The Hymn of the Soul

the Mother, and the Son of the Living, they here figure as the Father “the King of kings,” the Mother “the Queen of the East,” and the Brother “the next in rank.” Finally the “lesser gods” appear as the “kings” (couplet 38), who obey the command of the King of kings. In addition to these ideas we here find others which are not expressly ascribed to Bardesanes but are nevertheless perfectly consistent with what we know of him. Thus the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence (recollection original Greek: ἀνάμνησις; the philosophical idea that the soul possesses innate knowledge from a divine origin which it must "remember"), which is expressed with such distinctness in the Poem (couplets 11, 55—57), can hardly have been unknown to Bardesanes, who, according to Epiphanius Epiphanius of Salamis (c. 310–403 AD), a bishop and counter-heresy writer, was skilled in Greek as well as in Syriac¹; moreover the Dialogue written by a disciple of Bardesanes, to which I have already referred, is so obviously modelled on the Platonic dialogues as to imply that the works of Plato were read in the circle to which the author belonged.

The foregoing considerations do not indeed suffice to prove that this Poem is a Bardesanist work, but they render it at least highly probable. Whether we have any reason to believe that it was composed by Bardesanes himself—as Nöldeke Theodor Nöldeke (1836–1930), a highly influential German scholar of Oriental languages suggested, with some hesitation, in the year 1871—is a much more difficult question. Ephraim the Syrian (Roman edition vol. ii. pp. 553, 554) speaks of the teaching-hymns (instructional songs original Syriac: madhrāshē) of Bardesanes, and mentions, in particular, a collection of 150 songs (psalms original Syriac: zĕmīrāthā), after the number of the pieces in the Psalter. In another homily (ibid. pp. 557, 558) Ephraim professes to give a few short quotations from Bardesanes, which appear to be in the five-syllable meter². But since Sozomen and Theodoret Fifth-century Christian historians speak of Harmonius, the son of Bardesanes, as a writer of hymns, it has been supposed by Hort Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828–1892), a prominent Irish theologian that Ephraim may have fallen into the mistake of ascribing the works of the son to his more celebrated father. The Poem now under discussion contains nothing, so far as I am able to see, which might not

¹ Collection of Heresiological Works original Latin: Corpus Haeresiologicum, edited by Oehler, vol. ii. part ii. p. 144.
² Macke, in the Theological Quarterly original German: Theologische Quartalschrift for 1874, p. 51, endeavors to prove that one of the citations in question, consisting of two lines, is in the six-syllable meter; but to me this seems very doubtful. There is however no reason to assume that the five-syllable meter was the only one used by Bardesanes, for Ephraim (Roman edition vol. ii. p. 554) expressly describes him as having introduced “measures” (musical modulations original Syriac: ܚܘܝܠܐ, ḥuwwālā), and it is by no means impossible that all these citations are taken from the same poem.