patristic studies in the twenty-first century - proceedings of an international conference to mark...

8/19/2019 Patristic Studies in the Twenty-First Century - Proceedings of an International Conference to Mark the 50th Anniver…

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PATRISTIC STUDIESIN THE

TWENTYFIRSTCENTURY

PROCEEDINGSOF AN INTERNATIONALCONFERENCE TO MARKTHE 50TH ANNIVERSARY

OF THE INTERNATIONALASSOCIATION

OF PATRISTIC STUDIES

Edited byBrouria B-A

Theodore BCarol H

F


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All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording, or otherwise,without prior permission of the publisher.

Cover picture:Madaba Mosaic Map, The Holy City of Jerusalem

© Archivio Fondazione Terra Santa, Milano

D/2015/0095/153

ISBN 978-2-503-55919-3

Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper

© 2015 Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Carol Harrison - Theodore de BruynIntroduction 9

KEYNOTE

Susan Ashbrook HarveyPatristic Worlds 25

OVERVIEW OF PATRISTIC STUDIES

Martin WallraffWhose Fathers? An Overview of Patristic Studies in Europe 57

Marcin R. WysockiBetween Western and Eastern Traditions: Polish Patristic Studiesafter World War II 73

Dennis TroutThe State of Patristics in North America 89

Francisco García BazánLos estudios patrísticos en Sudamérica y el Caribe 107

Satoshi TodaPatristic Studies in East Asia (Mainly in Japan) 125

Bronwen NeilPatristics in Australia: Current Status and Future Potential 145

Michel Willy LibambuLa contribution des études patristiques à la théologie africaine : L’étude des Pères de l’Église à l’école théologique de Kinshasa (1957-2013) 163


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Adolph Martin RitterThe Origins of AIEP 195

Angelo Di Berardino

The Development of the AIEP/IAPS 209 Jean-Noël GuinotÉditer et traduire les écrits des Pères dans Sources Chrétiennes :regard sur soixante-dix ans d’activité éditoriale 221

PATRISTICS AND THE CONFLUENCE

OF JEWISH, CHRISTIAN, AND MUSLIM CULTURES

Averil CameronPatristic Studies and the Emergence of Islam 249

Emanuel FianoThe Construction of Ancient Jewish Christianity in the TwentiethCentury: The Cases of Hans-Joachim Schoeps and Jean Daniélou 279

Timothy PettipieceManichaeism at the Crossroads of Jewish, Christian, and MuslimTraditions 299

PATRISTICS BETWEEN EASTERN

AND WESTERN CHRISTIAN TRADITIONS

Columba Stewart osbPatristics beyond ‘East’ and ‘West’ 317

Barbara Crostini

A Meeting-Point between East and West: Hesychius of Jerusalemand the Interpretation of the Psalter in Byzantium 343

PATRISTICS AND THEOLOGY

Christoph MarkschiesPatristics and Theology: From Concordance and Conflict to Competi-tion and Collaboration? 367

Lenka KarfíkováThe Fifth Theological Oration of Gregory Nazianzen and the Historical Contingency of Revelation 389


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Eimhin WalshFormation from the Fathers: The Place of Patristics in the Theological Education of Clergy 405

Reuven Kiperwasser - Serge RuzerSyriac Christians and Babylonian Jewery: Narratives and IdentityShaping in a Multi-Religious Setting 421

PATRISTICS, LITERATURE, AND HISTORIESOF THE BOOK

Mark Vessey

‘La patristique, c’est autre chose’: André Mandouze, Peter Brown,and the Avocations of Patristics as a Philological Science 443

Dominique CôtéLes ‘Pseudo-Clémentines’ et le choix du roman grec 473

Tina DolidzePatristics – as Reflected in Georgian Spiritual and Intellectual History 497

Yonatan MossThe Rise and Function of the Holy Text in Late Antiquity: Severusof Antioch, the Babylonian Talmud, and Beyond 521

PATRISTICS AND ART

Robin M. JensenIntegrating Material and Visual Evidence into Early Christian Studies: Approaches, Benefits, and Potential Problems 549

Anne KarahanPatristics and Byzantine Meta-Images: Molding Belief in the Divine from Written to Painted Theology 571

PATRISTICS AND ARCHAEOLOGY

Bernard J. MulhollandIdentification of Early Byzantine Constantinopolitan, Syrian, and Roman Church Plans in the Levant and Some Possible Consequences 597

Eirini PanouThe Church of Mary in the Probatic Pool and the Haghiasmata of Constantinople 635


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10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107509

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CAROL HARRISON THEODORE DE BRUYNDurham University University of Ottawa

President of AIEP/IAPS, 2007-2011 President of AIEP/IAPS, 2011-2015

INTRODUCTION

The Association Internationale d’Études Patristiques (AIEP) /International Association of Patristic Studies (IAPS) had a longgestation. The idea of an international association was pro-posed by Michele Pellegrino at the Fourth InternationalConference on Patristic Studies in 1963. Over the next two years the idea was advanced by Henri-Irénée Marrou, initiallyamong French scholars and then more widely. The Associa-

tion was founded at a colloquium convened at the Sorbonneon 26 June 1965, with a provisional Executive Committeecomprising Henri-Irénée Marrou, President, Jacques Fontaine,Secretary, Pieter G. van der Nat, Treasurer, and Kurt Alandand Frank L. Cross, Vice-Presidents. Finally, the Associationwas formally constituted with a duly elected Executive Com-mittee and Council at the Fifth International Conference onPatristic Studies in 1967. 1

The preparation of this volume of papers to mark the fiftiethanniversary of the founding of the Association had an equallylong gestation. The idea of a conference to mark the anniversarywas initially suggested at a meeting of the Executive Commit-tee in 2010. The proposal to hold the conference in Jerusalemin 2013 was presented to the Council at the Sixteenth Interna-

1 The paper in this volume by Adolf Martin Ritter, President of the

Association from 1983 to 1991, reflects on the state of Patristics in Europe in thedecades leading up to the formation of the Association. The paper by AngeloDi Berardino, President of the Association from 1999 to 2003, describes thehistory of the Association in the decades after its founding.


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C. HARRISON - T. DE BRUYN

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tional Conference on Patristic Studies in 2011. The conferencewas convened on 25-27 June 2013 in Jerusalem under the aus-pices of the Center for the Study of Christianity in the Hebrew

University of Jerusalem, fifty years after an association was firstproposed. This volume of papers will be published, we hope, intime for the Seventeenth International Conference on PatristicStudies in 2015, fifty years after the Association was founded.

No single conference or collection of papers can embracethe range, diversity, and richness of the scholarship that hasbeen the raison d’être and life of the Association, which now hasmore than 870 members in over 50 countries. In planning the

conference, the Executive Committee sought to bring togetherestablished and newer scholars to reflect on two aspects of theAssociation and its field of study: the state of Patristics in dif -ferent regions of the globe, and the multiple perspectives anddisciplines currently brought to bear on the field. We envisionedholding the conference somewhere in the Mediterranean basinthat, two millenia ago, generated the literatures and practices thatwe study, and consequently accepted with gratitude the offer

of the Center for the Study of Christianity in the Hebrew Uni-versity of Jerusalem to host and support the conference.Opening the conference with a lecture on ‘Patristic Worlds’,

Susan Ashbrook Harvey conjured up an extraordinarily sensuouspicture of the diverse, pluralistic – often competing and con-fused – worlds which formed the context for the emergenceof the multifaceted aspects of early Christian life and thought.As she vividly put it, anticipating much of what was to char-acterise the conference, ‘Twenty-first century patristic scholar-ship takes as its hallmark to approach antiquity as a multiplicityof worlds, an entire prism split open’.

The papers published here are only a selection of those pre-sented at the conference. We shall not attempt a synthetic over-view of all the papers, but we would like to offer a few remarkson the two foci of the conference. First, the study of Patristicsin different regions of the globe. Six scholars were invited toaddress the state of Patristics in their particular region: Europe,

North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Sev-eral other presenters described the situation in particular coun-tries (such as Poland) or settings (such as theological education).


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As might be expected, one’s initial impression in listening tothe different regional presentations was that of difference or – asMartin Wallraff, who addressed the state of Patristics in Europe,

put it – of ‘otherness’ or ‘alterity’. One was struck, first of all,by the sheer ‘otherness’ of fellow patristic scholars, working incontexts – geographical, cultural, political, social, linguistic, andconfessional – quite alien to one’s own. The sense of othernesswas further compounded by the different types of institutions,the diverse disciplines, and the divergent titles or designations inwhich patristic scholars appeared to be pursuing their inquiriesworld-wide. Indeed, the more one listened, the more unsettling

the otherness became, for it was evidently not simply a mat-ter of person, place, or position, but of the very subject whichshould have been their common, unifying foundation: Patristicsitself. Who were the ‘fathers’? We were told that they certainlywere not Europeans; it was noted that some, but not all, wereAfricans; we did not have to be told that they were not Asian.Moreover, who or what are they the ‘fathers’ of? These werenot questions which could be given a straightforward answer,

but were rather ones which prompted an awareness that the subject is as diverse as its modern practitioners, and that the worldsancient Christians inhabited were as complex as our own multi-religious, multi-racial twenty-first century contexts of shifting,often porous, linguistic, cultural, and geographical boundaries.

Interestingly, it is precisely within this otherness and diversitythat each of our presenters identified the strength and relevanceof Patristics in the twenty-first century to lie. In Kinshasa thestudy of Patristics is especially valued for its contribution to thechallenge which the African Church faces in making the Christianrevelation, its doctrines and practices, relevant to the cultural, so-cial, and religious traditions of a country in which it appears to bea relatively new and alien entity – in short, the challenges of en-culturation. In Japan, Patristics is similarly valued as a relevantmodel for Christian existence in a county where, again, Christi-anity is a relatively new, minority, and alien addition to a culturewhich still has many customs derived from ‘paganism’ – Toda

Satoshi’s word for the prevailing Japanese religious culture.The same cannot, of course, be said of Europe, but even there,amidst so much diversity and historic divisions, as Wallraff ob-


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served, we have need to reflect on our own identities in dialoguewith the ‘fathers’. In this context he interestingly commented, inrelation to Eastern Europe, ‘It is my impression that European

Patristics has not yet fully understood or exploited the potentialof Eastern Europe and the Orthodox tradition. The Berlin Walland the iron curtain came down, but there are still many men-tal curtains in our heads... Maybe our common “fathers” andresearch on them could contribute to a deeper understanding.’In North America the situation is again different. In the past fifty years, as Dennis Trout explained, the study of early Christianliterature and culture has engaged the interest and imagination

of scholars in an array of academic disciplines.What of similarities? There were obvious ones: each regionalpresenter described the academic study of Patristics in termsof the same fundamental elements which we will all recognise:editions of ancient texts and translations into today’s languages;notable academic institutions; centres of research; conferences; journals; series; associations or societies. It was at once reassuringand rather amusing to realise that, whether one is in Berlin, Kin-

shasa, or Kyoto, patristic study is undertaken and shared throughmuch the same channels. It gives us a sense of the durability andpromise of Patristics or – and several presenters commented onthis ‘or’ – the study of early Christian literature and culture.

Obvious though these fundamental elements are, they alsotell us something about the future of the field, whether under therubric of ‘Patristics’ or some other rubric. We can comment ononly a few of them. First, the preparation of editions and transla-tions, particularly translations. As Martin Wallraff observed, weare indebted to Europe for the monumental series of critical edi-tions of patristic literature – to which now scholars from aroundthe world contribute – and to the largest collections of transla-tions in French, Italian, German, and Spanish. We are also wellserved with English translations, thanks to the work of genera-tions of scholars in the anglophone world. In countries out-side these linguistic domains, however, translation is a priority.We see this, notably, in Japan, as Toda Satoshi explained in de-

tail, but also in South America, as Francisco García Bazán men-tioned, and Eastern Europe, as several papers presented duringthe conference noted. The value of this work for the continuing


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relevance of early Christian literature and its academic studycannot be underestimated. How many of our (undergraduate)students read Greek and Latin, let alone Syriac, Coptic, Arme-

nian, Georgian, Aramaic, Arabic...? We have yet to see howtranslations in multiple languages will shape the future studyof Patristics, locally or globally.

The variable academic setting for scholars of early Christianliterature and culture will also shape our future. This is appar-ent within both ecclesiastical and secular institutions. In somecountries ‘Patristics’ and ‘Patrology’ are still standard elementsof curricula in theological faculties. But this is waning, even, for

example, in Europe or South America, where there is a strongtradition of ecclesiastically founded universities with facultiesof theology. Other disciplines – biblical studies, pastoral care,social justice, current theological approaches – take precedence.The consequences for faculty appointments and regular coursesin early Christian history and literature are obvious. The sameis true, mutatis mutandis, in countries where the study of earlyChristian culture and writings has found a home in other facul-

ties. In the current panoply of departments and disciplines thereis no such thing as ‘Patristics’. The scholars and students whocome to conferences on ‘Patristics’ in fact work and study indepartments of classics, history, religious studies, literature andculture, art history. They identify as specialists in Late Antiquity,Byzantine Studies, early Christianity, Religious Studies, Cop-tic Studies, Syriac Studies and so on. In some ways they are asvulnerable, institutionally, as their counterparts in ecclesiasticalinstitutions.

But this leads to a related – and very reassuring – similar-ity around the world. Institutional variability and vulnerabilityhas meant that scholars find a home, foster interest in the field,and flourish on the strength of their sheer quality as researchers,their efforts to create opportunities for discussion and research,and their trans-disciplinary creativity. In Australia, for exam-ple, where theology was formally excluded from the curricu-lum of the older universities, there are two flourishing centres

for the study of early Christian (or patristic) literature, one inAustralian Catholic University, the other in Macquarie Uni-versity, each now with a cluster of scholars cultivated by and


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around a remarkable ‘mother’ or ‘father’, as Bronwen Neil putit. Similarly, in South America, centres for the study of earlyChristian literature have developed around a number of ener-

getic scholars. In Argentina and Chile, as García Bazán reports,they have supervised a generation of doctoral students who inturn have extended the reach of the field. The same can be saidfor North America, where the institutional settings for studentsand scholars are more numerous. One thinks of the influenceof Peter Brown in opening up the field of Late Antiquity, thework of Elizabeth Clark in bringing women, gender, and sexual-ity to the fore, the centre established at Universtité Laval under

a succession of scholars for the study of the Nag Hammadi codi-ces, to name only a few.There has been, one might add, a cross-cultural dimension

to this. One notable feature to emerge in both an African anda Japanese context is what we might describe as the impressivepractice of academic ‘mentoring’, in which an older and moreestablished faculty has enabled and assisted an emerging groupof scholars to establish themselves and to participate in an in-

ternational academic context: Kinshasa has strong links withLeuven; Kyoto with Australian Catholic University. Likewisein South America, as García Bazán mentioned, the InstitutumPatristicum Augustinianum in Rome has been responsible forthe formation of many patristic scholars.

In North America there has been a further enriching effectof the varied academic settings. There the expansion of thestudy of early Christian literature since the 1960s coincidedwith a growth in departments of religious studies and an in-creasing diversity of theoretical interests in both theology andreligious studies. As Dennis Trout recounted, these were con-ducive to new approaches to early Christian literature andculture – approaches drawing on anthropological models, fem-inist theory, Foucauldian discourse analysis, and much more,resulting in an array of what are commonly called ‘turns’: lin-guistic, social-scientific, material, cultural. These have devel-oped alongside, and increasingly in conversation with, studies

dealing with traditional theological loci or individual authors,both the ‘heavyweights and less well-known writers’, to useTrout’s phrase. So far the tent of ‘Patristics’ (as in the North


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American Patristics Society or the Canadian Society of Patris-tic Studies) has been large enough for all to gather in, even ifthere are periodic discussions as to whether that is the right

name for the canopy. (The same is true, as Wallraff observed,in Europe, where most scholars go by another name exceptwhen they attend a patristic conference!) But if the past of-fers any clue to the future, then shifts in institutional settingsand academic currents will affect not only whether ‘Patristics’continues to be a field of study but also where and how it isstudied.

This was the second focus of the conference in Jerusa-

lem: the multiple perspectives and disciplines that shape thefield of study called ‘Patristics’. The Association’s first Bul-letin d’information et de liaison, published in 1968, explicitlyacknowledged the persectives and disciplines of the field inthe way it presented the scholarly activity of its members.The section ‘histoire du christianisme’ included, inter alia,‘antiquité et christianisme, ‘christologie’, and ‘liturgie’, andwas complemented by ‘sciences auxilières’: art and archaeol-

ogy, codicology, epigraphy, and papyrology. A second sec-tion ‘langues et littératures’ encompassed studies of usage,genre, themes or motifs, and the reception and interpretationof scripture. The final section, devoted to studies of patristicsources or authors, was organized, after the second century,under the headings ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’. The conferenceheld in Jerusalem continued and expanded this tradition, in-viting papers on the themes ‘Patristics and the confluenceof Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cultures’, ‘Patristics be-tween between Eastern and Western Christian traditions’,‘Patristics and theology’, ‘Patristics, literature, and historiesof the book’, ‘Patristics and art’, and ‘Patristics and archaeol-ogy’. The papers presented at the conference revealed howcomplex it is to reflect on Patristics in an inter-disciplinarypersepective: a shift in the horizon of the researcher or thefield will entail additional linguistic and philological compe-tencies; a reconsideration of analytical categories; critical re-

flection about method when bringing disciplines to bear oneach other; awareness of ideological or confessional commit-ments. Two days of the conference were devoted to papers


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on such aspects of research in Patristics. We highlight someof the observations of the plenary speakers. 2

Columba Stewart, opening the session on Eastern and West-

ern Christian traditions, stated what proved to be a recurringleitmotiv : ‘We need to complicate the problem’. With the ech-oes of diversity, difference, and otherness still echoing in ourminds from the regional presentations, this was a note whichresonated rather than jarred. In order to do justice to the multi-racial, multi-cultural, and multi-lingual nature of both earlyChristianity and modern scholarship, a certain degree of com-plication was, we could assume, both inevitable and, if we were

prepared to be unsettled by it, positively informative and illumi-nating. Rather than attempting to capture the butterfly of an-cient Christianity and to pin it down for analysis, the regionalpresentations had already made us aware that it was perhaps bestcaptured by positively embracing its elusive, complex diversity,on the wing, as it were.

The first comfortable assumption to be thrown overboardwas the very idea of East and West; the Patrologia Graeca and

Patrologia Latina; the Greek East and the Latin West; Constan-tinople and Rome. One of the most significant features of thelast century of patristic scholarship, Stewart noted, was ‘the breakout from this binary view’ of the early Church to include a muchbroader range of cultures and languages into our understandingof Late Antiquity. What we now study is, as he strikingly put it,simply the ‘epiphenomena of waves of thought’ thrown up byvast, shifting currents of history and peoples. In short, Patristicsis not a subject that will stay still, but is characterised by a frag-mentary, fleeting fluidity: its texts are often missing or partial; itsauthors and peoples were transported by evangelism, pilgrimage,or exile into complex, overlapping, ever-changing linguistic andcultural identities. Stewart illustrated some of these shifting ebbsand flows with the example of language: it was used in diverseforms and contexts, which shifted with the people who spoke it.

2 We are regrettably unable to publish all of the invited or submitted papersfrom the conference, including two of the plenary lectures. Nevertheless, weoffer observations on all the thematic lectures in order to convey a sense of thethemes of the conference.


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Not only was bi-lingualism the norm for ancient peoples, butalso multi-lingualism; – in Eastern Asia Minor not only Greekwas used, but also Armenian, Syriac, Kurdish, Georgian, and

Arabic. Moreover, language often had a ‘high’ and a ‘low’, ora literary and a spoken, form, and cross-currents of linguisticinfluence led to some rather unexpected literary ‘microclimates’.Stewart also remarked on the growing importance of languagessuch as Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian as biblical trans-lations and vernacular liturgies were created.

Robin Jensen’s presentation, which opened the session onPatristics and Art, also provokingly ‘complicated the problem’,

this time by asking not only how we should interpret the artefactswhich have been washed up from the shifting waves of antiquity,but also who is best qualified to do the interpreting. Although thismaterial evidence – sculpture, mosaics, wall paintings, buildings,etc. – generally has the advantage of at least staying still for us,it too, she argued – like the languages and peoples of Stewart’spresentation – is extremely difficult to pin down for analysis.While Jensen advised us to be as suspicious of these artefacts as

we are of texts, and for much the same reasons, she first of allencouraged us to be suspicious of ourselves, and of our aims andpreoccupations as textual scholars. Obviously, we do not do thematerial evidence justice if we exploit it simply to confirm theinsights we have reached through textual study; indeed, moreoften than not, it actually contradicts them, and only occasion-ally does it complement them. Indeed, she urged that it wouldbe a mistake to expect complementarity, for our text-based con-cerns are not necessarily, or usually, the ones which will allowthe material evidence to be appreciated for what it frequentlyis: the product of popular piety, the oral traditions and beliefsof marginal groups, or a commission driven ‘as much by socialstatus as by piety’.

It was telling, therefore, that for his presentation on Patris-tics and Archaeology, 3 focusing on holy sites in Jerusalem, Yo-ram Tsafrir turned not to apologetic, exegetical, theological, orhomiletic works, but to a genre expressive of popular piety as

3 Yoram Tsafrir, ‘ Aelia Capitolina and the Holy City: The Roles of PatristicLiterature and Archaeological Research in the Study of Late Antique Jerusalem’.


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well as social status: the itinerary of a pilgrim, in this instancethe miraculous pilgrimage of Peter the Iberian. His vita illus-trates what Columba Stewart observed about the cultural fluidity

of the period: its subject is a Georgian prince who was educatedas a hostage of the court of Constantinople and then embraceda monastic life in Palestine; its author is still plausibly John Ru-fus, born in the Roman province of Arabia, educated in Beirut,priest in Antioch, and companion of Peter in his monastic per-egrinations in Palestine; the work itself was written in Greek butis now preserved in Syriac. How can we – or a text – possibly do justice to such cultural layering? Between the account of Peter’s

night-time journey and the results of archaeological investiga-tions there is a complementarity of a sort. With the help of ar-chaeological reports, maps, and reconstructions one can piecetogether the route that Peter took and imagine in three dimen-sions the churches where he prayed. This complementarity is,however, partial and impermanent. As Tsafrir noted throughouthis lecture, there is much we do not know because there are noremains or the remains are inaccessible, and the interpretation

of the remains we have may be more or less debatable. Still,archaeologists can call attention to silences and omissions bornof the interests and perspectives of writers. In the Jerusalem of theLife of Peter the Iberian the ruined Temple Mount, the largest holyplace in the city, does not exist. For a sense of its meaning for Jews in Late Antiquity Tsafrir turned, poignantly and disconcert-ingly, to a biblical commentary by Jerome.

Christoph Markschies’ paper stood back firmly from the roll-ing waves of either textual or material evidence to consider themore fundamental relation between Patristics and Theology.Again, we were unsettled from any comfortable assumptions thatmight remain by a picture of the shifting currents of mutual suspi-cion which have characterised the changing fortunes of Patristics.Beginning with a portrait of theologica patristica harmoniously wed-ded to theology in the context of confessional debates throughto the eighteenth century, Markschies described how Patristicssubsequently became separated from Theology as a result of the

more secularised context of nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryacademic study, which took place in public institutions, moti-vated by the search for a seemingly more objective, so-called


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‘scientific’ (non-confessional and non-dogmatic) scholarship.As a counterweight to this movement, Markschies consideredthose scholars and scholarly trends which have attempted to rec-

oncile the two parties on the grounds that each, in fact, needsthe other: Gadamer; De Lubac, Danielou and Nouvelle Theologie ;Anglican, Roman Catholic and Orthodox ressourcement . Even inProtestantism, where the separation between Theology and Pa-tristics seems to continue unabated, Markschies was able to citeProfessor Ritter’s arguments for the significance of early Chris-tian traditions, both for ecumenical dialogue and for what hetermed ‘cultural confidence’ or ‘cultural self-reassurance’, on the

basis that we cannot hope to understand ourselves or others un-less we understand the past and recognise it as our own.While scholars who associate with a Christian tradition as

theologians or historians have thus negotiated various raisonsd’être for their study of early Christian writings, the same textshave engaged the critical imaginations of scholars who do notso identify. In his paper Mark Vessey took us back to a momentbefore the founding of the Association Internationale d’Études

Patristiques that would, in hindsight, anticipate streams of schol-arship that now flow widely over the terrain of early Christianwriting. In a lecture given at the Third International Confer-ence on Patristic Studies in Oxford in 1959, André Mandouzeslipped the moorings of prior approaches to the history of earlyChristian literature to embark on the exploration of the literary‘effects’ of early Christian texts – notably, for Mandouze, Au-gustine’s Confessions. These effects cannot be contained withina single academic discipline; there is always ‘something else’.At the next Oxford patristic conference in 1963 Peter Brownpresented a paper on Augustine’s attitude to coercion in whichBrown read Augustine’s writings against the Donatists preciselyin order to bring out ‘something else’: a sense of what shapedAugustine’s attitude and motivated his actions. Since then wehave seen an ever-increasing flow of studies of the discursive ef-fects of early Christian texts. These studies were – and are – insearch of ‘something else’, most often, an understanding of how

texts expressed attitudes toward the body, women, Jews, hereticsand ‘pagans’, and in so doing constructed the identity of ‘self’ inrelation to ‘others’.


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This brings us, finally, to the paper of Aryeh Kofsky on study-ing Patristics as an ‘outsider’. 4 His observations arose from hisexperience as a Jewish patristic scholar. Despite wide learning in

Christian tradition and close association with Christians of vari-ous denominations, certain Christian sensibilities would eludehim. At the same time, he found Jewish patristic scholars to bealert to aspects of the theological and political culture of earlyChristians that have eluded Christian scholars or been of no in-terest to them. Thus Jewish patristic scholars have noted com-monalities between Ephrem of Syria’s biblical interpretation andrabbinic approaches to scripture. They have examined the chris-

tologies of Aphraat and Theodore of Mopsuestia in relation notto emerging Christian orthodoxy but to a local Christian-Jew-ish matrix, arriving at a different rationale for their views. Theyhave exposed the dynamics of Christian appropriation of Jewishtradition, knowledge, and space, which constructed Jews as the‘other’ to be displaced by Christians. The ‘hybridity’ – Kofsky’sphrase – that motivates such observations and investigations can,of course, take many forms. Indeed, one can discern hybridities

of various types – some acknowledged, others not – in schol-ars who read early Christian texts in search of ‘something else’,to return to Vessey’s theme. Therein lies the as-yet unexploredrichness of the textual, material, cultural, and political field of an-cient Christianity.

Indeed, as Averil Cameron argued in her public lecture atthe conference, we are only beginning to appreciate the field’srelevance for the study of early Islam, an area of explorationthat requires its own hybribities. Cameron’s wide-ranging es-say surveys recent scholarship that, in different ways, approachesthe origins of Islam from the perspective of late antique studies.She points out that some of the relationships or influences pro-posed by scholars do not correspond to what we know fromother sources (textual, epigraphical, archaeological) about Jew-ish and Christian groups in late antiquity, and suggests a num-ber of areas where expertise in the debates and currents of late

4 Aryeh Kofsky, ‘Studying Patristics as an Outsider: Does It Make a Dif-ference?’.


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antique Christianity could contribute to a richer understandingof the context of early Islam.

Perhaps to an extent that we did not anticipate, all the the-

matic papers were studies in complexity. But these complicationswere ultimately revealed, like the diversity and otherness evokedby the regional presentations, to be a strength: Patristics – or thefield by any of its other names – is not fixed and sorted, but alive,changing, and adapting to the twenty-first century and its par-ticular contexts and cultures.

A final word, of thanks. We are deeply appreciative of thewillingness of the Center for the Study of Christianity in the He-

brew University of Jerusalem to support and host the conference,and we owe a great deal to Professor Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony,Director of the Center, and her very able assistant, Daniel Salem,for seeing to the details of its organization. The publishing houseBrepols, which has had a long association with the Associationas the printer of its Bulletin d’information et de liaison and Annuaire ,very kindly agreed to publish the proceedings, and welcomedthe editors at the offices of Corpus Christianorum in Turnhout for

several weeks of editorial work in February 2014. Dr. Paolo Sar-tori, the editor responsible for the volume at Brepols, has beena joy to work with.


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SUSAN ASHBROOK HARVEYBrown University

PATRISTIC WORLDS

The conference celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Asso-ciation Internationale d’Études Patristiques / the InternationalAssociation of Patristic Studies brought together colleaguesfrom six continents. 1 The rich program demonstrated at everyturn the diversity, vitality, and originality that characterize thestudy of patristics today as a global enterprise. If there was evera homogeneous ‘world’ of patristic study, that world is now, inthe twenty-first century, wholly diversified and complexified.

Similarly, if there was ever a notion of an ancient ‘patristic world’(in the singular), twenty-first century patristic scholarship takes asits hallmark to approach antiquity as a multiplicity of worlds, anentire prism split open.

My task is to offer a window into ancient Christianity thatI hope honours and marks important changes in patristic scholar-ship over recent decades, changes now fundamental as we moveforward in a new century. Taking a cue from the fifth century

Greek historian Sozomen, I will first locate ancient Christian-ity as a religion amidst the religious pluralism that was its givensocial and political context. This pluralism was a highly fraughtmatter. Religious competition and religious confusion framedancient Christian practice in tense, agonistic terms, constantly

1 I am grateful to the AIEP/IAPS planning committee for the opportunityto participate in this conference; and especially to Carol Harrison, Theodorede Bruyn, and Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony for their extraordinary generosity

and hospitality. My discussion here has benefitted greatly from conversationswith conference participants. I have addressed some of the issues and themeshere raised, for different purposes, also in the essay ‘Sensing More in AncientReligion’, Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift , 89 (2013), p. 97-106.


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evident in the public, civic spaces so important for ancient reli-gious expression. Then, taking the example of sacred song fromSyriac tradition, I will ask what kinds of voices we might hear

when we take diversity and pluralism seriously. In this instance,those voices will be Syriac, female, and lay, all bespeaking loca-tions sorely understudied by patristic scholars until recent years. 2

In both scenarios, I raise the issue of religion encounteredand expressed within a sensing body. Just as patristic scholarshave come to contextualize Christianity politically and sociallyin a religiously diverse ancient world, so, too, must we contex-tualize theology and doctrine – pillars of patristic study – withinthe embodied religious lives of ancient believers.

For this paper, I confine myself to Christianity after thelegalization under Constantine, between the fourth and sixthcenturies: Christianity in Late Antiquity. I hope by this briefexploration – representative only of my own ‘particular, evenidiosyncratic’ interests, as Dennis Trout admonished during thesame AIEP/IAPS conference – to suggest avenues that open andrefract the multiple ‘worlds’ that patristic scholars navigate, bothin our ancient sources and now, in our contemporary settings.

1. Religion in a Sensing Body

Sozomen’s Ecclesiastical History provides a gripping narrativeof the tumultuous religious changes that filled the fourth andfifth century Roman Empire. Among his chapters is an accountof the annual festival held at the Oak of Mamre, in Palestine. 3 This festival commemorated the events recounted in Genesis 18,

of the patriarch Abraham’s surprising visit from three unnamedheavenly messengers. In the biblical story, the visitors werenot identified. But they did foretell the miraculous birth thatwould follow in the next year, of a son for the barren marriageof the elderly Abraham and Sarah. To these visitors, Abraham

2 I make no effort to chronicle the huge body of scholarship that documentsthese changes. The present volume provides ample testimony of the shifts in

scholarly concerns, methodologies, and interests, and the papers are themselvesprime examples of the results.

3 Soz., h.e., 2.4. Bidez, (SC , 306), p. 245-249; Hartranft NPNF2 II,p. 261.


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and Sarah had offered abundant hospitality, in a scene familiarto late antique Christians from its (perhaps frequent?) depictionin church decoration. 4

Writing about a century after the events described, Sozomenclaimed the festival had been hugely popular among a diversityof religious groups. Jews, Christians, and pagans all came to jointhe celebration; for, Sozomen explained, all understood the storyfrom within their own religious traditions. Jews claimed theirdescent from Abraham; Christians understood the visitors to havebeen Christ accompanied by two angels; and pagans saw theevent as an instance of divine visitation such as their own sacredstories often recounted. The occasion, accordingly, belongedto all; and so, too, the festival. Thus, Sozomen explained,

This [brilliant] [lampran] feast is diligently frequented by all[peoples] [ pasi ][...] This place was moreover honoured fit-tingly [ prosphoros] with religious exercises. Here some prayedto the God of all; some called upon the angels, poured outwine, burnt incense, or offered an ox, or he-goat, a sheep,or a cock. 5

Sozomen’s account continued with a description of the variouspieties performed during the festival’s duration. Without nec-essarily identifying which practice belonged to which religion,he mentioned an array of ritual actions, undertaken througha diversity of media. Pilgrimage, prayer, supplication, libations,incense, and animal sacrifice were all prominent. Sozomen men-tions further that faithful visitors dedicated votive offerings, care-fully crafted and saved over the previous year, on behalf of theirfamilies. Women adorned themselves with special attire. There

were public processions, undertaken with decorum. Attendees

4 For example, the image is extant among the mosaics in Santa MariaMaggiore (5th cent.) in Rome, and San Vitale (6th cent.) in Ravenna. Euse-bius describes its depiction in an image at Mamre itself that has not survived;Eus., d.e. 5.9. See the discussion by R. Jensen, ‘Early Christian Images and Exe-gesis’, in Picturing the Bible: the Earliest Christian Art – ed. J. Spier, New Haven,London, 2007, p. 64-85. On rabbinic and patristic exegesis for Genesis 18,see E. Grypeou, H. Spurling, ‘Abraham’s Angels: Jewish and Christian Exegesis

of Genesis 18-19’, in The Exegetical Encounter between Jews and Christians inLate Antiquity – ed. E. Grypeou, H. Spurling ( Jewish and Christian PerspectivesSeries, 18), Leiden, 2009, p. 181-203.

5 Soz., h.e., 2.4 – trans. Hartranft NPNF2 II, p. 261(adapted).


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slept in tents which, although public and of mixed populations,were nonetheless orderly. Next to the Oak stood Abraham’sfamed well. There, Sozomen reported, pagans lit burning lamps,

and poured offerings into the well: wine, cakes, coins, myrrh,and incense, to such an extent that the water was undrinkableduring the festival’s duration. The events were well and gener -ously attended.

However, Sozomen reports, one year Constantine’s mother-in-law Eutropia attended. Apparently scandalized, she apprisedthe emperor of the situation. Constantine at once rebuked thebishops of Palestine for their negligence in allowing ‘impurelibations and sacrifices’ to defile the holy site. He further issueda letter with instructions to dismantle and destroy the existingaltar and religious images. In their place, the emperor orderedthe construction of a church, henceforth to be the only locationof religious activity at Mamre – now to be known exclusively asa Christian holy place. 6

Sozomen’s account of the festival at the Oak of Mamre allowsus to posit a definition of religion in antiquity. Here we seereligion as a relational system, serving to interlace human and

divine orders, in terms that also account for human social orders:families, communities, ethnicities; gender, class, office; the livingand the dead. Further, this was a relational system constitutedthrough ritual practices such as those enumerated above. Rit-ual behaviors of these sorts further constructed and contributedto traditions of sacred stories, sacred places and spaces, and sacredtime, categories delineating the human-divine relation on whichreligions were premised. Sozomen identified the people attend-

ing the festival at Mamre as Jews, Christians, or pagans (whomhe called Hellenes). Yet he also presented these multiple identi-ties as sharing the basic presuppositions and orientations of ‘reli-gion’ as here defined: a relational system, conjoining divine and

6 Soz, h.e., 2.4. Eusebius of Caesarea also recorded the letter in his Lifeof Constantine – ed. Av. Cameron, S. G. Hall, p. 141-143. For important analy-sis of the cultic activity at Mamre in late antiquity, see A. Kofsky, ‘Mamre:

A Case of a Regional Cult?’ in Sharing the Sacred: Religious Contacts and Conflictsin the Holy Land – ed. A. Kofsky, G. G. Stroumsa, Jerusalem, 1998, p. 19-30; andN. Belayche, Iudaea-Palaestina: the pagan cults in Roman Palestine (second to fourthcenturies), Tübingen, 2001, p. 96-104.


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human orders, comprised of familiar ritual practices and specialtraditions for time and space. 7

Religion as Sozomen presents it was furthermore an embod-

ied matter. Its practices were physically performed and enacted,embodied by habit and habitually perceptible. Ritual instrumentsand objects were crafted, handled, offered, displayed; processionswere joined or witnessed. Incense and sacrifice scented the air;special foods were eaten, special clothing worn. Religious prac-tices were conducted with the body; they were encounteredand experienced through the senses. Furthermore, their sensoryaspects were also expressive, and even revelatory, for participantsand observers alike. 8

Even from Sozomen’s somewhat reserved account, we cangrasp a basic cultural system of virtues and vices with respectto ancient religious practices. These virtues and vices are appar-ent to the modern reader – as they were to the ancient partici-pant or observer – through the sensory qualities Sozomen choseto highlight. His descriptions underscored traits of light, bril-liance, and radiance; ordered decorum, lively variety, and gen-erosity. At the same time, although he stressed that the pieties

displayed at Mamre were ‘fitting’ ( prosphoros), other traits clearlyearned his disapproval: excess, impropriety, impurity (here denot-ing disorder), and irreverence. Attention to the sensory qualitiesof religious practice was apparently important for right or properreligious activity. But it was also, in literary terms, an effectiverhetorical strategy allowing an author like Sozomen to differen-tiate true from false religions. This was particularly important incontexts where one might not immediately grasp where the dif-

ferences lay, because the practices could appear to be the same.Neither the given fact of religious pluralism, nor the fre-quency of shared practices, should mislead the modern readeron the matter of religious tolerance in the ancient world. Evenin a multi-religious event such as the festival at Mamre priorto Constantine’s intervention, the context was not one of con-

7 On the shared sensibilities of religions in the Roman Empire, see espe-

cially J. Rives, Religion in the Roman Empire , Malden, 2007, p. 13-53.8 S. A. Harvey, ‘The Senses in Religion: Piety, Critique, Competition’, in

A Cultural History of the Senses – ed. C. Classen, vol. I: Antiquity – ed. J. P. Toner,London, 2014, p. 91-113.


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vivial, shared celebration. Rather, as the imperious (and impe-rial!) conclusion to Sozomen’s account made clear, the moodwas tense, agonistic, and competitive. Indeed, Late Antiquity

was characterized by a pervasive, often belligerent culture of reli-gious critique and competition. 9 Religious communities werecontinually assessing and re-assessing their own practices, evenas they expressed frequent disdain for those of other traditions. 10 They were concerned as much with their own effectiveness,appropriateness, and ‘success’, as with their differentiation fromthose whose religion they did not accept. Critique was the tool,competition the tone for such differentiation; religious polem-ics were the prevailing mode of expression. In all of this, thesenses played an important rhetorical role, just as they carriedcrucial significance as intrinsically functional elements of ritualpractices. 11 Sozomen’s account of the events at Mamre was asmuch about the dangers of religious confusion within a contextof competition – the inability to distinguish true religion fromfalse religion – as it was about the triumph of Christianity, in hisview the ‘right’ religion. In fact, such confusion and competitionwere something of a theme throughout his Ecclesiastical History. 12

This passage from Sozomen, well-known to patristic schol-ars, raises themes for the study of ancient Christianity that havegained increasing purchase in recent decades: religion as a shared yet contested aspect of late antique society; religious pluralism asan agonistic and polemical context for Christian piety; and thesensing body as intrinsically functional for religious practice aswell as religious understanding. These themes provide the framein which to set the matter of patristic voices.

2. Religious Voices, Public Spaces

Sozomen’s account of competing celebrations at Mamre raisesfurther questions. Amidst the diversity of practices, whose voice

9 E.g., H. A. Drake, ‘Intolerance, Religious Violence, and Political Legitimacyin Late Antiquity’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 79 (2011), p. 193-235.

10 A point well made by D. Ullucci, The Christian Rejection of Animal

Sacrifice , New York, 2012, passim.11 Harvey, ‘Senses in Religion’.12 E.g., Soz., h.e. 5.17 (confusion regarding incense practices); 8.8 (com-

peting Arian and Nicene choirs in Constantinople).


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was heard, by whom, and with what import? For these questionsI turn to voices from the margins, geographically and perhapsalso socially: those in Syriac, of women’s choirs leading the laity

in song.During the fourth century, Syriac hymnography underwentimportant changes in form, content, and performance over itsearlier renditions. 13 The changes are markedly evident in thework of the greatest of all Syriac liturgical poets, Ephrem theSyrian (d. 373). 14 In form, Ephrem developed the madrāshê :hymns devoted to doctrinal instruction, utilising different metri-cal patterns, arranged in stanzas, punctuated by short refrains. 15 In content, Ephrem gave notable attention to the Bible ina decidedly canonical form: Old and New Testaments, exploredand woven together through rich tapestries of typology. As forperformance: Ephrem’s hymns were apparently sung at eveningvigil services, performed in civic churches (as opposed to monas-tic ones) with women’s choirs and lay participation. 16 In someof his hymns, Ephrem referred to the women’s choirs and

13

On the development of Syriac hymnography, seeF. Cassingena-Trévedy,‘L’hymnographie syriaque’, in Les liturgies syriaques – ed. F. Cassingena-Trévedy,I. Jurasz (Études syriaques, 3) Paris, 2006, p. 183-219.

14 See especially S. P. Brock, The Luminous Eye: the Spiritual World Visionof St. Ephrem the Syrian, Kalamazoo, 1992; S. H. Griffith, ‘Faith Adoring theMystery’: Reading the Bible with St. Ephraem the Syrian, Milwaukee, 1997.

15 On the madrāshê specifically, see S. P. Brock, ‘Poetry and Hymnography (3):Syriac’, in the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies – ed. S. A. Harvey,D. G. Hunter, Oxford, 2010, p. 657-671; Griffith, ‘Faith Adoring the Mystery’,p. 10-11; M. Lattke, ‘Sind Ephraems Madrāšē Hymnen?’, Oriens Christianus,73 (1989), p. 38-43.

16 A. Palmer, ‘ “A Lyre without a Voice”: the Poetics and Politics ofEphrem the Syrian’, ARAM , 5 (1993), p. 371-399; Id., ‘A Single Human BeingDivided in Himself: Ephraim the Syrian, the Man in the Middle’, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies, 1.2 (1998 [2010]), p. 119-163, in partic. p. 128-133;S. A. Harvey, ‘Performance as Exegesis: Women’s Liturgical Choirs in SyriacTradition’, in Inquiries into Eastern Christian Worship: Acts of the Second Interna-tional Congress of the Society of Oriental Liturgy – ed. B. J. Groen, S. Alexopoulos,S. Hawkes-Teeples (Eastern Christian Studies, 12), Leuven, 2012, p. 47-64.For the development of the Syriac liturgy and the daily offices in the con-text of eastern Christianity see, e.g., J. Mateos, Lelya-Sapra: Essai d’interpretationdes matines chaldeennes (OCA, 156), Roma, 1959; Id., La célébration de la parole

dans la liturgie Byzantine (OCA, 191), Roma, 1971; P. Bradshaw, Daily Prayerin the Early Church, Oxford, 1982, p. 72-110; R. Taft, The Liturgy of the Hoursin East and West: the Origins of the Divine Office and its Meaning for Today , Col-legeville, 1986, esp. p. 225-248.


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also to the congregation’s singing. This was an era of expand-ing liturgical splendor for Christians in general. The new pat-tern of hymns with stanzas and refrains, appearing also in Greek

and Latin around this same time, allowed for the continuationof congregational singing – a basic feature in early Christian wor-ship – with the emerging use of trained choirs and chanters. 17

According to sixth century Syriac sources, Ephrem in factestablished the long-lasting practice of Syriac women’s choirs,though he himself made no such claim. 18 But by the fifth cen-tury, women’s choirs were mandated by canonical regulation forSyriac civic churches within the Roman Empire and also in thePersian Empire. 19 An important component of ancient Syriacliturgical practice, these choirs remain a living tradition to thisday in the Middle East as well as in diaspora Syriac communitiesin Europe, North America, Scandinavia, and elsewhere. 20

Late antique Christian sources in Greek or Latin occasionallyrefer to choirs of nuns participating in special liturgies: for exam-ple, at the Easter liturgy in Jerusalem, or for important funer-als or civic occasions. 21 Yet in Syriac tradition alone, it would

17 Above all, see now C. Page, The Christian West and its Singers: the FirstThousand Years, New Haven, 2010, p. 29-88.

18 See the anonymous Syriac vita, chapter 31-32; and Jac. Sar., ‘Homilyon Ephrem’, where this is a major theme throughout.

19 Harvey, ‘Performance as Exegesis’. For example, ‘Rules of Rabbula’,rules 20, 27; ‘Maruta Canons’, canons 26, 41.

20 See now S. Bakker Kellog, ‘Fragments of a Liturgical World: SyriacOrthodox Christianity and the Dutch Multiculturalism Debates’, unpublisheddoctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2013.

21 See the texts conveniently collected in J. McKinnon, Music in EarlyChristian Literature , Cambridge, 1987, e.g. at p. 73-74 (#152, Gr. Nyss. fromthe Life of Macrina, on the singing at her funeral); p. 104-105 (#225, Eus., h.e.,3.19.1-4 on a convent choir in Antioch); p. 112-113 (#242-243, Egeria onthe Jerusalem choirs). The scholarly convention that women were forbiddenfrom singing in church in Late Antiquity is based on a highly influential articleby J. Quasten, ‘The Liturgical Singing of Women in Christian Antiquity’,Catholic Historical Review , 27 (1941), p. 149-165; also in Id., Music and Worshipin Pagan and Christian Antiquity – tr. B. Ramsey, Washington, D.C., 1983,p. 75-86. Although Quasten himself cited a number of texts referring to women’sliturgical singing, including the Syriac evidence, he insisted that women’s

singing was eliminated from Christian liturgical practice during the patristic era.Unfortunately, recent scholarship continues to cite his conclusions: R. MacMul-len, The Second Century: Popular Christianity A.D. 200-400 , Atlanta, 2009, p. 15;Page, The Christian West and its Singers, p. 5.


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seem, did women’s choirs have a place in the ordinary, and daily,worship of the civic community, whether village or city. Theirprominence in the public context of liturgical piety appears

to have been unusual, perhaps even problematic, in the broaderlate antique culture. 22

All three of the above noted elements – form, content, andperformance – contribute to how we might understand thesound of Ephrem’s hymns, for which we have no surviving evi-dence of the music itself. According to the anonymous sixthcentury Life of Ephrem the Syrian, Ephrem began to composemadrāshê as a strategy against heresy. 23 Recognising the dangersand prevalence of ‘foul’ doctrines, Ephrem was alarmed that her-etics dispersed their teachings in hymns of ‘alluring and ungodlysounds’, captivating ‘the simple folk of the cit[ies]’ with ‘attrac-tive melodies’ mixed with ‘godlessness’. 24 Ephrem’s responsewas to fight song with song. He ‘took arrangements of melo-dies and songs and mixed [true doctrine] [lit: ‘fear of God’] inthem, and offered to hearers an antidote at once agreeable andwholesome’. 25 Just as importantly, he ‘prepared troops for bat-tle against those heresies’. Calling upon the consecrated virgins

called Daughters of the Covenant, he established them as choirsto sing his compositions. 26

Here, in the anonymous Life , and also in an important homilyon Ephrem by the great Syriac poet and homilist Jacob of Sarug(d. 521), the women of these choirs were referred to as ‘teachers’(in the feminine form), malphānyāthâ, a weighty term in Syriac,connoting learning, authority, and wisdom. 27 They were des-

22 A point emphasised by K. McVey, ‘Ephrem the Kitharode and Proponentof Women: Jacob of Serug’s Portrait of a Fourth-Century Churchman forthe Sixth-Century Viewer and its significance for the twenty-first centuryecumenist’, in Orthodox and Wesleyan Ecclesiology – ed. S. T. Kimbrough,Crestwood, NY, 2007, p. 229-253.

23 Syriac vita, chapter 31.24 Syriac vita, chapter 31; Amar, (CSCO , 630 / Scr. Syr. 243), p. 76.25 Syriac vita, chapter 31; Amar, (CSCO , 630 / Scr Syr. 243), p. 78.26 Syriac vita, chapter 31; Amar, (CSCO , 630 / Scr Syr. 243), p. 77-78. On

the Daughters of the Covenant, see S. A. Harvey, ‘Revisiting the Daughters

of the Covenant: Women’s Choirs and Sacred Song in Ancient Syriac Christi-anity’, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies, 8.2 (2005 [2009]), p. 125-149.

27 Syriac vita, chapter 31; Amar, (CSCO , 629/ Scr Syr. 242), p. 71; Jac. Sar., ‘Homily on Ephrem’, vv. 41-42, Amar, p. 35.


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ignated as such, because their singing taught the true doctrinesof the church through what became something of an officialministry of music. 28 They were also described in martial imagery

that blends a strong military chord into the otherwise harmoni-ous depiction of Ephrem leading the choirs in song. We willreturn to the matter of performance in due course. But first, wemust consider the content of Ephrem’s chosen weaponry.

Ephrem’s hymns are drenched with a sumptuous biblicalknowledge, displayed with dazzling poetic artistry. 29 Old and NewTestament adorn his verses, sometimes with dizzying virtuosity. 30 In part, such attention to biblical content bespoke a major agendaof the fourth century: the need for biblical education, as convertsstreamed into Christian churches in unprecedented numbers whileChristianity rose in political and cultural ascendency.

Yet for Ephrem, the biblical focus was not triumphal. It wasclearly, and pragmatically, polemical. Out at the eastern edges of theEmpire, in the cities of Nisibis and Edessa where Ephrem livedand wrote, Nicene Christians were hardly in the majority. Otherreligions, and other Christianities, touted other bibles with othercanons. Much of Ephrem’s emphasis on canon lay here, in his

polemical insistence on right canon, and on ownership of Old aswell as New Testament. He was explicit about this in the Hymnson Virginity, where he sang of the three harps of God – the Oldand New Testaments, and nature itself – in opposition to Jews andMarcionites. 31 Hence he summoned the church to song:

Blessed are you, O Church, whose congregationsings with three glorious harps. Your finger plucks the harp of Moses

and [the harp] of our Savior and [the harp] of nature. 32

28 I have emphasised the teaching aspect of the Syriac women’s choirs inS. A. Harvey, ‘Singing Women’s Stories in Syriac Tradition’, InternationaleKirchliche Zeitschrift , 100.3 (2010), p. 171-189.

29 Brock, Luminous Eye ; Griffith, ‘Faith Adoring the Mystery’; Palmer,‘ “Lyre without a Voice” ’.

30 Ephrem’s Bible differed in certain respects from what would become‘standard’ canon. He utilised the Diatessaron, for example, on which he wrote an

excellent commentary; and did not know the book of Revelation. S. P. Brock,The Bible in the Syrian Tradition, Piscataway, NJ, 20062, p. 17-19, 31-37.31 Ephr., Hymns on Virginity (hereafter H Virg ), Hymns 28-30.32 Ephr., H Virg 27.4; McVey, p. 383.


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One hears Ephrem’s insistence on the canon once again as com-bative in his Hymns on Nativity. 33 For example, in Nativity 1,Ephrem presented a magisterial panorama of biblical history as

he extolled what came to fulfillment in the birth of Christ. 34

The verses sing through lists of Old Testament prophets, tap-estries of the messianic lineage, recountings of the sacred gen-erations from Cain and Abel through to Moses and Aaron andthe biblical kings. Did Ephrem think his congregations wouldrecognize all of these names and allusions, with their specificstories in mind? Surely not. But as his verses wend their course,punctuated repeatedly by the congregation’s refrain, ‘Glory to You, Son of our Creator!’, 35 the sung dialogue drives home theclaim that the stories, generations, prophecies, triumphs, andsufferings of the Hebrew Bible can only – as Ephrem presentsthem – be rightly grasped and rightly understood in and throughthe birth of Christ, the Messiah. Moreover, the Messiah can onlybe rightfully understood in and through these inherited bibli-cal histories. Throughout this entire cycle of hymns, then, onehears battle with Jews, Marcionites, and others for the ownershipof scripture. 36

At the same time that he battled for and with a particularcanon, Ephrem utilised biblical instruction to present moralexemplars: figures to be revered, meditated on, and emulated byfaithful Christians. Hence he depicted biblical men and women ascharacters of virtue with short, vivid images to hold in the mind,incised in memory by the metrical patterns of song. His pres-entation of biblical women is especially striking, for in theseinstances his verses allude to the singing of the Syriac women’s

choirs. They invoke the women’s singing as public in impact andcivic in implication.

33 Ephr., Hymns on Nativity (hereafter H Nat ).34 Ephr., H Nat 1; McVey, p. 63-74.35 Ephr., H Nat 1, refr.; McVey, p. 64.36 See especially C. Shepardson, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy:

Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria (Patristic Monograph Series, 20), Wash-

ington, D.C., 2008; S. H. Griffith, ‘Setting Right the Church of Syria:Saint Ephrem’s Hymns Against Heresies’, in The Limits of Ancient Christianity:Essays on Late Antique Thought and Culture in Honour of Robert A. Markus –ed. W. E. Klingshirn, M. Vessey, Ann Arbor, 1999, p. 97-114.


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In the Hymns on Nativity, for example, Ephrem sang ofdoubts engendered by the Virgin Mary’s pregnancy. He com-pares the calumny she suffered among the Hebrew women

to the slandering in his own time of Christian virgins, and appar-ently of the virgin choirs, by others in the city. 37 Ephrem singsof consecrated virginity as the choice to undertake marriageto Christ rather than to a mortal spouse. 38 Rather than a renun-ciation of sexuality, virginity was thereby an embrace of sexu-ality’s purpose, dedicated to a different goal than that of socialneed. In these verses, we hear how abrasive the Christian valu-ing of lifelong celibacy appeared to a late antique society not yet convinced of its worth; monasticism had not yet gained itsrespected place. 39

Ephrem confronts the slandering of virgins as a maliciousresponse to virtuous female devotion, a devotion which, in hisNativity hymns, might require women to make sexual choicesof shocking public ramifications. Rather than playing down theelement of public scandal, Ephrem highlights this as a virtue.He emphasizes it dramatically, calling on Christian women – and, by implication, his choirs – to take their public stance

of faith with boldness and holy impudence. He holds up theexample of the scandalous foremothers of the messianic lineage:Tamar the daughter-in-law of Judah who ‘stole’ pregnancy inher widowhood; Rahab the prostitute who discerned salvationin Joshua and his troops; Ruth the gleaner who brazenly climbedinto Boaz’s bed. 40 Each of these, Ephrem sings, pursued theirLord and his purpose with single-hearted devotion, fearing nei-ther scandal nor shame in their love for God. ‘Because of You,

37 On the slandering of virgins: e.g., Ephr., H Nat 9, 12, 15.38 E.g., Ephr., H Nat 8.21; 12 ( passim); 17.5-8, 11; H Virg 1-3 ( passim);

15.4,6; 25.10,16,17.39 A point well made by P. Brown, ‘The Notion of Virginity in the Early

Church’, in Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century – ed. B. McGinn, J. Meyendorff, J. Leclerq, New York, 1985, p. 427-443. For the emergenceof Syriac ascetic and monastic traditions, see S. H. Griffith, ‘Asceticism inthe Church of Syria: the Hermeneutics of Early Syrian Monasticism’, in Asceti-cism – ed. V. Wimbush, R. Valantasis, New York, 1995, p. 220-245.

40 E.g., Ephr., H Nat 1. 12 (Tamar), 13 (Ruth), 33 (Rahab); H Nat 9. 7(Tamar, Ruth, Rahab), 8-11 (Tamar), 12-16 (Ruth). See S. A. Harvey, ‘Impu-dent Women: Mt 1: 1-16 in Syriac Tradition’, Parole de l’Orient , 35 ( Actes duX e Symposium Syriacum) (2010), p. 65-76.


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[O Christ]’, he sings repeatedly in Nativity 9, women commit-ted shocking scandals; 41 ‘By You [O Christ] honourable womenmade themselves contemptible’. 42 Yet this is exemplary:

Ruth lay down with a man on the threshing floor for Your sake. Her love was boldfor Your sake. She teaches boldnessto all penitents. Her ears held in contemptall [other] voices for the sake of Your voice. 43

Again, in Nativity 15, the Virgin Mary herself glories in the slan-der she endures, knowing her justification is sure:

Behold, I am slandered and oppressed,but I rejoice. [...]For if Tamar was acquitted by Judah, how much more will I be acquitted by You! 44

In Ephrem’s hymns, real and imagined women’s voices con-verged amidst the congregation whose response here was therefrain, ‘Glory be to You, my Lord, and through You to the

Father, on the day of Your nativity!’. 45 Voice nested withinvoice. The Virgin Mary was slandered in the biblical story; vir-gins (the choir) were slandered in the civic order; the Nicenecongregation was slandered amongst competing congregationsand religions. In Ephrem’s verses, the (women’s) choir led thechurch to sing out boldly, in confidence of the truth they pro-claimed. Their boldness of voice had been earned by the Vir-gin Mary’s own boldness, which had undone the shame women

inherited from Eve:Let chaste women praise that pure Mary.Since in their mother Eve their disgrace was great,behold in Mary their sister their triumph was magnified. 46

41 Ephr., H Nat 9. 7, 10, 11; McVey, p. 126.42 Ephr., H Nat 9. 13; McVey, p. 127.43

Ephr., H Nat 9. 14; McVey, p. 127.44 Ephr., H Nat 15. 7-8; McVey, p. 146-147.45 Ephr., H Nat 15, refr.; McVey, p. 146.46 Ephr., H Nat 22.N23; McVey, p. 183.


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The biblical model justified and also enhanced the work of thewomen’s choirs, as their voices taught a witness proclaimed notonly by the words they sang, but further by the sound of their

singing: the sound of maligned but faithful virgins.The model of biblical women in bold and scandalous declara-tion of faith was furthered in Ephrem’s presentation of New Tes-tament women in his Hymns on Virginity. Here again, he portrayedtheir models in terms that appear unconventional whether for thebiblical accounts or for Ephrem’s own social order. In Virginity 26, for example, Ephrem celebrates an entire cascade of womenwhom Jesus encountered in his ministry: Martha and Mary thesisters of Lazarus; the Sinful Woman who anointed Christ’s feetwith oil and kisses; the Woman who called a blessing from thecrowd; the Hemorrhaging Woman; the Widow with two mites;the Canaanite Woman; the Widow of Nain; Jairus’s Daugh-ter; the mother of James and John; and Pilate’s Wife. 47 Each hepraises in turn, in verses punctuated by the refrain, ‘To You bepraises from all!’. 48 His praises are vivid, even startling:

Blessed are you, Martha, who without fear served the One [Christ] feared by all.

[...]Blessed are you, Martha, to whom love gaveThe confidence that opened your mouth.By the fruit Eve’s mouth was closedwhile she was hidden among the trees.Blessed is your mouth that sounded forth with love. 49

In the biblical account in Luke 10, 38-42, Martha complainedto Jesus, who rebuked her in return. Yet Ephrem delights in

Martha’s bold speech, and more, in this hymn. To the Womanwho called to Jesus from the crowd, and whom Jesus rebuked inLuke 11, 27, Ephrem sings, ‘Blessed are you, woman, whose voicebecame / a trumpet’. To the Canaanite Woman whom Jesus atfirst dismissed in the gospel (Matth. 15, 21-28), Ephrem exults,‘Blessed are you who broke through the obstacle fearlessly’. 50

47

Ephr., H Virg 26; McVey, p. 377-381.48 Ephr., H Virg 26, refr.; McVey, p. 377.49 Ephr., H Virg 26.2-3; McVey, p. 377.50 Ephr., H Virg 26.5, 9; McVey, p. 378-379.


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The gospel accounts present these women as an affront intheir own times, evident in Jesus’s behavior. Yet Ephrem high-lights them as exemplars of faith, notable for boldness of action

and especially boldness of voice. Again, we must hear the wom-en’s choirs singing these verses and leading the congregation intheir responses of praise. The resonance between biblical story,liturgical performance, and social world was palpable.

Elsewhere in these hymns, Ephrem speaks of the Canaan-ite Woman as one ‘whose love bellowed out’. 51 Similarly, heexalts the Samaritan Woman who encountered Jesus at the wellin John 4. In Virginity 22, Ephrem praises her as one ‘reproached’and ‘slandered’, yet ‘her head was high / and her voice wasauthoritative’. 52 In Virginity 23, with the congregation’s repeatedrefrain, ‘Glory to the Discoverer of all!’, 53 Ephrem extols theSamaritan Woman because truth was made known through hervoice – as indeed it was through the choir’s voice:

O, to you, woman in whom I seea wonder as great as in Mary!For she from within her wombin Bethlehem brought forth His body as a child,

but you by your mouth made Him manifestas an adult in Shechem, the town of His father’s household.Blessed are you, woman, who bought forth by your mouthlight for those in darkness. 54

Above all else, it is her voice that Ephrem praises:

Your voice, O woman, first brought forth fruit,before even the apostles, with the kerygma [Syr: karūzūtâ].[...]

Blessed is your mouth that He opened and confirmed. 55

Christ spoke to the Woman; she listened and responded byproclaiming the gospel to her people. In liturgy, words were

51 Ephr., H Virg 34.7; McVey, p. 413.52 Ephr., H Virg 22.7; McVey, p. 356-357.53 Ephr., H Virg 22, refr.; McVey, p. 361.

54 Ephr., H Virg 23.4; McVey, p. 362. The Syriac for verses 4 and 5 employsterms that explicitly engage the physicality of conception and birthgivingfor both Mary and the Samaritan Woman (CSCO , 223/ Scr Syr 94), at p. 82.

55 Ephr., H Virg 23.7; McVey, p. 363.


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sung, heard, and responses sung forth, in orchestrated exchangebetween chanter (Ephrem), women’s choir, and congrega-tion. In Ephrem’s hymns, words were not only intellectual tools

for understanding; they were bodily acts of hearing and speech,which served to actualise divine purpose.Gender is highlighted in these verses on multiple levels. Nota-

bly, the women’s boldness of speech breaks social customs pre-sumed in the biblical accounts and apparently also by Ephrem’sown audience. The image of the Samaritan Woman engagesgender as well as ethnicity in a rhetorical strategy that plays uponmarginality: both underscore the unlikelihood and therefore thepower of the encounter with Christ. Yet there is more: in Syriacliturgy, gender and ethnicity were literally utilised to performthe teaching of truth, as the sound of the Syriac women’s choirsembodied and enacted the very moral of the Samaritan Woman’sstory. Truth sounded forth from Syriac women’s voices, despitesocial constraint or calumny.

Ephrem’s hymns exalted women’s voices. But he delightedfurther to name all the types and ranks of voices contributingto liturgical celebration:

Let the chief pastor weave together his homilies like flowers,let the priests make a garland of their ministry, the deacons of their reading,strong young men of their jubilant shouts, children of their Psalms,chaste women of their songs, chief citizens of their benefactions,ordinary folk of their manner of life.Blessed is He who gave us so many opportunities for good! 56

What mattered in these combined, yet distinct, voices of wor-ship?

3. Sounding voices

In the gathered presence of the church as a whole, Ephrem

rejoiced at the sounds of collective song.

56 E.g., Ephr., H Res 2.9; Brock, Kiraz, p. 177.


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Blessed are you, O church [...]Blessed are your voices [...] Your mouth is a censer, and your voices like sweet spicesrise up on your festivals! 57

It was a sound to which he called every believer: ‘Let us glo-rify with all our mouths the Lord of all means [of salvation]’. 58 Just as his hymns joined the voices of his choirs to those of bibli-cal women, so, too, they joined the voices of the congregationto the voices of natural and supernatural order. For soundingvoices were Ephrem’s characterisation of these orders at theirmost glorious. In his Hymns on Paradise, Ephrem reflected

on Paradise as a place of resounding splendor, with ‘thunder -ous sound,’ ‘blaring trumpets’, voices ‘crying’, ‘harps and lyres’,‘shouts of hosanna’, cries of ‘alleluia’, ‘seraphs with their chants’,‘cherubs with their wings’, voices and music for which ‘there isno comparison here below’. 59

Such a view had characterized biblical depictions of wor-ship in human communities, as in the Psalms; and in heavenlyones, in prophetic accounts such as Isaiah 6 or Revelation 5.

For Christians and Jews, creation itself had been an act of thun-derous sound. 60 In Ephrem’s Nativity hymns, that originalcommotion was (fittingly) echoed in the thunderous clamorof the second creation, the birth of Christ, as heaven and earthtogether sounded their joy with clamor, thunder, loud voices,cries, shouts, and proclamations. 61 The sound of such singing, heurged, should pour forth in triumph. At the Easter vigil, he sang:

This joyful festival is entirely made up of tongues and voices:

Innocent young women and men sounding like trumpets and hornsWhile infant girls and boys resemble harps and lyres;

57 Ephr., H Nat 25. 2; McVey, p. 200.58 Ephr., H Nat 3.19; McVey, p. 87.59 E.g., Ephr., H Par 5.11, 11.2, 14.9. Discussed in B. Varghese, ‘Saint

Ephrem and the Early Syriac Liturgical Tradition’, St. Vladimir’s Theological

Quarterly, 56:1 (2011), p. 17-49.60 See now D. MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History, New York, 2013,p. 11-50; and, for example, Jac. Sar., ‘the First Day of Creation’.

61 E.g., Ephr., H Nat 6.21-24; H Nat 7.1.


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Their voices intertwine as they reach up together towards heaven,Giving glory to the Lord of glory. 62

And to this splendid chorus, the congregation sang the refrain:‘Blessed is He for whom the silent have thundered out!’ 63

Such a celebration of volume perhaps befits the hymn-writer,whose job in part required rousing people to enthusiastic partici-pation. But an appreciation of loud-sounding worship recurredin other kinds of literary sources that mention or refer to liturgi-cal celebration. If the volume somehow mirrored divine (or atleast, biblical) counterparts, it also, undoubtedly, carried social

implications in the context of late antique religious competi-tion. Loud choirs in public spaces proclaimed proud witnessto one’s religious loyalties. Histories, chronicles, letters, andhagiographies referred to dueling choirs in late antique cities allacross the Empire. 64 Triumphalism both social and political lacedsuch accounts, as well as a conscious attention to religious ritualas public performance. It is important for scholars to remem-ber how much religious activity took place outdoors, in public,

widely accessible spaces: as processions through city streets, or inmarketplaces or other civic areas. 65

62 Ephr., H Res 2.2; Brock, Kiraz, p. 171.63 Ibid .64 Again, see the examples in McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature,

p. 72 (#148, Gr. Naz. on the congregation at Caesarea); p. 101-102 (#218,Socr. on Nicenes and Arians in Constantinople); p. 102-103 (#219, Soz. on

factions in Antioch); p. 105-106 (#227, Thdt. on Melitians in Alexandria).The public ethos of polemic continued, apparently also contributing to thedevelopment of Jewish liturgical poetry, particularly piyyut. See, e.g., W. vanBekkum, ‘Anti-Christian Polemics in Hebrew Liturgical Poetry (Piyyut) of theSixth and Seventh Centuries’, in Early Christian Poetry: A Collection of Essays –ed. J. Den Boeft, A. Hilhorst (Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae , 22), Leiden,1993, p. 297-308.

65 The classic study remains J. F. Baldovin, The Urban Character of ChristianWorship: The Origins, Development, and Meaning of Stational Liturgy (OCA, 228),Rome, 1987. See further, e.g., T. F. Mathews, The Clash of Gods: a reinter- pretation of early Christian art , Princeton, 19992; N. Andrade, ‘The Processions

of John Chrysostom and the Contested Spaces of Constantinople’, Journalof Early Christian Studies, 18.2 (2010), p. 161-189. For an important Syriacinstance, J. Khoury-Sarkis, ‘Recéption d’un évèque syrien au vie siècle’,L’Orient Syrien, 2 (1958), p. 137-184.


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But there was also an aesthetic sensibility that understoodloud sound as an appropriate adornment of religious ritual; andfurther, that encouraged participation in those terms in order

to express willing and active presence on the part of the congre-gation. Hence the Syriac women’s choirs were praised in descrip-tions that mention their loud singing with appreciation. Syriacliturgical instructions, whether in commentaries or sermons,called for the congregation to follow suit: to offer their ownvoices ‘loudly’, ‘with shouting’. 66 Such aesthetic views contrib-uted to the formative, or instructive, aspects of Christian wor-ship. A hymn-writer or choral leader such as Ephrem, might cul-

tivate an awareness of bodily engagement with sound – whethervoicing or hearing – in verses such as we have been consider-ing. A homilist could do likewise in a more explanatory mode. Just so did Jacob of Sarug, itinerant priest and bishop serving inthe eastern Syriac-speaking areas of the Roman Empire duringthe late fifth and early sixth centuries. 67

In lyrically crafted poetic homilies, Jacob provided importantevidence about the Syriac women’s choirs, in contexts wherehe instructed the congregation about liturgy, its performance,and their own forms of participation in it. In these passages, heemphasised the importance of voices sounded forth in speech orsong, and voices received by listening. Both modes of voice orsound involved hearing as a sensory act of potent affective qual-ity, on persons and on the world. 68

In the homily he dedicated to Ephrem, Jacob emphasisedgendered sound as crucial to the truth of Bible and liturgy asproclaimed by Ephrem’s hymns. 69 Hence he highlighted the

66 E.g., Jac. Sar., ‘On the Partaking’, l. 203-340. Cfr the East Syriac litur-gical homily, wrongly ascribed to Narsai, ‘Hom. 17: An Exposition of theMysteries’, at p. 6. Ephrem repeatedly summons the congregation to sing outtheir joy: e.g. H Nat 22 and 25. Jacob of Sarug’s festal homilies often end witha summons to the whole of creation – including the congregation – to sing forthloudly.

67 See now Jacob of Serugh and his Times: Studies in Sixth-Century SyriacChristianity – ed. G. A. Kiraz, Piscataway, NJ, 2010.

68 For an important new consideration of listening in early Christian culturemore broadly, see now C. Harrison, The Art of Listening in the Early Church,Oxford, 2013.

69 Jac. Sar., ‘Homily on Ephrem’.


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import of the women’s choirs, arguing from various directions. Just as Moses led the Hebrew women in triumphant song at theRed Sea, so, too, did Ephrem lead the Syriac women to sing

praise to the Deliverer of All (v. 45-50, 78-97). In former timeswomen kept silence in church, because their mouths were shutby the disobedience of Eve (v. 40-41). Now the obedienceof Mary has opened the mouths of women; they can sing forth‘without shame’, with faces unveiled (v. 108-113). Womenshould sing lo

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