The Syrian Penitential Spirit The Witness of Saints Ephraim and Isaac (Part 2)
Now, these two facts—St. Ephraim’s life as a deacon in a large urban parish and his Christian culture’s widespread use of Greek—can help greatly in understanding something of his Lenten Prayer. I shall here use the ecclesiastical Greek translation of the Syriac as my text (for I have no Syriac), fairly confident that in doing so I shall be able to achieve some secure accuracy. Also, I shall assume throughout that St. Ephraim intended the prayer to speak with equal power to all Orthodox, lay and monastic as well as clerical: for his mind is shaped by parish and not monastic life. Let us, then, consider this prayer in Greek. The prayer is three sentences long. The first sentence deals with an undesirable spirit that possesses four qualities, while the second deals with a wholly desirable spirit also possessing four qualities. Note well at the outset: the prayer speaks of two distinct spirits, each with four qualities—and not of eight spirits. The first sentence asks “the Lord and Master of my life” not to give me this first spirit. (An aside: the usual English translation asks God to “take from me”—a mistranslation of the Greek, one with interesting implications, as we shall later see.) The first quality of this spirit is, in Greek, argia, a word meaning sloth, most literally “a-working,” with the same meaning in the prefix as “a-moral.”7 That is, argia does not mean simply “not-working”; it means the total absence of any capacity to act. The second quality uses the same root as the first to form the word peri-ergia, which literally means: running all around in crazed busyness. These first two qualities are therefore opposite sides of the same devastating coin: the total absence of the capacity to work; the hyper-presence of extreme working. The sequence here seems to me crucial: the sloth creates the psychic condition for crazed busyness as response. And this response of crazed busyness creates, in turn, the condition for the third quality of this terrible spirit: philarchia, a word best translated here as “the hunger to control things.” That is, every experience of crazed busyness produces in us this terrifying hunger to manage and dominate and rule over all things. But—and here is one of St. Ephraim’s great insights in this prayer—this hunger leads, in turn, to the fourth quality: argologia, a word we can most literally construe as speech that has no capacity to achieve work (ergia). In other words, the more we hunger to dominate, the less our speech has any power to effect genuine consequences. The Greek beautifully signals this point by having the first part of argologia repeat the first of the four qualities, argia. In this way, then, the first sentence gives us the total state of our soul when held by this dread spirit. Our sloth produces our crazed busyness, which in turn creates in us the hunger to dominate—and this hunger leads to speech that achieves nothing: and so we return to sloth: and then the devastating cycle begins again. Now, the Greek verb that steers this first sentence is: “Do not give me”—and not “Take from me.” The Greek could not be plainer and more straightforward—nor, for that matter, could the Slavonic, which fully agrees with the Greek on this point. We may therefore rightly ask, how can the Lord and Master of our life be understood as giving this dreadful spirit to us? The best response is to consider this passage from Homily 42 of St. Isaac the Syrian’s great book, The Ascetical Homilies. St. Isaac is St. Ephraim’s monastic counterpart, from the same Syriac Orthodox culture some three centuries later. Here is the passage from Homily 42:
But the trials that God allows to fall upon men who are shameless, whose thinking is exalted in the face of God’s goodness, and who abuse His goodness in their pride, are the following: manifest temptations of the demons which also exceed the limit of the strength of men’s souls; the withdrawal of the forces of wisdom which men possess; the piercing sensation of the thought of fornication which is allowed to assault them to humble their arrogance; quick temper; the desire to have one’s own way; disputatiousness; vituperation; a scornful heart; an intellect completely gone astray; blasphemy against the name of God; absurd notions that are entirely ridiculous, or rather, lamentable; to be despised by all men and to lose their respect; to be made by the demons both openly and secretly by every kind of means a disgrace and a reproach among men; the desire to mingle and have intercourse with the world; always to speak and behave foolishly; endlessly to seek out some new thing for oneself through false prophecy; to promise many things that are beyond one’s strength.
This dreadful list can be seen as an elucidation of St. Ephraim’s four qualities, the seventeen magnifying the four, yet presenting the same understanding. And Isaac’s point in the Homily is everywhere clear: God bestows such terrible afflictions upon us in order that (and here I am quoting Isaac) “you may comprehend the subtle pathways of your mind by the kinds of trials that beset you” (Homilies, 42:210). That is, when we see that—for example—we have fallen into “the desire to have one’s own way,” we are thereby being shown by God that which is hidden in the depths of our minds. Syriac ascetical tradition everywhere asserts that such unveiling is directly from God—and, equally, the remedy for such spiritual sickness is also from God. For, a page later, Isaac says this: “The remedy for them all is one . . . And what is it? Humility of heart” (211). In other words, God sends us the dreadful spirit precisely so that we may see hidden within us that spiritual sickness called arrogance. And once we so see it, we may then begin to seek what alone will cure that sickness, namely humility. But—and this is crucially important—such sickness begins when (says Isaac) “a man . . . begins to appear wise in his own eyes” (211), and such sickness can easily become next to incurable. Isaac puts it this way: “Do not be angry with me that I tell you the truth. You have never sought out humility with your whole soul” (212). And therefore St. Ephraim prays in his prayer: Do not give me—do not lay upon me; do not weigh me down with—this dread spirit, for I may well not possess the humility and wisdom I need to be cured of such affliction. “Take from me” as a translation thus misses important aspects of God’s action in our penitential awareness—though, clearly, it is God who grants us the humility that heals us. In this way, the action of repentance in us reflects the great line from Psalm 99: “Know that the Lord, he is God, that he has made us, and not we ourselves” (l. 3). In this context, then, St. Ephraim’s second sentence possesses sharp significance. In this sentence, the four qualities of the penitential spirit— better: the four pathways of this spirit in us—are beautifully given. The first of the four is, in Greek, sophrosyne, a word of high antiquity in classical Greek culture, going back through Plato and Aristotle all the way to Hesiod and Homer. The word is translated variously as discretion, moderation, sanity, self-control, prudence, temperance, and chastity. All the word’s meanings, both classical and Christian, include two key aspects: integrated wholeness and unified singleness.
Now these two aspects are best understood in the light of Syriac Orthodoxy’s teachings on celibacy and virginity, teachings that everywhere held that celibacy—including the celibacy voluntarily chosen by a husband and wife—was the condition in which a person achieved self-integration. The Syriac translation of the Gospels rendered the Greek word monogenes (only begotten) with the Syriac word meaning “singleness,” using the same word for both the Son of God and the human person. In one of his poems, St. Ephraim says: “let such a man who is divided / collect himself together and become one before You.”10 Self-collection and becoming one before God: here is sophrosyne. It is the state of self-integration in which each person achieves oneness in order to be in God’s presence. The Syriac Church reads this oneness as the fulfillment of Christ’s commandment in the Gospel: “when your eye is single, your whole body is then full of light” (Matt 6:22). Such singleness of sight results when one’s eye sees every other person not as the receiver of one’s hungers and desires—not, that is, in the thousand disintegrations of one’s craziness—but, instead, sees everyone in the world as a child of God, completely integrated and entirely beautiful and wholly illumined. Sophrosyne is thus both the means and the end of such illumined seeing. As Psalm 35 says: “For with thee is the fountain of life, in thy light we shall see light” (l. 9). The second of the four spiritual qualities St. Ephraim asks for is, in Greek, tapeinophrosyne, or humility of mind. This compound word is, again, one possessing a high and long history before it reaches this Syriac prayer. The first part of the compound, tapeino-, means humility, while the second part signifies the mind in its conscious intentionalities, its deliberately chosen focus. Taken together, the two parts signify the mind’s voluntary obedience to the way of humility. And—here is yet another of St. Ephraim’s insights in this prayer—this humility of mind incarnates and makes actual the way of sophrosyne. That is, our freely chosen humility of mind heals our intellectual arrogance in such a way that sophrosyne can be made real in us.
Thus, an interesting verbal pattern now can be seen. In the first sentence about the dreadful spirit, the initial pair of words used the same root in a contrastive manner: sloth became its opposite, crazed busyness, yet stayed the same spirit. In this second sentence, the initial pair also shares the same root, but the use is not contrastive but actualizing: chastity, or sophrosyne, becomes actualized by humility. In the first sentence, the movement is a whipsaw motion; in the second, the movement is one of grounding and making real.
Sheehan, Donald. The Grace of Incorruption: The Selected Essays of Donald Sheehan on Orthodox Faith and Poetics (p. 18). Paraclete Press. Kindle Edition.
