When lightning produces pearls
Percy Dearmer was an odd, energetic figure in the Church of England, a Christian Socialist who, in The Parson’s Handbook (1899), sketched a liturgy of his own devising that he thought of as the “English Use” – Catholic but quite independent of Rome.
He was also largely responsible for The English Hymnal (1906). In it is a hymn, Strengthen for Service, Lord, often attributed to him as translator and to Ephrem the Syrian as author.
I do not think Dearmer knew any Syriac, the ancient form of Aramaic in which Ephrem wrote. This hymn came by a roundabout route via an English version, published in 1859 by that great hymn translator John Mason Neale, of a chant used by Malabar Christians in the liturgy of St James. It may well originate with Ephrem, but, much as it is loved, I doubt the English hymn does him justice.
St Ephrem (pictured here in a mosaic at
Nea Moni on Chios) lived from about
303 to 373 and was outstanding in the way he used poetry to talk about the things of God. We might assume Syriac to be marginal, but it is worth realising that this language is very close to that spoken by Jesus, and that the Christians of Syria and the eastern parts of what is now Turkey probably became Christians when St John the Gospel writer was still alive.
If we are sorry today to see the sufferings of Christians in Syria and Iraq, it might do them a little justice to be aware of the culture they represent.
St Ephrem lived, of course, long before Islam, but he still spent the last 10 years of his life as a refugee from the Persians, dying in the city of Edessa, now called Sanlıurfa, in southeastern Turkey, where half a million Syrian refugees now live.
St Ephrem left a large body of work, chiefly hymns embodying Christian belief and metrical sermons often expressing insights into biblical text by way of paradox. In a homily on the Nativity, for example, he wrote of how “The king before whom angels of fire and spirits tremble lies in the bosom of a girl, and she cuddles him as a baby.” It is a thought taken up in Christina Rossetti’s In the Deep Midwinter.
St Ephrem’s bibliography is complicated but I found a good place to start was a paperback selection The Harp of the Spirit, which contains 24 items translated by Sebastian Brock, a leading scholar of Syriac at Oxford. There’s plenty more free on the internet.
What is so engaging about St Ephrem is his daring use of images from nature in elucidating Scripture. He does not see revelation as a dead thing preserved in a book, but something alive and active as the work of the Holy Spirit. Hence his own sobriquet Harp of the Spirit. One hymn in Professor Brock’s selection takes the notion of his time that a pearl is engendered in a shellfish when it is struck by lighting in the sea. This he takes as an image of the conception of Jesus in Mary’s womb by the power of the Holy Spirit. Just as the pearl is raised from the depths of the sea, so Jesus is raised to honour, both from his baptism in the Jordan and from his sojourn in Sheol after his death (as the Creed says, “He descended into hell”). As the pearl is pierced to be mounted as a jewel to be regarded, so the hands and feet of Jesus were pierced before he entered into his reign of glory.
This might sound strange and it is certainly a strongly metaphoric approach. St Ephrem is certain that God literally took flesh, but he is suspicious of explanations of godly reality that leave everything explained.
Revered by Roman Catholic, Eastern, Orthodox and Armenian Christians, St Ephrem should be a source of unity in times as troubled as his own.