The Life
Ephrem was born around 306 in Nisibis, a Roman frontier city in Mesopotamia. He was baptized by Bishop James of Nisibis, who had been at the Council of Nicaea, and made a deacon. He served the Church of Nisibis for thirty years, surviving three Persian sieges. When Nisibis was ceded to Persia in 363, Ephrem fled with the Christian population to Edessa. There he taught at the famous School of Edessa and composed hundreds of hymns to defend the orthodox Faith against the heretical sects that filled the city. He trained all-female choirs to sing his hymns in the public squares so the orthodox doctrines would reach the simple people. He visited Saint Basil the Great around 370 and the desert fathers in Egypt afterward. When a great famine and plague struck Edessa in 372, he organized relief, nursed the dying, and contracted the plague himself. He reposed in peace in 373 at about sixty-seven. His Lenten Prayer is recited at every weekday service of Great Lent in the Eastern Church.
Ephrem was born to Christian parents in Nisibis around 306. He was baptized as a youth by Bishop James, the great pastor of the city. Bishop James had attended the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 and had signed the Nicene Creed there with his own hand. He recognized in his young disciple unusual spiritual gifts and made him a teacher of the Christian school. Ephrem was eventually ordained a deacon. He served the Church of Nisibis under Bishop James and his successors for some thirty years, learning the Faith from a man who had heard it directly from the great fathers of the Council.
In 363, after the Emperor Julian was killed campaigning against Persia, his successor Jovian was forced to surrender Nisibis to Persia to save the surviving Roman army. The peace treaty required that all the Christian inhabitants of Nisibis leave the city. Ephrem, in his late fifties, was among the great body of refugees. He fled west with the Christian population, first to Amida (modern Diyarbakir), then to Edessa, the great Aramaic-speaking city further west. He would spend the last decade of his life in Edessa. He would never see his native city again.
Edessa was full of heretical sects — Arians, Marcionites, Manichees, Bardaisanites — each claiming to be the true Church and competing for the simple people’s loyalty. Ephrem noticed that the heretics, especially the Arians, were sending female choirs into the marketplaces to sing their heretical doctrines to popular tunes, and that this was working: the simple people heard the songs and remembered the doctrines. Ephrem’s response was direct. He gathered the Christian women of his parish, taught them to sing his orthodox madrashe set to the same Syriac folk melodies, and sent them into the public squares of Edessa to sing the truth where the heretics had been singing the lies. The Christian women of Edessa thereby sang the Nicene theology into the ears of the entire city. The strategy worked. The orthodox Faith reached even the unlettered population. The tradition of women’s choirs in the Syriac Church descends from this innovation.
Ephrem’s hymnographic achievement is hard to grasp. He composed hundreds of hymns on every deep mystery of the Christian Faith — the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Cross, the Resurrection, the Holy Spirit, the Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, paradise, the Last Judgment. He used more than fifty different metrical schemes in Syriac verse. Sozomen says he wrote three million lines of poetry over the course of his life. Some four hundred of his hymns survive today. The Christian Church has called him the Harp of the Holy Spirit, the Sun of the Syrians, the Pillar of the Church. His hymns are full of biblical imagery, paradox, theological symbol, and the simple devotion of a soul that loved Christ. Through them the Nicene Faith of his Bishop James was preserved for the Eastern Christian world.
Around the year 370, Ephrem traveled west across Asia Minor to visit Saint Basil the Great at Caesarea in Cappadocia. The two great fathers had heard of each other and longed to meet. When they finally did, they recognized each other immediately as brothers in the Holy Spirit. They spent some time together in theological conversation. Saint Basil, recognizing Ephrem’s spiritual depth, wished to ordain him to the priesthood. Ephrem, in his deep humility, refused. At Basil’s insistence he consented only to the ordination of deacon. When Basil later sought to make him a bishop, Ephrem feigned madness in the streets to escape the dignity. He returned to Edessa as a deacon, which is what he had always been.
In 372 a great famine struck Edessa, probably from a long drought. The poor of the city were starving in the streets. Ephrem came down from his cell. He observed that some of the wealthier Christians were hoarding food. He rebuked them publicly. He gathered provisions from those willing to give. He set up hundreds of beds in the public squares to receive the starving. He nursed many of the dying with his own hands. When the plague followed the famine — as it often did in the ancient world — he stayed in the city to care for the sick. He contracted the plague himself. He continued to write and to pray as his strength permitted. He reposed in peace on June 9, 373, at about sixty-seven. He had died as he had lived: in service of people who needed someone to show up.
Saint Paul tells the Christians of Ephesus to sing to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. Ephrem’s entire life was the working out of this single apostolic command. He believed that the deep mysteries of the Faith reach the soul through song more than through any other medium. He composed hundreds of hymns, trained choirs to sing them, sent them into the streets of Edessa, and made the Christian worship of the Lord into a song that the whole city could hear. We sing his hymns to this day in Lent and at the great feasts. Ephrem shows us that singing is not decoration on the Christian life but its proper voice. The Faith we believe in our hearts naturally rises to our lips as song.
Of all Saint Ephrem’s many hymns and prayers, the one most beloved by the Eastern Christian Church is the short prayer of repentance that has come to be called simply the Prayer of Saint Ephrem. It is recited at every weekday service of Great Lent in the Eastern Orthodox Church, often three or more times a day for the entire forty days of the fast. The prayer asks the Lord to take from us four spirits — sloth, despair, the lust of power, and idle talk — and to give us instead four spirits — chastity, humility, patience, and love. It ends with the petition: “O Lord and King, grant me to see my own sins, and not to judge my brother. For blessed art thou unto ages of ages. Amen.” The whole Christian life is summarized in these few lines. We pray it many times each Lent. It is the deepest gift Ephrem has left to us.
Ephrem gives the Christian Church a particular gift: he shows us that the deepest theology is sung in the streets, lived in the famine, and prayed in the cell, all by the same person at once. He never stopped being a poet. He never stopped being a teacher. He never stopped being a deacon caring for the poor. He never stopped being a man of prayer in his cell. All of these were the same single life, given to the Lord and flowing out to neighbors in many forms. We sometimes treat theology, charity, and prayer as separate activities for separate kinds of Christians. Ephrem reminds us that they are one work, given to one person, expressed in many forms across the seasons of a single life. The hymn we sing in church and the bowl of soup we serve in the kitchen and the prayer we whisper at night are all the same Christian life seen from different angles.