symbols to generate contention and disagreement. In The Symbolism of Evil, included among other features of the symbol, he remarks, “the symbol is given to thought only by way of an interpretation which remains inherently problmatical. There is no myth without exegesis, not exegesis without contestation. The deciphering of mysteries is not a science, either in the Platonic or Hegelian sense [or modern meaning] of science.” (pg. 317). While there is a lot to unpack here, one point is that Ephrem does describe symbols as generative of contestation. Rather, for Ephrem, contention and quarreling and contest arise, not in virtue of the symbols themselves, drawn from scripture or creation, but by the heretics and their improper ways of thinking and seeing and living.
A fresh approach to Ephrem’s symbolism may lie ahead, perhaps by drawing inspiration from Maximus the Confessor, for whom there was no discord between his own dogmatic expansion and Gregory’s dense poetry. Perhaps symbolism is not limited to one form or another. There may be nothing inferior or primitive or empty about writing theology in mere verse.