“You who have been set over others, you have heard the Apostle Paul saying, Let him who is in charge carry out his work in diligence (Rom 12:8), and, Let no one despise your youth (1 Tim 4:12). See to it that you never use your position to fulfill your own passions. For the Scripture says elsewhere, Do not lord it over those under you, but become an example for your flock; and when the Chief Shepherd shall appear, you shall receive an unfading crown of glory (1 Pt 5:3). And again, Paul says: Become imitators of me, as I am of Christ (1 Cor 11:1). For high-mindedness is alien to those who believe, as it is written: God resists the proud, but he gives grace to the humble (James 4:6).

–One Hundred Chapters: How One Attains Humility (CPG 3936), Chapter 14

Greetings, once again, with the feast of St Ephrem!

I recently came across a blog post by Dr. Alan Suciu, a researcher and scholar of Coptic Christianity and Literature, which features some articles related to the Greek Ephrem. I want to thank Dr. Suciu for posting these and acknowledge my use of them. You can have a look at Dr. Suciu’s site here. (And here is the page with the articles.) I’ve added the references, with his links, to the Links and Bibliography page.

“Christ is bread, wine, and oil.”

The short sermon “On the Cross” (CPG 4104) is as much a meditation on the biblical image of the Vineyard of God as it is a meditation on the saving work of Christ. Indeed, this short text identifies the Cross of Christ as the inheritance of Christians (taken from Israel and given to the Gentiles), upon which hangs the Pearl of Great Price. The Cross as the vine of eternal life is typologically connected with the Tree of Paradise, and the author makes full use of the agricultural and horticultural symbolism present in this image. Towards the end of the sermon, the language of the tree, the vine, and the field of harvest is tied together with Eucharistic imagery, calling Christ the Bread, Wine, and Oil by which the Church is nourished.

Click here to read the Ephremic sermon On the Cross.

During these most holy days preceding the Lord’s Suffering and Crucifixion, we share with you the metrical sermon On the Lord’s Passion attributed to St. Ephrem the Syrian in Greek. This text was translated by the late Fr. Ephrem Lash and featured on his Anastasis site. Thankfully, this site is archived here, and Fr. Ephrem’s translations can still be accessed by a grateful public. Continue reading below to read the full text here.

Continue reading “On the Passion of the Savior, trans. E. Lash”

Index of Gospel Passages and Pericopes

If you would like to read patristic commentaries on the Gospel using the translations in Toal’s Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers, it may be useful, if you are not an expert in the Tridentine lectionary, to consult the following index of pericopes or Gospel passages:

I. By order of Gospel passages

II. By order of the Tridentine Lectionary/Toal

1. By order of Gospel passages

Toal vol.: page

Matt 2:1-12                                                    1:196

Matt 4:1-1                                                      2:1

Continue reading “M.F. Toal, Sermons of the Great Fathers: Index of Gospel Passages”

Although the manuscript in its entirety is not digitized, one cannot resist sharing this lovely image of St. Ephrem the Syrian (Effrem Diaconus) in a Latin manuscript of the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris (which today forms part of the Bibliothèque nationale de France).

The manuscript (codex 233) originated in the Benedictine monastery of St. Albans (sic) in Hertfordshire, England, between 1170 and 1190. It is written in Protogothic miniscule, a Western script of the 12th century.*

As you can see from the image, the figure of St. Ephrem occupies a capital D, which forms the first letter of the incipit: Dolor me compellit dicere et iniquitas. This incipit, together with the title (Here begins the First Book of the Blessed Effrem the Deacon of the City of Edessa) are in green and red majuscules, before transitioning to the black miniscule of the remainder of the text.

The work presented here is the Sermo asceticus (ed. Phrantzolas 1:122-184). This is an influential sermon that circulated widely in Latin translation. It begins, “Pain compels me to speak, but my unworthiness urges me to keep silence.” The writings of Ephrem take up folios 1r-50v. But because I have not been able to see the manuscript in its entirety, I am not sure whether all of these pages are devoted to the Sermo asceticus. The original sermon is rather long in the original (62 pages in the printed edition), and could certainly fill the fifty folios. Still, the desinit in the manuscript (given on the library’s website) does not match the ending of the Sermo asceticus in Greek. In the original, the Sermo asceticus ends with a doxology: “…and glory to the all-holy Spirit who renews us, unto all the ages of ages. Amen.” The Latin text, on the other hand, ends with the words, ut omnis anima que hic meditatur trahatur ad vitam eternam. Amen. This is a phrase that appears in another work, the De iudicio et compunctione, though even here it does not form the closing lines of the text.** Thus, without being able to examine the manuscript, it is not clear exactly what these fifty folios of St. Ephrem contain.

In addition to the Ephremic material which opens the codex, the manuscript also contains some sermons of St. Augustine and the Adversus Manichaeos (51r-146v). Indeed, if you did not know that the illumination in question was of St. Ephrem, you might very well think that the person in this image, pictured in Western garb with a Roman tonsure, was not St. Ephrem the Syrian but St. Augustine himself. May both saints, whether praying in Syriac, in Greek, or in Latin, grant us their blessing and their intercession.

The images presented here have been borrowed, with gratitude, from the Index of Medieval Art.

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* You can find more information on the manuscripts of St. Alban’s in Rodney M. Thomson, Manuscripts from St. Albans Abbey, 1066-1235, (Suffolk, D.S. Brewer, 1982).

** ἵνα πᾶσα ψυχὴ μελῳδοῦσα αὐτά,γλυκανθεῖσα ἑλκυσθῇ εἰς ζωὴν αἰώνιον. Ἀμήν.

If you know the Spiritual Psalter of St. Theophan the Recluse (St. John of Kronstadt Press, 1997), you know that this is a collection of 150 Ephremic texts arranged into a collection of prayers to be prayed like the psalms. Like the rest of the corpus of St. Ephrem, these prayers are deeply penitential and profoundly moving.

As far as I know, no one has gone to the trouble, so far, of tracking down the Greek texts behind St. Theophan’s translations (see the bibliography page for the Slavonic and Russian translations of Ephrem Graecus). But we have been able to pinpoint, for now, the source of Psalm 122.

That prayer begins with the call,

Take an interest, at last, in your salvation, O sinner. Seclude yourself, collect your thoughts and say to yourself: how much time have you spent feeding the lusts of your flesh and imagination, and what benefit has it brought you; what have you attained by doing this?

And it ends with an appeal to turn to the Lord in repentance, culminating in the following lines:

Approach with faith and He will cleanse you straightway as He cleansed the leper, lift you from your bed as He lifted the paralytic, and raise you from the dead as He raised Lazarus.

This exhortation, it turns out, corresponds to about eighty lines from the forty-second of the fifty Exhortations to the Monks of Egypt (ed. Phrantzolas 3:36-294). It is a paraenesis To A Monk Who Has Fallen, with the subtitle, On Repentance. The exhortation begins with the words,

The Enemy attacks those who are subject to a spiritual father, saying….

It is concerned largely with the details of monastic endurance. But large portions of it also apply to Christian strugglers in general. The portion excerpted by St. Theophan begins at line 114 of the paraenesis (already quoted above):

Σχόλαζε τοιγαροῦντῇ ἑαυτοῦ σωτηρίᾳ, ἀγαπητὲ ἀδελφέ, καὶ καθίσας ἐν ἡσυχίᾳ, ἐπισυνάγαγέ σου τοὺς λογισμοὺς καὶ εἰπὸν ἐν σεαυτῷ· Ἄνθρωπε, τοσοῦτον χρόνον ἔχειςποιῶν τὰς ἐπιθυμίας τῆς σαρκὸς καὶ τῶν διανοιῶν σου. Τί ὠφελήθης καὶ τίἐκέρδησας τὰ τοιαῦτα ἐπιτελῶν;

And it ends at line 192:

Καὶ τῷ λεπρῷ εἶπε· θέλω, καθαρίσθητι· καὶ εὐθέως ἐκαθαρίσθη αὐτοῦ ἡ λέπρα. Τὸν δὲ Λάζαρον τεταρταῖον ἤγειρεν ὁ Κύριος ἐκνεκρῶν.

The excerpt appears in the edition of Phrantzolas, vol. 3, pp. 228-233, though naturally, there are some variations in the translation. The Greek text goes on for another two pages (about thirty lines more). So, in total, St. Theophan’s Psalm 122 is about 1/3 of the entire text. The original paraenesis, as we said, is about monastic perseverance. But St. Theophan has wisely excerpted this portion which is of extreme relevance to every sinful human soul.

I would encourage everyone to obtain a copy of the Spiritual Psalter and make frequent use of it, as it is among the very, very few translations we have of the Greek Ephrem; and these are exceptionally edifying and compunctive prayers.

 

 

 St. Ephrem the Syrian in Byzantium

A Symposium on the Greek Writing Attributed to St. Ephrem the Syrian

Saturday, November 9, 2019
Sensenbrenner Hall 104
10am – 3pm

Please join us this coming Saturday on the campus of Marquette University for a symposium on the Greek Ephrem. 

For a full program of the day’s events, click here.

We recently came across an amended reprint of some hymns and sermons of St. Ephrem the Syrian published by St. Anthony’s Monastery in Florence, Arizona. Entitled Eschatological Hymns and Homilies, it contains seven texts (or groups of texts) on the end times, a theme that is very prominent in the Greek corpus as well the Syrian. This collection led us, in turn, to the work by M.F. Toal, Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers, 4 vols. (London, 1955-1963), which contains translations from the Greek writings attributed to St. Ephrem, translated mainly from Vossius (1616 ed.). Toal’s work, a systematic collation of patristic and medieval sermons, is worth obtaining for its own sake. But the fact that it contains otherwise untranslated sermons of Ephraem Graecus makes the collection especially valuable. In addition to the two works reproduced in the Eschatological Hymns, it contains five other works of the Greek Ephrem.

Since the volume from St. Anthony’s does not contain references to the original works that it reproduces, we list here the cross-references that we were able to find to the original translations (with translations from the Greek marked by an asterisk). Below this is a list of the works translated in Toal. We will also add the citations of Toal, and other relevant bibliographical information, to the list of available translations here on this site.

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Eschatological Hymns and Homilies on Repentance, the Antichrist, the End of the World, the Lord’s Second Coming, the Resurrection, and the Last Judgement (Florence, AZ: St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery, 2019).

*1. On Repentance, pp. 3-24: this translation of the Compunctive Discourse (CPG 3908) is readily found on the internet without attribution; it possibly derives from A Spiritual Psalter (SJKP, 2004).

2. Thirty metrical hymns on death, the life thereafter, and the Resurrection, pp. 25-88 =Henry Burgess, Select Metrical Hymns and Homilies of Ephraem Syrus (London, 1853), 1-93.
On the Death of Children: Their Blessedness
On the Death of Children: The Sorrow it Produces, The Sources of Consolation
On the Death of Youth
On the Death of a Spiritual Son
On the Death of Persons in All Walks of Life
On Death and the Resurrection
On the Death of a Servant of God
On the Death of a Bishop
On the Death of a Priestmonk
A Prayer in the Prospect of Death
On the Death of a Private Person
The Parting of Body and Soul
On the Death of a King and a Beggar
Christ the Companion of the Disembodied Soul
On the Death of a Monk
On the Death of a Woman
On the Death of an Aged Man
On the Death of a Priest
Necessity for Preparation for Death
On the Death of a Priest
For a Time of Plague
A Prayer in the Prospect of Judgement
Hymn on the Resurrection
A Morning Hymn
Hymn for Pascha
Hymn for the Lord’s Day
A Hymn of the Whole Church
For the Whole Church at the Resurrection
In Praise of God and His Most Pure Mother
Description of Paradise: The Revelations of God adapted to Man’s Nous

*3. On Various Places of Torment and on the Judgement, pp. 89-106 =M.F. Toal, The Sunday Sermons of the Church Fathers, vol. 3 (London, 1960), pp. 302-311 [CPG 3944, 3969].

*4. On the Second Coming and the Last Judgement, pp. 107-115 =M.F. Toal, The Sunday Sermons of the Church Fathers, vol. 1 (London, 1960), pp. 10-14 [CPG 4693].

*5. On the Antichrist, pp. 117-129: this translation of the ‘Sermon on the Coming of the Lord, and on the Consummation of the Age, and on the Coming of Antichrist’ (CPG 3946) appeared, verbatim, in an issue of Orthodox Life 3 (1970): 20-27, but I am unaware at the moment of its provenance, or if this reprint derives directly from that issue).

6. On the Antichrist and the Consummation, pp. 131-142 =M.F. Toal, The Sunday Sermons of the Church Fathers, vol. 4 (London, 1960), pp. 352-358.

7. Prayer for the Future Life, pp. 143-152 =M.F. Toal, The Sunday Sermons of the Church Fathers, vol. 4 (London, 1960), pp. 347-352.

M.F. Toal, Sunday Sermons of the Great Fathers, 4 vols. (London, 1955-1963).

• Vol. 1:10-14, On Patience, the Second Coming, and the Last Judgement (CPG 4693); reprinted in Eschatological Hymns and Homilies, 107-115.
• Vol. 2:44-51, On the Transfiguration of Our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ (CPG 3939)
  
• Vol. 3:121-23, The Mystery of the Eucharist (excerpted from the sermon On Those Who Scrutinize the Nature of the Son of God) (CPG 4054)
• Vol. 3:233-37, Charity and Forgiveness (CPG 3980)
  
• 302-11, On the Various Places of Torment and on the Judgement (excerpted from the Sermon on the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ (CPG 3944) or, alternatively, Questions and Responses (CPG 3969); reprinted in Eschatological Hymns and Homilies, 89-106.
• Vol. 4:10-18, On the Evil of the Tongue and Similar Vices (CPG 3950)
• Vol. 4:406-7, Prayer for the Judgement (CPG 4088 latine)

Things have been busy, but we’ve recently added some updates to the Bibliography section as well as the Manuscripts.

You can also read a short new text here on the righteous Noah, who gives us an example of not conforming ourselves to a wicked generation or making an excuse that the times are evil.