Hymns and Sermons of Saint Ephrem the Syrian, Volume 1

the memory of which, the bitterness of which always hovered before his eyes. His spirit was inflamed, and indeed almost seized, by the heresy of Aetius a fourth-century Arian theologian, who denied that the tithes for funerals ought to be paid, as Epiphanius in Heresies 75 and Augustine in Heresies 53 testify. Of these same hymns, which number eighty-five, the Syrians use thirty-one, partly in the offices for the dead and partly in the daily office. The remaining fifty-four deal with the individual ranks of the departed: namely, children, youths, men, women, monastics, clerics, deacons, presbyters, and bishops.

In these songs, four things are worthy of note: 1st, that the rite of funerals which the Church observes is most ancient; 2nd, that the souls of the departed, once dissolved from the bonds of the body, immediately approach judgment; 3rd, that those who depart this life stained not with a lethal but with a light fault undergo purification in purgatorial fire, the severity of which is diminished by the sacrifices, prayers, and pious works of the faithful; 4th, finally, that the souls of the saints are called to eternal happiness and the company of the angels before the final day of judgmentSee Steph. Ev. Assemani, Syriac-Latin Works III, preface p. 20.; which last truth is placed beyond all controversy by what he holds concerning the happiness and intercession of the saints in the hymns we are about to publish regarding the martyrs, confessors, Abraham Qidunaia, and Julian Saba.

The Roman editors published the songs and sermons on the departed in the third volume of the Syriac Works from Nitrian codex XVI, of the 9th century, and from codex XVII, the age of which is not indicated, but since it consists of parchment and originates from the Scete monastery, it is hardly more recent than the 12th century. The editors, however, led by I know not what reasoning, did not preserve the order of the codices and arranged the songs in a different sequence. Hence, perhaps, it happened that the same song is found twice in the edition; for instance, canon 65 is nothing but a part of canon 18Cf. pp. 264-65 and 332.. Other songs are not complete: thus, canon 62 is nothing but a part of the Nisibene hymn 74, to which two strophes have been added from Nisibene hymn 77Cf. Bickell, Nisibene Songs, Leipzig, 1866, p. 6.. This same thing is to be observed in all liturgical codices, in which the hymns of Ephrem are kept more or less abbreviated according to the various customs of the churches, as we shall say below.

Nisibene Hymns.

Related to these songs about the departed is that collection of 77 hymns called the Nisibene, which the distinguished Bickell edited from the Nitrian codices of the sixth century kept in the British MuseumIbid.. In the first thirteen hymns, Ephrem deals with the various calamities and wars that the people of Nisibis suffered, interspersing his hymns with ardent prayers to God, and adorning them with examples and images drawn from Scripture and confuting the heretics who claimed that calamities were sent by an evil god.