Alas, our contemporary does not seem to remember very clearly the very existence of classical Syriac literature, which survived its golden age in the 4th-5th centuries. “The Syrians – did they write in Arabic?” - sometimes you have to hear from people who are not at all ignorant. Neither textbooks nor reference books are in a hurry to help grief 9 .

And this is a pity, because literature in Syriac, the offspring of the Aramaic language tree, created over a strictly measured historical period, when the onslaught of Hellenism lost strength, and the onslaught of Islam had not yet gained strength, is not just the subject of one of the disciplines of Semitology, not a local phenomenon that can only be praised for its originality, but a historical and literary fact of a worldwide scale. The lines connecting in time biblical antiquity with the Christian, and even Muslim, Middle Ages, and in space - Iran and everything that lies to the east of Iran, with Byzantium and Western Europe, pass through the Syrian-speaking zone, intersect in it, form their own lines in it. vital knots. In the first millennium of our chronology, the Syrian influence was felt from Ireland 10 to China 11. This is not the place to talk about this in any detail. Let us just recall two circumstances: firstly, it was the Syrians who were the first to create durable forms of the Christian hymn for Byzantium, and therefore for all countries that Byzantium influenced 12 ; secondly, it was from the Syrians that the Moslem East received the tradition of Aristotelianism, which in a roundabout way, through the Arabs, returned to the West and fertilized high scholasticism 13 . The importance of both cannot be overestimated. And one more brief reminder, concerning not world, but domestic culture. What do ancient Russian literature, together with Russian folklore, owe to Syrian authors (and especially to Ephraim the Sirin ) 14, in a few words you can’t say; but even in our literature of the last century, which seemed to have departed so far from these sources, it is impossible not to recall Pushkin, who transcribed into verse the prayer of the same Ephrem the Syrian 15 , and Dostoevsky, a reader of another Syrian author, Isaac of Nineveh 16 .

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Pay to unlock / donate if you like...Syriac literature has a special relationship with the Palestinian origins of Christianity. As is known, the very word "Christians", according to a completely reliable report, was first heard on Syrian soil, in the city of Antioch 17 . Another thing is also known: it was in the cities and semi-free states of Eastern Syria, which lay on the border between the Roman and Persian powers, that the will for spiritual self-determination, starting from both Greco-Roman paganism and Iranian Zoroastrianism, very early appreciated Christianity as a welcome ally . Long before the era of Constantine arrived in the West, there were already experiments in the Constantinian spirit 18. Behind a legend very popular with Syrian Christians, according to which the East Syrian kingdom of Osroene, vassal to Rome, with its capital in Edessa (by the way, the area of crystallization of literature in the Syriac language) became Christian even under King Avgar V the Black, who allegedly was in correspondence with by Christ himself 19, that is, in the first half of the 1st century, some kind of historical reality lies; in any case, one of the successors and namesake of this monarch, Abgar IX (179-216), was baptized, and the citizens of Edessa were proud of their long-standing commitment to Christianity. Characteristically, the position of Christians worsened after 216, when Osroene was absorbed into the Roman Empire. The fate of Syrian identity and Syrian Christianity reveals a curious parallelism later, for example, during the brief but significant attempt by the Syrian woman Bat-Zabbai, whom the Greeks and Romans called Zenobia, to found a Middle Eastern empire with its capital in Palmyra (270-272) 20. Bat-Zabbai was not a Christian, but she patronized her Christian subjects and even allowed the heretical bishop Paul of Samosata to play the role of the first man in Antioch 21 ; under the rule of the pagan Caesars of Rome, he would not have succeeded. The Syrians, especially those of Edessa, early formed a self-consciousness of the Christian people. They liked, for example, to argue that if the inscription over the head of the crucified Christ, according to the Gospel, was written in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, it follows that these languages were defiled by the sin of deicide, while the Syrian language is pure.

As for Syriac, which gave birth to Syriac literature, it should not be forgotten that this is a late phase (and dialectal variant) of the same Aramaic that was spoken in Palestine in the 1st century, the native language of early Christianity. On a purely verbal plane, the parables, aphorisms and sayings of Jesus preserved in the text of the Gospels - alas, translated into Greek - appear, perhaps, as one of the first portents of the future flourishing of Syrian poetry. The Syriac versions of the Gospels, on the whole secondary to the Greek-language canon, but unusually early (starting from the 1st-2nd centuries 22), apparently retained some fragments of the original Aramaic oral tradition; and in any case they are much closer in linguistic matter to the latter than the Greek text. An almost punning play on words and consonances, which you would not even guess from the Greek text, because it went out completely there, suddenly flashes in the Syriac version, as a sure sign of returning to your native element - the element of Aramaic speech. Examples of this are numerous 23 . We will give only one - a saying from the Gospel of Matthew ( Matt. 11:17 ): “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang you sad songs and you didn't play". In Greek, it keeps so little from the characteristic "folding" of a real proverb (although still a little more than in Russian); but here is how it sounds in both ancient Syriac translations:

Z e marn l e khon w e la raqqedhton

welajn l e khon w e la arqedhton…

In this case, as in many other, homogeneous ones, the Syriac translation is, if “genetically” and not more primary than the Greek text of which it seems to be a translation (although even this, as has already been said, remains unclear in relation to each specific place), then “typologically” it is undoubtedly more primitive than it.

Here we must reflect to understand the scope of the implications of this fact. The Bible was the norm for every Christian culture, and therefore the tuning fork by which every Christian literature tried to tune itself: both the Greek chant of Roman the Melodist 24 and the Latin prose of Augustine 25 could begin with a quotation from a psalm, and you never know what else . The constructive role of looking back at the Biblein the formation of the medieval literary canon is very great. However, already in the zone of the Greek language, biblical poetics, the biblical culture of the word, the life of the word within the Semitic text could be perceived only indirectly, through a foreign language, alien refraction. In Greek, even where the meaning is retained to the smallest detail, the tone changes irreparably; and tone, as you know, makes music. The mediation, and, moreover, the mediation of a world-historical scale, was already the translation of the Septuagint, from which the Greek version of the New Testament and through it the Greek-language Christian literature received stylistic models, and above all a set of lexical "Biblicalisms" 26. In the Septuagint, neither biblical poetics nor the elements of the Greek language remain equal to themselves, for they are mediated by each other; Semitisms of the translation introduce artificiality, almost exoticism, the slightest manifestations of Hellenistic taste move away from the original. But the Greek reworking of biblical poetics, in turn, served as a model for many Christian literatures, primarily for Latin and Coptic, whose sacred vocabulary, along with Semitisms, includes a lot of Greekisms. The farther, the more steps of mediation grew one above the other; for example, the "biblical" vocabulary of the modern Russian language embraces both Semitisms, and Greekisms, and Slavicisms, the Jewish appeal "rabbi" and the Aramaic "rabboni" coexist in it with the Greek "sinhedrin" and "architriklin", the guests at the wedding are called “sons of the bridal chamber” in quite Aramaic, and everything is immersed in an atmosphere created by a not very distinct, but constant glance at the Church Slavonic language. The consequences of mediation were manifold. People of ancient culture, becoming Christians, could acquire in the Semitized, that is, “barbarian”, linguistic appearance of Greek, and then LatinThe Bible is like an ascetic sackcloth to subdue one's literary taste, brought up on orators and poets; they themselves spoke about it quite expressively. Later, the very involuntarily arose "estrangement" of the biblical word could cause reverent admiration - from playing with the Hebrew names of God in the sequence of the Latin poet of the XI century Herman the Relaxed 27to the tenderness of the Chekhovian woman over the incomprehensible word "dondezhe." Literary creativity and literary perception can turn everything to their advantage, even interference. But mediation is mediation, distance is distance. So, the uniqueness of the position of Syriac literature in the face of biblical poetics was that for it, and only for it, the reception was almost without mediation, that the distance was minimal - like the geographical distance between Galilee and Syria. The Syriac language, compared with Aramaic, is the same language, and even compared with Hebrew, the same linguistic structure, the same, in its basics, attitude to the word. Biblical poetics was adopted without effort, without tension, without struggle with oneself, which tormented the "Ciceronian" Jerome 28; and therefore the biblical word sounds in Syriac with such simplicity and naturalness as nowhere else. We cited above such an exotic phrase in Russian, Greek, Latin "sons of the bridal chamber." Only in Syrian is this the most common everyday expression, standing among others similar to it: the spouse is “the son of a concubine”, the city dweller is “the son of the city”, the dying one is “the son of death”, even the demon of sleepwalking is “the son of the roof”, etc. e. 29 The gospel idioms, spread throughout the literatures of the Christian world, as pilgrims carried relics from Palestine around the world, are an everyday, homely thing for the Syrian writer and his reader.

With this we will limit our general, preliminary remarks about the place of Syriac literature at the origins of the Christian Middle Ages. The rest we have to see from the texts themselves.

Before we move on to them, a few words about their author. Ephraim the Sirin , as it is customary to call him in Russian from ancient times, or Mar Afrem (that is, "Mr. Ephraim"), as he is called in the Syrian tradition, is the most representative, because the most central, figure of the Syrian classics 30 . So he was appreciated by his contemporaries and descendants, who gave him honorary nicknames in which it is impossible to separate religious reverence for his teaching authority and delight in his poetic gift (just as in his work it is impossible to separate didactics and poetry); he is both the “prophet of the Syrians”, and the “sun of the Syrians”, and the “harp of the Holy Spirit”, and the “pillar of the Church” 31. Later researchers did not change anything in the assessment of Ephraim as the first poet and writer of the Syrians; they might be skeptical of Syriac literature as such , 32 but not of Ephraim's place in it.

The hagiographic tradition about Ephraim is rich, but the information it offers is often dubious. We recall only the main and most indisputable facts. The life and work of Ephraim was connected with two important centers of East Syrian, that is, the most original, least touched by Hellenism, culture; until 363, he lived in his native city of Nisivin, but then Nisivin went to the power of the Sassanids, and Ephraim moved to the west, on this side of the border of the Christian empire of the Romans, in order to settle in Edessa until the end of his life, where he taught at the so-called "school of the Persians" bible interpretationand singing. Apparently, even in the Nisivinian period of his life, Ephraim took the rank of deacon, but never went beyond this rank, which brings him closer to another great church poet, Roman the Melodist. In those days, the position of a deacon was associated with the duties of a choir director, and, if he had the appropriate talent, with the duties of a composer of hymns, that is, a poet and composer; consequently, it is precisely the deacon's office that befits the hymnographer 33 .

Since Ephraim was not a hierarch, a "hierarch", his exclusive authority is the authority of his personality. A living memory of him was preserved as a short, bald and beardless man with an unusually concentrated expression on his face, which was impossible to amuse or make laugh. His fame during his lifetime went far beyond the Syrian language zone. It is difficult to say how reliable the traditions about his meeting with Basil the Great , Bishop of Caesarea in Asia Minor and the most prominent church leader and writer of his century, but there is no doubt that Basil knew about him 34 . The writings of Ephraim very early, perhaps even during his lifetime, began to be translated into Greek 35; their influence, which is very noticeable in Byzantine literature, spreads further to the West thanks to Latin translations, reaching the area of semi-barbarian Old High German poetry by the 8th-9th centuries . (For the role that Ephraim's legacy played in Rus', see note 6.) The Syrian writer was well known in neighboring Armenia.

Attempts to discern echoes of Ephraim's texts in the Qur'an 37 remain debatable .

The poetic texts, which will be discussed below, belong to the genre called in Syriac "madrash". The word madrasa (from dras - "to trample, reason, talk, argue") - the same root as the Hebrew midras ("study, teaching, interpretation of the Bible ") and Arabic madrasa , known to us in the form "madrasah" ("a place where are learning"). So, madrash is a teaching genre. Formally, it is characterized by a clear syllabic rhythm, which makes the hymns suitable for singing, and the alternation of stanzas of a certain length with an unchanging refrain that runs through the entire poem. Ephraim either created, or, more likely, brought to perfection this genre, which obviously later served as a model for the Byzantine kontakion, as already mentioned above.

Every poetry has its own sociological context. “We must imagine Ephraim as concretely as possible at the head of the choir of virgins , 38 which he leads as regent. Who are these virgins? In Syriac they are called "daughters of the Covenant" (be nath qjama); these are celibate women who voluntarily chose an ascetic life, but not yet nuns in the institutional sense that was then only developed in the monasteries of the Egyptian Thebaid, not a special community that separated itself from the “worldly” Christians, but rather the center of a large Christian community - a characteristically Syrian phenomenon that kept traditions of early Christianity 39. This is what Efrem brings to them with each of his new works, with them he learns the text and melody; they are his "performing team", but at the same time his first public. When one thinks of Ephraim's poetry, one must not forget them, just as, if it is permissible to compare things so dissimilar, one must not forget about other, quite different girlish choirs around Sappho or about the acting troupe to which Shakespeare brought his fresh manuscript. The life of the "daughters of the Covenant" creates an atmosphere within which only Ephraim's creativity is possible. Madrash, as we have already seen from its very name, is fundamentally didactic, it teaches all the time and cannot stop teaching, but Ephraim's teachings are not resonant, for he teaches not an abstract student, but his maidens, whom he sees in front of him and knows that they need; and only together with them, at the same time with them - any "Christian soul", which will find a place for itself in the same circle, since this circle has not yet closed, has not realized itself as a special “monastic rank”, “spiritual class”. But still this is a circle of one's own, and it is necessary to enter into it; From the outside you will not understand anything, but from the inside everything is clear, and even very simple. Their understand each other perfectly.

Hence the well-known esoteric nature of Ephraim's hymns, which manifests itself on a purely literary level in, for example, how he builds thematic transitions, associative linkages of thoughts and images; in no way is the esotericism of artificiality, rather, on the contrary, the esotericism of artlessness (unless by artlessness one understands the so-called spontaneity, which in the traditionalist verbal craft does not and cannot exist at all). Indeed, Ephraim's compositional technique is very far from the rational rhetorical divisions so important to the Byzantine and Latin literary tradition. Reading Ephraim, we are often puzzled by the movement of his thought. To understand why he wrote this way, one must remember for whom he wrote this way. Due to the circumstances of their ascetic life, the maidens of Ephraim needed reference points for “reflections” in the special sense of the word, that is, for “meditations”; as if the dotted composition of the hymn gives them these dots, the gaps between which were to be filled by their own spiritual work. But they are both nuns, and not quite nuns yet, and their “God-thinking” is not yet cell silence, is not yet isolated from communal, all-people worship; they "meditate" not silently, but with a singing larynx, articulated lips and tongue.

To say that the thematic order in Ephraim's hymns is the order of "meditation" is, on the formal constructive plane, the same thing as calling it improvisational. An epigraph to the description of this kind of composition could be the New Testament words about the ways of the spirit: “You hear his voice, but you do not know where it comes from and where it goes ...” ( John 3:8 ). Of course, we are not aware of how Ephraim's creative process proceeded empirically, and we have no right to take too literally the hagiographic idea of inspiration ., much less build any conjectures, so that the word "improvisational" should not be understood in the meaning, so to speak, everyday; but the most general nature of Ephraim's work, as far as it is restored by its results, is marked by a feature of improvisation - in any case, more tangible than that of any of the Greek-speaking and Latin-speaking associates comparable to him in rank. We emphasize - comparable to him in rank; for the authors of secondary and tertiary compositional norms could be obscured simply by a lack of skill and diligence. But the fact of the matter is that Ephraim lacks a logical-rhetorical singling out and combining topics - not inconsistency or carelessness, not simple negation, but, on the contrary, some positive, constructive property: the absence of one and, due to this, the presence of something else not emptiness, but fullness.

Where the special quality of the thematic construction, manifested in Ephraim, finds numerous parallels, it is in the field of biblical poetics - for example, in the Old Testament psalms or in the New Testament epistles, especially Paul. Let whoever wants to try to draw up a clear plan for them, from which it would be clear what cannot be discussed in this or that place of the text; his task will be simply impossible 41 . Something similar can be said about the suras of the Qur'an. On the contrary, in the classical literatures of Greece and Rome there is hardly a real correspondence to what Ephraim did; for the underlined, played up, exposed liberties of transitions from subject to subject, which flaunt the odes of Pindar and Horace 42, is a fundamentally different phenomenon. Pindar still has some similarities with Ephraim in that his work also presupposes both a circle of his own, who understand perfectly (by no means just “connoisseurs”), and a nationwide cult situation; and he trusted his poetic word to the choir. However, already he, a representative of the Greek culture, moving towards the discovery of rhetoric as a universal way to organize a statement about anything, had “metaphorical associations” 43they mask, decorate, make more mysterious, and therefore more interesting, the order given by a uniform rational scheme. A modern researcher describes this order as follows: “Imagine in the “core” - a myth, in the “beginning” and “conclusion” - praises and prayers, in the “seal” - the words of the poet about himself, in the “turn” and “counterturn” - binding moralistic reflections - and we will have before us an almost exact scheme of the structure of Pindar's ode" 44 . The relationship between “metaphorical associations” and a given scheme is regulated by the will of the poet, who quite clearly felt himself: this is “a constant sense of audacity and risk present in his songs” 45, far from the much more "humble" position of Ephraim, as heaven is from earth. There is nothing to say about Horace: he is a pet of a completely mature, centuries-old tradition of rhetoric, and it is quite clear that each of his odes is based on a rhetorical "disposition", only carefully shuffled; if this were not given, if the rational rhetorical habit of isolating topics, their atomic isolation, were not given, the whole game of shuffling would be impossible. In the ancient ode, logical order is primary, "lyrical disorder" is secondary. Everything is different with Ephraim: if you like - poorer, that is, less "artistic", if you like - deeper, that is, more "original", it's how you look; anyway, much easier. The improvisational warehouse of the composition is not for him a means by which diversity or thoughtful complication is provided, or through which the freedom of the author in relation to the material expresses itself, not a "device" at all, but an absolutely necessary and self-evident premise of his entire poetics: the air he can only breathe. It is this improvisation that is primary, everything that is attached to it is secondary.

The question that one wants to ask without any hope of a verifiable answer is whether the unimaginable fertility of Ephraim, which seems unique even in the era of patristics, when writers, as a rule, wrote a lot 46, with the spirit of improvisation, which prevents poetry from properly noticing itself and, in any case, becoming a “problem” for itself? In the 19th century, perhaps, they would have expressed this state of affairs by saying that, in contrast to Horace, the conscious artist, Ephraim is an unconscious artist, or naive (however, no one seems to have said this, it must be because the teacher of the “school Persians" in Edessa, an interpreter of sacred books and, in general, a man of books to the marrow of his bones, is completely different from Naturdichter'a, as he was portrayed by the last century). Time has taught cultural historians to be very skeptical about the concept of the "unconscious" artist, in particular in relation to medieval literature 47. This idea is unclear at best: it would be absurd to believe that Ephraim did not know that he wrote well, or did not make a completely conscious effort to write as well as possible, or did not find it difficult to think about the secrets of skill, which means that if the word "unconscious" generally makes sense, not as a term, but as a metaphor. Therefore, we preferred another metaphor, more frank, not pretending to be a terminologically strict statement (hence, less dangerous), just attributing not to Ephraim, but to Ephraim's poetry - as if to a personified object - the property of not noticing itself too much. A more frank metaphor more accurately corresponds to the essence of the matter: for it really should not be about the subjective psychology of the poet (which we cannot judge), but about the objective status of his poetry (which we can and must judge,

It was mentioned above that in the eyes of contemporaries and descendants, Ephraim was a "prophet of the Syrians" - not a poet, even a sacred one (like Roman the Melodist ), not just a preacher (like John Chrysostom ) or a church teacher (like Basil the Great or Gregory the Theologian ), but precisely a prophet in other words, he was put on a par with the prophets of the Old Testament 48 . But the latter, as is known, also had a certain art of elevated and embellished speech, passed down from generation to generation 49 or from teacher to student 50 , striking the imagination and laying down on memory, that is, effective in a mnemonic sense 51 . No wonder they form a corporation 52that keeps this art; cases where a prophetic call comes to a person standing outside the corporation are exceptions that prove the rule. Whatever experience of ecstasy (which, to put it mildly, is beyond the competence of a literary critic) may be behind their word, this word contains skill, tradition, skill, something that, in the terminology of D.S. Likhachev is called "etiquette", which means a well-known measure of a conscious attitude towards technology; just as much as they can be called "artists" at all, they cannot be defined as "unconscious" or "naive" artists. On the other hand, however, there is no way to see them as "writers" - representatives of a certain cultural type, as it is known from the history of not only modern European or ancient, but even Byzantine literature, to the extent that we are talking about genres known to rhetorical theories53 . The opposition between the "prophet" and the "writer" is not at all the opposition between the "sacred" and the "profane". A "writer" can be a purely ecclesiastical author, such as, for example, Simeon Metaphrastus , a Byzantine hagiographer of the 9th-10th centuries, who corrected and trimmed the old lives of the saints according to the rules of rhetoric. He can be a saint, a theologian, "father" and "teacher" of the church, like Gregory of Nazianzus , a contemporary of Ephraim, who engaged in versification exercises at his leisure, when, for example, a poem already written in elegiac distich was rewritten in iambs or vice versa. A "prophet" is not a "writer" not because, along with his place in the history of literature, he also occupies a place in the history of religion, but because his place in the history of literature is different.

So, firstly, not an "unconscious artist", and secondly, not a "writer"; these two negations, like landmarks, limit on both sides the specific zone of "prophetic" poetics, within which both the biblical authors and Ephraim are located.

Let us try to bring our involuntarily protracted general discussion to concretization, at least having previously figured out what exactly this poetics requires "technicality", and in what - what we called the esoteric artlessness above. For every viable working system is an equilibrium of mutually compensating opposites, so that its specificity can never be adequately described by pointing to one of the opposites, but only by characterizing their relationship. A magnet with only one pole is an impossible thing.

In an article devoted to the situation of the image in Ephraim's poetry, there is no place to talk about metrics in detail, but it is necessary to say a few words on this topic, because meter and rhythm, as we all know after Tynyanov, color the poetic word in their own colors, influence the image, organize concatenation of images. Ephraim's metric differs from the Old Testament metric by a much greater regularity. As is known, for a Hebrew verse it is enough that in two halves of a couplet ("verse" of our editions of the Bible) there is the same number of stresses, and the number of unstressed syllables is completely arbitrary; as an example, let's take the opening couplet of the Book of Solomon's Proverbs, in which the rhythm is even more clear and uniform than it is, generally speaking, usually 54 :

Ladat hochmah wmusar lhabin "imrej blnah…

In contrast, the Ephraim verse is based on a rather strict isosyllabism. Here is an example of a five-syllable from the Hymns of Paradise:

wabram mle rahme d'al Sdom bad rahme… 55

The similarity between the one and the other is revealed through opposition to the third; what is impossible neither in biblical poetry nor in Ephraim is the complex strophic constructions characteristic of Greek Christian hymnography, the so-called ikoses, in which each column, that is, a rhythmically closed passage of text, equivalent in this case to verse 56, can have any length and any rhythmic pattern you like, but in the cyclic movement of subsequent stanzas until the very end of the hymn, the columns will each time return in the same sequence, at the same place within the stanza, with the same volume and the same rhythmic pattern (approximately as in Pindar's ode the antistrophe reproduces the order of heterogeneous feet given in the stanza - only there was a quantitative metric, and here it is tonic) 57. True, the Madrash of Ephraim (unlike Old Testament poetry 58 ) knows the regular division of the text into equal-sized strophic units, closed by a refrain; but the rhythm of the couplets united in these stanzas is uniform 59 .

Let's digress from the musical aspects of the Greek and Syriac types of stanza 60; let us focus on the consequences that the difference of one and the other type had for the connection of thoughts and images, for the life of the image in the space of the text. It is easy to see that the Greek type inspires a heightened sense of a complete whole, and, moreover, a whole that is built as a developed hierarchy of levels of integrity: foot - colon - ikos - anthem. The heterogeneity of the columns, the absence of a simple rhythm running through the entire text, forces one to an “atomic”, separating perception of rhythmic units, especially stanzas, and at the same time is compensated by the rigidity of the symmetry relations acting between the stanzas: like a macrocosm composed of microcosms. Volume, proportion, aesthetics of a closed form are acutely felt. A high degree of structured text stimulates the logical-rhetorical development of the topic “point by point” (the isolation of which, of course, coincides with division into stanzas). Not only is the anthem as a whole constructed as a sequence of introductions (according to the old Russian terminology - "attack") exhausted one after another points and conclusions, but within the development of each point, the beginning, middle and end are again singled out61 . There is very little room left for the improvisational principle. It would be an exaggeration to absolutize the opposition of the Syrian type of stanza to the Greek; both types have common features, for example, a complex of formal and meaningful functions transferred to the opposition of the main text and refrain 62 . However, the Syrian type of stanza, characterized by an even flow of a simple rhythm from stanza to stanza, leaves the form more open, the whole more improvisational.

The improvisational principle of Ephraim's poetry is revealed precisely at the level of the whole, first of all, as was said above and will be shown below, at the level of composition; on the contrary, the "technicality" of this poetry is palpable at the level of the syllable. Ephraim has a lot of play of sounds and play on words. As an example of the first, let us quote the stanzas from the 1st hymn about Paradise, quoted for the same purpose in the article by F. Graffen 63 .

Ktlbat bgaljata sbihat bkasjata "mirat bkaijata tmfliat bsetlata…

An example of the second is the strange metaphor from the hymn about the seven sons of Samona, which we will analyze in the next section of the article:

The mother was adorned like a bird of heaven, for her feathers are her beloved; but she accepted orphanhood and nakedness, she uprooted and threw away her feathers, so that in the resurrection she would be able to find them.

This metaphor is based on a punning consonance: "ebra- "feather", bra- "son".

Both techniques find many parallels in the area of "prophetic" poetics, both in the Old Testament texts 64 and in the Aramaic proto-form of the Gospel texts, as far as the latter can be reconstructed by back-translation from Greek 65 . The technique of rapprochement of words by consonances (using the possibilities of Semitic roots in much the same way as Heraclitus used the possibilities of the roots of the Greek language) is exactly the same in Ephraim and in the Sermon on the Mount, where, for example, the following question is asked: “Which of us , caring ( by - Aramaic - jaseph), can add (Joseph) to his height? (Gospel of Matt. 6:27). Greek Christian hymnographers, as, generally speaking, the Greek rhetorical tradition, are not alien to this; one of the striking examples is the convergence in one pair of “hairetisms” of the Akathist to the Theotokos 66 images as heterogeneous as the “star” and the “womb” ( αστήρ and γαστηρ ) 67. But here it is necessary to make a reservation: such a density of alliterations, assonances, rhymes and puns, which we have just seen in Ephraim (see above the text given in the transcription), the ancient taste did not allow. An author who would allow himself something like this would be assessed as frivolous and extravagant (cf. reviews of the tragedian Agathon, "Asiatic" rhetoricians, etc.); but in Ephraim's poetry there is a stern, downright burning seriousness and absolutely no extravagance. For Greek-speaking hymnographers, the oversaturation of the text with a play on words and consonances is always a symptom of their departure from the ancient norm; it is great in the same Akathist to the Theotokos and is noticeable in Roman the Melodist 68 , but in a significant way it is absent in such a purely classicistic monument of Byzantine church poetry as iambic canonsJohn of Damascus 69 . To summarize: the Greek rhetorical taste is very fond of the sound game, but within certain limits (the Hellenic principle of "measure"); Ephraim's poetics does not place any boundaries on it, except for those that are themselves determined by extreme concentration on meaning - but these are already boundaries that are not aesthetic, not “taste”.

With all the care that sound and pun playing requires from the poet, it does not contradict the improvisational principle. On the contrary, it powerfully stimulates the operation of this principle, since from time to time it serves as the starting point for a sudden meditative "illumination" that leads the mind in an unforeseen direction (we have yet to see that the above-mentioned punning convergence of the concepts "feathers" and "sons" gives just such Effect). Therefore, it cannot interfere with that poetics, which we conventionally called "prophetic". What is contraindicated for the latter is the author’s desire, characteristic of the ancient tradition and at least partly revived in Greek-speaking Christian poetry, to stand above the work, to look at it from above with one glance as a whole and impose on it from above - precisely as a whole - the measure of his artistic intention. , putting it in order, putting everything in its place in accordance with the rules of rhetoric (the very existence of which implies the sovereign position of the author-orderer). Without this, even such an innocent formal feature as the complex stanza of Greek church hymns described above is hardly possible. If the work lies under the gaze and hands of its "demiurge"70 , then his subject, his theme is in front of him, presented to his mental gaze as a paradigm 71; his work is twofold - to remove from the subject a scheme that singles out and systematizes the logical moments of the subject, and then to impose this scheme on the verbal matter of the work, informing the latter of the "disposition" (rhetorical term). So, the author is in front of the subject and above the work: but both prepositions express different modes of the same thing - detachment, distance, in any case, outsideness. It is understandable: in order to see the whole as a whole and especially to dispose of it as a whole, one needs a position outside this whole, even at some distance from it. Distance provides clarity of vision for both the creator and his connoisseur partner. The imperative of "prophetic" poetics is fundamentally different: neither the speaker (author) nor the listener (reader) dare to remain outside the mystery of the encounter with the object, the encounter that is conceived - at least in the task - not aesthetic, but real and concrete; the sacred space of the text accepts both of them inside itself, and therefore the speaker has power over each specific place of the text, which he can decorate with any sound pattern, but the whole does not belong to him in a sense - rather, he belongs to the whole. His mind is not a sovereign master, controlling the movement of a theme; in the act of meditation the theme moves on its own and you have to follow it. Instead of distance - closeness, instead of clarity of sight - involvement. managing the movement of the topic; in the act of meditation the theme moves on its own and you have to follow it. Instead of distance - closeness, instead of clarity of sight - involvement. managing the movement of the topic; in the act of meditation the theme moves on its own and you have to follow it. Instead of distance - closeness, instead of clarity of sight - involvement.

Perhaps an example from another field will clarify the matter. A modern art critic blames Beato Angelico for the fact that his frescoes in the Florentine monastery of San Marco are not linked to the architectural context 72 ; but Beato Angelico wrote with the monk in mind, who, while engaging in “divine thinking,” is positively obliged not to see the walls around him and to concentrate entirely on the sacred image, as it were, drawing him into himself and withdrawing him from physical space. With such a super-task, breaking the connection between the fresco and the wall, the aesthetic denial of this connection is a meaningful moment, moreover, a necessary one. It is very important that Angelico did not paint the church, where everyone gathers, but tiny cells and a monastic corridor, where, in cramped, home-style, the closed life of “their own” goes on; this is again what we have called the esoteric artlessness. (The chapel of Pope Nicholas V in the Vatican - for the "peace" - he painted in a different way.) The parallel with Ephraim is thus sociologically justified; brothers in the order for the Florentine Dominican - the same as the "daughters of the Covenant" for the deacon of Edessa.

And this parallel sheds additional light on the comparison of Ephraim with his Greek-speaking colleagues, helping to clarify what remains unclear in the too summary characterization of the two poetics. Indeed, when we talk about specific characters in the history of literature, the reality of which, like any reality, does not indulge us with such pure, fully revealed, uncomplicated contrasts as those found in the field of general concepts, we cannot do without questions. . Is it really a Christian hymnographer of the Greek language, like the same Roman the Melodist, who directly served cult needs, did not set himself the same task of involving the listener in "God-thinking"? Of course I did. Why, then, is his poetics, aspiring to the biblical model, in many respects close to the poetics of Ephraim, retains, however, two most important constitutive moments that are opposite to the very essence of the “prophetic” line: firstly, the rhetorical-logical development of the theme; secondly, a rhetorical craving for “visibility” ( ένάργεια ), that is, to ensure that everything is “presented before the eyes” in the most picturesque way possible 73? There seem to be two answers to this question that complement each other. The first answer is: due to the specific possibilities and tendencies, specific "energies" present in the composition of the Greek language - whether by its linguistic nature or under the influence of millennia of rhetorical processing - but absent from the composition of the Syriac language 74. In this plane, the difference between Ephraim and Roman is a historical and cultural difference between the Near East and the Mediterranean: Ephraim is "east" of Roman. But for the second answer, we will return to our parallel and say: Romanus worked differently than Ephraim, in much the same way that Beato Angelico worked in a Vatican chapel differently than in a Florentine monastery, introducing pictorial equivalents of rhetoric - the monumentality of architectural backgrounds, the rationalism of perspective developments, the sequence of decorative design 75, - which were only a hindrance to him while he turned to his brother. (If our comparison is “lame”, it is only in so far as the atmosphere of Syrian Christianity in the 4th century, still relatively close to the spirit of the early Christian communities, and Constantinople, that is, metropolitan, imperial Christianity in the 6th century, in the era of Justinian, differ more significantly than the atmosphere San Marco and the Vatican in the same 15th century; but the signs in which they differ are more or less the same.) On this plane, the difference between Ephraim and Roman is a sociological difference between microsociety and ceremonial: Ephraim is “more intimate” than Roman.

And now it's time to consider the principle of Ephraim's poetics, which we called improvisational, in concrete manifestations.

One of Ephraim's hymns is dedicated to the mother of the seven martyrs of the Old Testament faith, whose exploits are mentioned in the Second Book of Maccabees 76 . Both a Greek and a Latin Christian poet of late antiquity or the Middle Ages, approaching such a topic, would feel obliged to give one of the two forms described in textbooks on rhetoric - either diegesis, the "narrative" of martyrdom, that is, the completion of the canonical story with extending details. 77 , or encomium, "a eulogy" to the martyrs, that is, enlivening the list of their virtues with metaphors, comparisons, etc. 78 ; it is even more likely that he would give a synthesis of both of these forms .. The completeness of the hymn in itself would be marked by milestones of the beginning and end - the introduction and conclusion, the function of which is also to summarize the theme. The introduction and conclusion are structurally isolated and opposed to the main text; the introduction in Greek kontakia hymns stands out rhythmically, forming the so-called kukuli 80 , the conclusion stands out intonationally as an appeal - either an admonishing appeal to the listeners, or a prayerful appeal to God or a saint, but it is the appeal, peroration, which is different from both the narrative and the laudatory word .

The first thing we must note in the hymn of Ephraim we are considering is the absence of an introduction, as well as a conclusion. Neither the opening nor the closing stanza has any formal features that would distinguish them and prevent them from being given any other place in the composition of the hymn. We emphasize - formal signs: for we have to see how the semantic lines passing through the hymn intersect in the last verse of the last five lines; but there is absolutely no verbal "gesture" that would indicate this point of intersection. The intonation of the initial and final stanzas is the same as in ordinary stanzas.

A small reservation is needed for what has been said: in the initial stanza, Ephraim says something from himself, although without any increase in his voice, without the posture of an oratorical "attack" - he simply uses the first person verb, which then does not happen throughout this hymn:

I will liken the mother of the glorious seven to a series of seven days, and a candlestick with seven branches, and a house of Wisdom with seven pillars, and the fullness of the Spirit with seven gifts .

Such an Ich-Stil at the beginning of the hymn (although not always in the first stanza) is quite characteristic of Ephraim; Here is how, for example, the VIII madrash about Paradise begins:

Behold, a verb ascends to my ears that amazes me; let them read it in the Scriptures, in the word about the thief on the cross, which very often comforted me amid my many falls: for He who showed mercy to the thief, I hope, will lead me to Vertograd, whose name alone fills me with joy ... -

and in the next two stanzas the poet goes on talking about his feelings, his perplexities:

I see the prepared chamber and the Tabernacle illuminated by sight,

I already believe that the robber is in that place, but the thought immediately confuses me ... […]

In this place of joy, sadness comes to me... 82

We return to the hymn about the mother of the seven brothers-martyrs. As we have seen, it begins with four similitudes. The stringing of likenesses is a technique extremely characteristic of biblical aphorism; but the Old Testament parable (mashal), as a rule, adheres to a symmetrical structure, in which one object corresponds to one likening, two objects - two likenings. Here are examples from the Book of Proverbs of Solomon: “Listen, my son (a), to the instruction of your father and do not reject (b) the covenant of your mother: because it is (a) a beautiful wreath for your head and (b) an ornament for your neck” ( Prov.1:8-9 ); “(a) Fear the Lord and (b) turn away from evil; it will be(a) health to your body, and (b) nourishment to your bones” ( Prov. 3:7–8 ). In the New Testament, a different, concentric structure appears, in which various similes are located around one, central object. An example is the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, which gives a cycle of parables about the Kingdom of Heaven: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; […] like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field, […] like leaven, which a woman took and put into three measures of meal, until it was all leavened. […] The Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, […] a merchant looking for fine pearls, […] a net thrown into the sea…” ( Matthew 13:24, 31, 33, 44, 45, 47). As is known, the Christian doctrine systematically insists on the unity of meaning for a huge number of symbols (when, for example, all the Old Testament images of an innocent victim or royal majesty “represent” the one and only Christ, and all images of natural fertility and the cult “presence” of God in consecrated matter indicate on the miraculous motherhood of the Virgin Mary); the content structure of the doctrine itself stimulated the formal structure of "concentric" assimilation and gave it the opportunity for unusually magnificent development. An example is the Akathist to the Mother of God, where a total of 144 likenesses are given to the same subject, that is, the heroine of the hymn. And later in the literatures, successively connected with the Christian tradition, the paradigm of the concentric structure retains its productivity:83 , in Catholic everyday life - some sequences, and starting from the era of the Counter-Reformation and also to the present day - litanies 84 ), but also worldly developments that secularize the sacral model (“Strophes on the death of my father” by the Spanish poet of the 15th century Jorge Manrique, in which the hero likened in a row to almost all the heroes of Roman history, a very common scheme of the Baroque sonnet 85 and much more 86 ).

Of course, Ephraim is far from the luxury of the Akathist to the Theotokos and is closer to the proportions of the Gospel cycle of parables just quoted. In the first stanza, as we have seen, there are four similitudes, to which a fifth is added in the next stanza: the mother is likened to a bird, her sons to feathers. The stanza has already been quoted, and the phonetic, punning motivation for assimilation has been analyzed (in the previous section of the article).

Now we are interested in the further movement of the image of the bird in the third stanza:

In the resurrection, the mother will soar,

and her loved ones will fly after her:

whom she carried in her womb,

whom she gave in the fire,

Yes, it will be possible to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.

Ephraim obviously really needs the image of death "on fire." The Bible speaks of various methods of torment applied to brothers: scourging ( 2 Mac. 7:1 ), cutting off the tongue ( 2 Mac. 7:4, 10 ), peeling off the skin and cutting off the members of the body ( 2 Mac. 7: 4 ), ripping off the scalp ( 2 Mac. 7:7 ), finally, frying in a frying pan, obviously experienced by one of the martyrs ( 2 Mac. 7:5 ), but possibly by others (cf. 7, 8), although this remains unclear. The picture of fiery death is more or less compatible with the biblical story, but does not follow directly from it. In Ephraim, it arises in connection with the image of a bird taking off as a metaphor for resurrection. The word "phoenix" (introduced into the Syriac language from the Greek 87) remains unpronounced; but it is simply impossible not to think about the phoenix. The notion of the phoenix, which was a popular symbol of the resurrection for that era 88 , is itself caused by the triple chaining of the associative connection: "fiery death" - "resurrection" - "flight of a bird". Along the way, another associative connection arises: the symmetry "in the womb" and "in the fire." For her, there are parallels in other texts of Ephraim, for example, in "The Debate of Marriage with Virginity", a hymn that has survived only in Armenian translation. Marriage says to Virginity:

For the fact that I carried you in the womb, I will be saved whole from the fire 89 .

Note that the symbolic correlation of the pangs of childbirth and the pangs of betraying children to a fiery death (that is, as if of their second birth in a future life), which underlies the third stanza, is not explained until the end of this stanza and is not pronounced in words, but remains implicit in order to obtain explication in the next, fourth stanza:

The torments suffered in their death were more severe than birth pangs; in these, as in them, she showed firmness, for the bonds of the Lord's love are strong, stronger than the pangs of childbirth and the pangs of death.

Of course, the end of the stanza means the biblical words: “Love is strong as death! fierce, like hell, jealousy; her arrows are arrows of fire; she is a very strong flame” ( Song 8:6 ). Thus, for those who know the Old Testament text, further development of the “fiery” imagery has already been given: the “fire” of labor pains and the fire of torture is opposed to the “fire” of love (mystical) and jealousy (spiritual). The horizon of the alleged meditative act includes, presumably, the “fieryness” of angels 90 , as well as the biblical saying that likens the very source of love and jealousy to fire: “For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God” ( Deut. 4:24). But all this is offered to the listener or reader only in hint. Ephraim once again acts as in the third stanza with the image of a phoenix and in the same place with likening birth pangs to fire; he refrains from directly calling spiritual love and jealousy "fire", only suggesting, suggesting to the imagination this image with the help of a fairly clear allusion to the Old Testament text, but leaving the likeness unrevealed - as we will see, in order to, in one stanza already without any clarification to introduce the metaphor of spiritual "fire" as a matter of course.

But before this, the fifth stanza flows in, interrupting the movement of the theme of fire for a while:

The mother did not tolerate that the youngest of all remained like a staff of her gray hairs, but she broke the staff of her gray hairs; she who was victorious in her sixth son was not defeated in the seventh.

Here, it seems, there is nothing special to note, except for the exemplary clear antithetical structure that organizes the text in the entire volume of the stanza. The antithetical structure itself is also characteristic of the Middle Eastern, including the biblical, tradition (the so-called parallelismus membrorum), and of the technique of ancient rhetoric; but its specific appearance in these historical and literary areas is different. And if the second antithesis of the stanza (“she who won in her sixth son was not defeated in the seventh”), perhaps, without significant changes, can be mentally transferred to the zone of Greek-language literature, which focuses on rhetorical training, then with the first antithesis (“... remained, as the staff of her gray hairs, but she broke the staff of her gray hairs”) such an experiment fails. Two immediately following each other rhythmic units, in the crampedness of which (non-transferable in translation) all words, except for a single varying verb, remain invariant, that is, they are repeated twice in the same order - such a device for Greek taste would seem an exaggeration; in Ephraim it is very common, and in Old Testament poetry it also has numerous correspondences91 .

Of particular interest is the imagery of the sixth stanza:

She tore her sons from her arms and gave them herself into the fire; multiplied fire and breathed in the spirit, so that their carnal nature would be transformed into the nature of angels - into fire and spirit.

Finally, a similarity is revealed between the material fire that burned the martyrs and the immaterial "fire" that burned in the martyrs. However, even here there is no indication of the allegorical nature of the image of fire as applied to zeal for faith; on the contrary, fire and "fire" are simply equated and are spoken of as the same thing. Which of them did the mother of the martyrs “multiply”? Certainly immaterial; but in principle it can also be understood that, repeating the feat of Abraham, who kindled the fire for the sacrifice of Isaac, in a fit of zeal she helped the tormentors kindle the material fire, especially since the words “blowing the spirit” following this suggest the image of a blowing mouth. "Spirit" - along with "fire" the second key word of the stanza; but it is necessary to know that in Syriac it is minimally "spiritualistic." Of course92 ; however, the Greek word πνεΰμα , which by Christian times already had a centuries-old history of functioning in the philosophical language of the Stoics, was largely reserved for more or less special theological use, 93 and even the Latin spiritus partly weakens the connection with its everyday, material meaning. "Wind" - in Greek άνεμος , in Latin ventus; "breath" - in Greek άναπνοή , in Latin spiramen or spiratus (also flatus - "breath", anhelitus - "heavy breathing", etc.); thanks to such single-root or foreign-root lexical "doublers" of the word πνεΰμαand spiritus are released for a "spiritual" meaning - if not exclusively, then still predominantly. The situation is quite different with the Syriac riiha – and the corresponding Hebrew gya/i. These are the most common, commonly used, central words for the concept of “wind” 94 (from which, by the way, the meaning “country of the world” develops, since for the ancient consciousness the countries of the world generally appear as “four winds” - cf. Apoc. 7:1 ). The semantics of "wind" is not found either in Syriac or in Hebrew 95word, not the slightest tendency to die out, or even to retreat into the background under the onslaught of "spiritual" meaning. These words are just as common for the concepts of "breath", "breath". But "spirit" and specifically "Holy Spirit" (for the Hebrew language - in the Judaic sense, for the Syriac language - in the Christian sense, that is, as the third hypostasis of the Trinity) are denoted by the same words (Heb. ), and in the structure of the vocabulary there is not even a hint of the distance between everyday and theological use. Behind these linguistic features stands that property of the biblical worldview, which could only be called mystical “materialism” only in a purely inaccurate and conditional way, and which in fact boils down to removing the boundary between the corporeal and the incorporeal in the “sacrament”.“Having said this, he breathed, and said to them: receive the Holy Spirit” (Gospel of John 20:22 ). Just as the water of baptism and the bread of the Eucharist, according to the Christian doctrine, being material, are identical with supersensible reality - they do not simply signify it, but are precisely identical with it - the physical breath (rba) of Christ is identical with the communicated spiritual charism (riiha). Let us note for the future that in a certain respect the concept of "sacrament" is comparable with the concept of "allegory" (since both represent a certain mode of conjugation of "invisible" meaning and "visible" materiality). The Syriac word rázanaja, meaning "sacramental, pertaining to the sacrament", is often translated by specialists according to the context "allegorically" 96. Another question is whether such a transfer is ultimately justified. For the concepts of "sacrament" and "allegory" are comparable just enough to be essentially opposite. “Mystery” is “mystery” because it is not an “allegory”, that is, not an allegory: not a distance and a gap between a thing and meaning, but their incomprehensible identity.

The poetics of the "sacrament" requires images that are downright shocking in their concreteness, dense materiality (although not too "plastic", that is, visual - you can be inside the "sacrament", but you cannot look at it from the outside, at a distance). We have just seen the mother of the martyrs "blowing the spirit" into her sons, as if blowing on them from her mouth. In another hymn, we see Ephraim himself with his mouth open - opening his mouth to receive the Eucharist turns out to be simultaneously opening the "mind" to receive inspiration:

Lord, it is written in Your Book: "Open your mouth, I will fill it" 97 . Behold, Lord, the mouth of Your servant and his mind are open to You! Lord, fill them with the fullness of Your gift, so that I may sing Your praise in accordance with Your will. 98

The word “gift” (in Syriac mawhabta) here means absolutely equally the material Eucharistic substances and the immaterial gift of “understanding”: the mouth is filled, and the mind is filled just as concretely, as if bodily.

At the end of the same hymn, after long reflections on the hierarchy of meanings in worldly and transcendental being, that is, over rather abstract and “mental” objects, we are again returned to the same imagery:

Behold, Lord, my hands are filled with crumbs from Your table, and there is no more room left in my bosom for anything! I bow my knees before You: keep Your gift with You, keep it in Your bins in order to bestow upon us again! 99

However, it is time for us to end this protracted digression and continue our analysis of the sixth stanza of the hymn about the mother of the brother martyrs. Behind this stanza , as well as the fourth, there is an Old Testament reminiscence - this time an allusion (again unspoken) to Psalm 103/104 , 3-4 : » . The assimilation of the nature of angels to the nature of fire and wind - the most subtle, lightest and most mobile elements - is a motif common to the Old and New Testaments, to Christian literature in various languages 100. But the absence in the very composition of the lexical stock of the distance between the “spirit”, and hence the “angel”, and the “wind” is a linguistic premise common to Hebrew and Syriac figurativeness. Here Ephraim once again stands very close to the biblical source.

The next, seventh stanza is a turning point; with it begins instructions to the virgins, which do not seem to follow from the general theme of the hymn, but are imperiously demanded by the situation of Ephraim as a mentor of the “daughters of the Covenant”. It is important for the poet to say a word directly to his girls, and he resolutely turns onto the path he desires, not at all caring about the rhetorical harmony of the composition, which would disturb his Greek counterpart.

To begin with, he needs to call them to humility and a shameful look at themselves. According to the peculiarities of the spirit of Syrian Christianity, there was a real danger that the "sons of the Covenant" and "daughters of the Covenant" would look upon themselves as the only true Christians. Let us recall that Manichaeism, which granted the status of a full member of the community only to an ascetic, arose from the material of Syrian Christian or near-Christian sectarianism 101 . The mother of seven sons-martyrs is suitable for putting to shame the possible pride of the “daughters of the Covenant” precisely because she herself ascended to such a height of sacrificial self-giving, being not a virgin, but a matron of many children. Ephraim contrasts them with the “foolish virgins” of the Gospel parable (Gospel of Matt. 25:1–12) is a prototype of virgins, who by improper behavior destroy the fruit of their own asceticism and excommunicate themselves from salvation:

Our virgins will be judged by a mother who has deprived herself of her sons: foolish virgins in their foolishness leave the care of their vanities, but accept the sons of vanity.

The motif of "foolish virgins" is continued in the eighth stanza:

Therefore, in the embarrassment of the Day of Judgment, the foolish ones who toiled in vain in their robes will stand naked; there shall be no oil in their vessels, and darkness shall possess their lights.

These two stanzas look like a simple digression, a departure from the theme of martyrdom. But both martyrdom and virginity are the voluntary surrender of oneself as a sacrifice of “burnt offering”, that is, in full and without reservation. To express this, the archaic motif of the slain maiden, which is represented in the Old Testament by the strange story of the daughter of Jephthah ( Judges 11:30–40 ), is very useful: in the wild, semi-pagan times of the “shofets”, the leader of the tribe of Israel makes a vow before the battle to sacrifice that creature , who, upon returning, will meet him at the gate of the house, but this creature turns out to be his only daughter. The church fathers were often worried about the folly of the Jephthah vow and the inadmissibility of fulfilling such a vow. But something else is important to Ephraim - courage and obedience, sounding in the words of the doomed girl:“My father! you opened your mouth before the Lord - and do with me what your mouth said when the Lord took vengeance on your enemies the Ammonites through you ” ( Judg. 11:36 ). Here the daughter of Jephthah is the prototype of a Christian martyr and at the same time a Christian nun:

The daughter of Jephthah gave herself up as a sacrifice, the youth loved the edge of the sword,

and in her blood the father made the sacrifice; but it was given to the simple in their blood to make a holy offering.

She is so close to her Christian sisters that Ephraim alludes to the "blood baptism" doctrine, according to which one who dies for the faith, being unbaptized, receives a sacramental washing from the filth of sin in his death. This ablution is contrasted with the ritual prenuptial ablution of the bride, which the daughter of Jephthah lost, as every maiden who leaves marriage for martyrdom or monasticism is deprived:

She neglected the bridal bath, but washed herself with the outpouring of her blood, and made her body pure; through the effacement of the washing streams, hidden impurity is destroyed.

In the next five stanzas, starting with the eleventh, the movement of meditative associations is determined, apparently, by two moments at once. Firstly, an intermediate link between the position of the mother of the family, which was the heroine of the hymn, and the position of the virgins, what are the performers and listeners of the hymn - the position of the pious widow, who was the mother of the family, but for the rest of her life she chose the asceticism of virginity. In the conditions of the early Christian communities, and partly also in the conditions of Syrian Christianity of the era of Ephraim, the "widow" ("true widow", see 1 Tim. 5:5-16) is a real dignity. Widows were chosen by testing their morals in the past (ibid., 9–10); we are talking about nothing other than strict proto-monasticism. But the gospel ideal of the “true widow” is Anna the Prophetess, who, together with Simeon, was honored to meet the baby Christ in the Jerusalem temple, “a widow of eighty-four years old, who did not leave the temple, serving God day and night with fasting and prayer” (Gospel of Lk. 2 :37 ). Secondly, a common feature by which one can compare the calling of a martyr and the calling of a virgin is the undivided wholeness of the sacrificial will to self-giving. It is Anna the Prophetess Ephraim who chooses as a model of such integrity of will. We quote (with the omission of the refrain) two stanzas dedicated to her:

Anna the Prophetess spent sixty years without despondency in the holy temple, betraying herself to God after the death of her husbands; left a widow, his soul

betrothed the incorruptible Bridegroom. […]

She loved the Lord instead of her husband, she served the Lord in the house of her Lord; renouncing her bonds, she gave herself up to the Lord, and He made her free.

Already at the end of the twelfth stanza, as we see, the theme of human freedom arises, as if his “sovereignty”, his, speaking in the special theological language of Ancient Russia, “autocracy” (Greek αύτεξουσία, Sir. sultana, also salitUta and msaltuta - the same Semitic root, as in the Arabic title "Sultan"), that is, royal calling to an act of will, to choice. This freedom is twofold: firstly, freedom of choice, which gives a person a chance to submit to God not as a supreme power, but voluntarily and voluntarily, out of love; secondly, freedom after the (right) choice, freedom from sin, "freedom to the glory of the children of God" ( Rom. 8:21). All this in itself is a general patristic orthodox doctrine. However, if in the Latin West the controversy with Pelagius prompts Augustine to emphasize the moment of "grace" and determining "predestination", and Greek theology, invariably recognizing free will, is still predominantly occupied with other problems, then Syrian theologians speak of the "autocracy" of man with special emphasis 102 . Ephraim devotes the thirteenth and fourteenth stanzas to the question of free will:

By free will, as her Lord, she accepted God, who did not compel her;

God has entrusted all freedom to us , so that we entrust our freedom to Him and become heirs of His Kingdom.

As long as the free will of people listens only to itself, remains a slave; when he entrusts himself to God, he truly becomes completely free; For the Lord's dominion is good.

The concluding words of the fourteenth stanza once again outline the key concept, which is to be the center of a long, detailed reflection; in a whole ten stanzas - from the seventeenth to the twenty-sixth, we will talk about the correct choice of the will, recognizing "good" and distinguishing it from "evil". But the movement of meditation is interrupted again. Saying goodbye to the image of Anna the Prophetess, Ephraim wants to imprint with possible energy in the imagination of his maidens this example of concentration and love for God, trusting their conscience with such a measure and reproaching the negligent and uncollected; the fifteenth and sixteenth stanzas are devoted to this:

Anna loved her God, and served Him in His house, and contemplated His beauty unceasingly, never turning her eyes away from Him, not being satisfied with the vision of His face.

And

But the virgins of Christ, alas, wander outside their homes, and in their abode are distracted by their minds; the body in the gate, but the soul is not there, lazily outlive their life.

Turning from stanza seventeen to the theme of choosing the true "good", Ephraim finally returns to the plot of the martyrdom of the seven brothers, which, as we remember, was left even after the sixth stanza - ten stanzas earlier. Actually, all seven were faced with a choice, and the biblical story gives the words of the first six brothers, summarizing the choice of each of them ( 2 Mac. 7:2, 8-9, 11, 14, 16, 18-19). Why is Ephraim in a hurry to immediately move on to choosing the last, younger brother? Firstly, the contrast between the young age of the martyr and the firmness of his mind and will is not only especially touching, but also especially edifying, opening up the possibility of reproach: there is no justification for weakness in adulthood if the youth has conquered weakness in tender years! Secondly, according to the biblical story, only the younger brother was not only intimidated, like others, but also flattered with temptations: “Antiochus […] convinced the youngest, who still remained, not only with words, but also with oaths that enrich him and make him happy if he departs from the laws of his fathers, that he will have him as a friend and entrust him with honorable positions ” ( 2 Mac. 7:24). This brings the situation of a martyr closer to that of an ascetic and a virgin, normally tempted not by threats, but by temptations. But the martyr also has a cruel threat in front of him, which especially sharpens his choice:

Oh, marvelous athlete of God, venerable son of Samonin! Testing the strong, the tyrant placed him between tortures and baits, between bliss and the bitterest evils.

An evil king promises “bliss” (tuba), “good” (tUbta), but his promises are lies, for evil cannot be a source of good. And this conclusion is also true in its inverted form: the sorrows given by God are served for good, because goodness cannot be a source of evil. The criterion for distinguishing, recognizing good and evil should be the thought of the source of both:

Again and again the tyrant promises him good; but how can good be given who is wholly deprived of good? In his very good he was evil, and his blessings brought grief.

[…]

Seeing that the sufferers were protected against the evil caused by them, the evil one changed his intention: protecting in order to harm, he promised good things, but through his blessings he would cause evil.

As soon as the murderous Father of Lies, even when he presents himself as good, we should understand that God is good even then when He gives evil, and leads us to bliss through sorrows.

At the end of the nineteenth and twentieth chapters, another criterion is outlined - the idea of \u200b\u200bgoal. Any good must be evaluated depending on whether it leads a person to his goal, that is, the “highest good” (and then it remains good even with the appearance of evil), or leads away from the “highest good” (and then turns into evil) . The correct choice is correct insofar as the “highest good” is chosen in it. This is the theme of the twenty-first stanza:

The evil one covered himself with a mask, so that he could present himself as good and deprive the sufferers of the highest good; but they chose to endure evil, so that they would not deprive themselves of the highest good.

Curiously, it refers to the “sufferers,” that is, to all seven brothers; but already in the next stanza, the only hero will again be only the younger brother. We have to see what opportunity Ephraim is giving up. The biblical text (which originated in the Hellenistic era, in Greek and not without the influence of Greek rhetorical models) provides a visual, dramatized unfolding of the plot through the sequence of the choice and martyrdom of each of the brothers, culminating in the choice and martyrdom of the younger brother. One can imagine what Roman Sladkopevets would do with this compositional scheme , how he would carefully preserve it in its harmony, enriching it with details, that is, increasing its visibility. Ephraim is not interested in either the visibility of the detail or the harmony of the composition.

His "thinking" continues on its way. The martyr, having made the right choice, accurately separating good from evil and essence from appearance, deserves praise primarily for his mind. A mature mind is characteristic of an old man, but a young man shows it; amazement before this is a common place, equally characteristic of Syriac and Greek literature of patristic times 103 . “I see that you, although young in years, are already an old man in mind” 104 - these words have varied in hagiography and hymnography countless times. It is easy to see why the emphasis on free will logically leads to a kind of "intellectualism" (in no way connected with what is usually called rationalism): if a person's choice is free, every vice and sin, any licentiousness and laziness, any disobedience and apostasy is an error in choice, a miscalculation, an incorrectly taken angle to the guidelines of being, that is, stupidity. A “fool” (nalpal), and not a “villain” or something like that, is called by the biblical text of one who “said in his heart: there is no God” (psalm 13/14, 1; in the synodal translation - “fool” ). In the semantics of the single-rooted Hebrew word rfbalah, the meanings of “foolishness” and “sin” coincide without a trace: sin as stupidity and stupidity as sin 105 . New Testament , coming into conflict with the specific "intellectualism" of the scribes and Pharisees, rejecting "carnal" and "worldly" wisdom as false ( 1 Cor. 1:18-29 ), glorifying the mystery of God, hidden from the "wise and prudent" and revealed to babies (Gospel ofOK. 10:21 ), holds in principle the view of sin as stupidity, and the right choice - as an act of the mind, "prudence". The wisdom of the world and the flesh is so thin that it is stupid, “enveloped”. The image of souls coming to salvation is “wise” virgins, the image of souls perishing is “foolish” virgins (Gospel of Matt. 25:1-12 ).

Believers need to be smart, “wise as snakes” (ibid., 10, 16). And when Ephraim praises the martyr, who acted very recklessly from the worldly point of view, precisely for his prudence, he fully stands in the biblical tradition.

Stanzas twenty-two to twenty-five deal with this theme:

The youngest judged in his mind what is good and what is evil, and the good that the tyrant offered, in accordance with the truth, considered it to be evil, and his evil to be good. […]

Therefore, awake and wise, he chose that which brings triumph; the young lad showed himself to be an old man of great experience in mind, and his mind was like a melting furnace.

And

He placed in his heart what was offered to him as a fire: he tempted the good that was promised to him, and he saw the curse in him, but through the torment he gained triumph.

He rejected the good that was promised to him, seeing a curse from him, and the tyrant was outraged by him, when the Evil One multiplied his torment, while the Good One adorned his crown.

The close of the twenty-fifth stanza is curious in that, for the first time in the entire length of the hymn, there is a direct verbal connection with the hymn's refrain, which reads: "Blessed is he who crowns his faithful!" The second time such a connection will appear, as we shall see, is towards the end of the last stanza of the hymn. The distance between the main text and the refrain, the isolation of the refrain from the main text is great. The game involving the refrain in the "action", in the system of dialogic replicas of the main text, so characteristic of the Greek-language hymnography of the era of Roman the Melodist(when, for example, the words of the refrain about King Herod: “his power will soon be destroyed,” returning once again, put into the mouth of the faithful Herod’s soldiers with denial), is alien to Ephraim. The tricks of rhetorical ingenuity, aimed at building unexpected connections between the unchanged text of the refrain and alternately substituted speakers, are unfamiliar to him. The opposition of stanza and refrain remains very simple, as in a folk song; and even such a slight underlining of the connection between them with the help of the word “crown” (killa) is not the norm, but a special case.

Stanzas twenty-six to twenty-eight are linked by the key word "violence" (qtira). It has three lines of thought. Firstly, it is a contrast between the worldly consciousness, which sees in “violence” a dishonor for the victim of this “violence”, and the victory of the martyr over false notions of dishonor and honor. Secondly, it is a contrast between the ordinary situation, when the young man is “violently” turned away from pleasures, and the situation of martyrdom, when the young man was “violently” forced to pleasures, but rejected them. Thirdly, this is the contrast between the behavior of the sinner, who himself carries out "violence" in relation to the moral-religious law, violating it for the sake of those forbidden pleasures, and the behavior of the martyr, who endures "violence" in order not to touch the forbidden.

He was not afraid of the dishonor inflicted on him by a tyrant who promised him honor; us from violence - both fear and shame, but the young man could equally despise violence from a tyrant and honor from him.

And

The tyrant compelled him by force, so that the inexperienced will taste comforts; Think of youth, even with a bridle from tasting pleasures, you can’t keep it, but a tyrannical young man restrained himself!

Well, if we are foolish from our Lord, forbidden to us

acceptable, violating the holy covenant!

That the young man, having conquered violence, rejected -

applying violence, we are looking for!

Obviously, Ephraim continues to keep his "daughters of the Covenant" in mind. The martyr in his image appears first of all as a hero of refusal, abstinence, self-restraint, that is, an example for ascetics and virgins. But there are other examples that are even more directly relevant. And now, after the twenty-eighth stanza, Ephraim once again and finally leaves the plot from the Second Book of Maccabees, recalling the martyrs of chastity - first biblical, then early Christian.

The twenty-ninth stanza recalls the temptation of Joseph the Handsome by Potiphar's wife, who slandered the chaste young man and sent him to prison for refusing to marry her ( Genesis 39:7–20 ). The key word here is "nudity" ("artelajUta); as is known, Joseph fled from the temptress, leaving his clothes in her hands, and therefore the very state of "nudity", which is usually associated with temptation, served as a victory over temptation:

Once upon a time, the young man Joseph found a dangerous cove, a great evil, fell into the network prepared for the young; in nakedness they sought to destroy him, but in his nakedness he broke the net.

The thirtieth stanza contrasts the situation of Joseph, when a woman acts as a seducer and persecutor, and a man acts as a martyr of chastity, the reverse situation of the feminine martyr of chastity Susanna, slandered and thrown into the danger of execution by lustful elders (deuterocanonical short story, Dan. 13 ) . Unlike Joseph, Susanna remains unnamed. An "animal" metaphor dominates the stanza: the elders are wolves, Susanna is a lamb, Joseph is a lion cub, Potiphar's wife is a heifer. It is interesting that early Christian art gives an exact parallel to this metaphor: the fresco of the Catacombs of the Pretextatus in Rome depicts a lamb surrounded by two wolves, and the inscriptions above her head and the head of one of the wolves read “Susanna” and “old men”, respectively.

Two wolves, weighed down by old age, were inflamed with a lamb in the garden; on the contrary, the lion cub, seeing the heifer in the bedchamber, fled from her, constrained her nature, restrained her smoothness.

“In the bedchamber” - these words become the link connecting this stanza with the next, thirty-first. The bedchamber is a secret place, and what happens in it is done “in secret,” but the feat of the martyr of chastity, accomplished “in secret,” does not cease to be, like any martyrdom, a “confession” of God’s truth, a “testimony” of it. But the key word that organizes the newest stanza is "fire": this is how the thread of "fiery" imagery, which played such an important role in the third and sixth stanzas, is picked up. This time "fire" is a burning lust that tests the steadfastness of a virgin, just as the stamina of a martyr is tested by the fire of torture. To be "in the bedchamber" means for Joseph to be "in the fire"; his martyrdom is "not kindled" in this flame.

In the bedchamber, Joseph was a confessor and secretly bore witness to God; the confessor bears his witness by those who endure the torment of the fire, but Joseph by those who are not kindled in the fire.

We are nearing the end of the anthem. On a formal level, nothing foreshadows the end; no intonation signals, no “but full!” – as in the Odes of Pindar 106. But the two themes that ran like intermittent stitches through the entire hymn - the theme of martyrdom, given by the plot of the hymn, and the theme of virginity, given by its purpose - almost met. Almost, because in the episodes of Joseph and Susanna, both themes appear in an unequal form. The chaste characters of the Old Testament are only prototypes of Christian martyrdom and Christian virginity. They were not martyrs, because their suffering had a happy end on earth. They did not take a vow of celibacy: Susanna is generally a matron, a husband's wife, and Joseph will have to marry Asenef. Now Ephraim needs examples of a different kind: examples of true martyrdom in the full sense of the word, comparable to the images of the mother and seven brothers, and examples of votive virginity that could be offered for direct imitation of the “daughters of the Covenant”. Such images

In the days of persecution, virgins of tender years entered into battle, and acquired a crown; there was a time of strength, and the spirit was strong. In them the truth has established itself, but in us the victory is ruled by a lie.

Having fallen into the hands of the enemies of purity, they kept their purity, having especially improved their reward - the crown of suffering and virginity, the crown: and each is doubly strong to the other.

The reader can be convinced of what he was warned about at the very beginning of the analysis of the hymn: there is no rhetorical conclusion, that is, no verbal “gesture” of peroration, which is mandatory for Greek-speaking kontakia, at the end of the hymn - just as there was no rhetorical introduction at the beginning of the anthem, "attack". There is no intonationally emphasized appeal to the heavens or to the listeners, the final “raising the voice”, giving the form a roundness, is absent. (Ephraim reproaches the listeners for the last time, or, what is the same, himself, not in the final stanza, but in the previous one, and this repentant and reproachful remark - "in us, the lie rules victory" - is decisively no different either formally or meaningfully from similar passages throughout the anthem, and cannot function as a closed form factor.)

But the act of meditation, the act of "thinking God" has been brought to an end, fulfilled, completed. This completeness is even marked in its own way at the verbal level - only in a specific way, corresponding to the poetics of Ephraim: with the help of key words. There are two points to note here.

First, once again, and much more expressively than last time (in the twenty-fifth stanza), the word "crown" (klila), thirty-three times prompted and suggested by the refrain, becomes the center of the stanzas themselves - both final ones. The moving forward main text and the cyclically returning refrain, calling to each other from a certain distance - please remember what was said above about the distance that the Syriac hymnography, unlike the Greek one, maintains between the stanza and the refrain - converged on the image of the "crown". In other words, this image, given in the refrain from the very beginning, is revealed in the subject matter of the main text and is already returned to the refrain from the main text. His verbal fixation is a sign of a solved problem.

Secondly, the concepts of “martyrdom” and “virginity”, which alternately constituted the theme of “God-thinking”, approached, moved closer to each other in meditative work, as if exchanging characteristics (martyrdom as a feat of abstinence, chastity as a feat of steadfastness), even preliminary conjugated during mediation of their likenesses (Joseph and Susanna as "prototypes" of martyrs and virgins, although not martyrs and not virgins), - these concepts are finally called by their proper names, pronounced. Moreover, they appear as combined attributes of the same persons - the virgin martyrs of early Christianity; they are fully conjugated with each other - and with the image of the "crown". The words "martyrdom" - "virginity" - "crown" dominate the entire verbal composition of the anthem; and now they are all together, all close. In the poetics of Ephraim, this is such a serious event,

If we, following the example of Ephraim, allow ourselves a pun, the line "a crown of suffering and a crown of virginity" is truly the "crown" of the entire hymn.

Notes

8Between "explanation" and "covering": the situation of the image in the poetry of Ephraim the Syrian // Eastern Poetics: The Specificity of the Artistic Image / Ed. ed. P. A. Grintser. M., 1983, p. 223–260.

9In the "Short Literary Encyclopedia" the concept of "Syrian literature" without any reservations is given a definition: "literature of the Syrian people in Arabic" (KLE, vol. 6, stb. 867. M., 1971). The article does not name any of the central figures of Syrian literature of the era of formation and prosperity - neither Vardesan (Bar-Daisan), nor Afraat (Afrahat), nor Ephraim Sirin(Afrem), neither Curillon nor Philoxenus of Mabbog (Xenia); the name of the mysterious early Syrian author Mara bar Sarapion is grossly distorted, and the writer and scholar-encyclopedist Gregory Abul Faradj bar Ebrey, who tried to revive Syriac literature in the 13th century, is mentioned unintelligibly, without indicating the era when he lived, and genres, in which he worked. In the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (3rd ed.), the section on literature in the article "Syria" generally begins directly with the Arab authors of the Caliphate era (BSE, vol. 23, p. 459. M., 1976), although a little higher , in the article "The Syriac language", you can read: "It has a rich literature of the 5th-17th centuries." (ibid., p. 450). All the more important is the work of the honored domestic specialist Nina Viktorovna Pigulevskaya (“Culture of the Syrians in the Middle Ages”, M., 1979), which, unfortunately, saw the light after her death.

10Syrian influence, which was most tangible in the field of plastic arts, in the VI-VIII centuries. reached Ireland via Spain, cf. Hillgarth 1961, p. 442–456.

elevenA stele erected in 781 in the Chinese district of Xianfu with an inscription in Syriac and Chinese, indicating the presence of a Christian community led by a Syrian bishop (of the Nestorian faith), is widely known. Numerous monuments testify to the presence of Syrian influence in Central Asia, cf. Pigulevskaya 1979, p. 23, 170, 221. As regards India, the history of the "Christians of St. Thomas" on the Malabar coast, dating back to the first centuries of our chronology, was invariably associated with Syria as a traditional metropolis (the Syrian rite of worship, etc.), cf.: Roe 1892.

12The heyday of Syriac Christian hymnography in the 4th century. almost two centuries ahead of the rise of the Byzantine kontakion (while the first steps of Latin hymnography, also dating back to the 4th century - Hilary, Ambrose of Milan , - led in a completely different direction). The first great hymnographer of Byzantium, Roman the Melodist, it was not by chance that he came to Constantinople from Berytus (modern Beirut). One can hardly deny (as the prominent Greek patrolologist P. Christou tends to do) the influence of certain genre structures worked out by Syriac authors on the very foundations of the kontakion genre; here we should mention madrash with its characteristic balance of exegetical-homiletic and proper poetic elements and sogita with its inherent possibilities of dialogic dramatization of the sacred plot, as if played out “in persons”, cf.: Dalmais 1958, p. 243–260.

13See: Pigulevskaya. Decree. op. With. 141–149; Copleston 1962, b. 211–238.

14Especially tangible in the Russian tradition is the influence of the eschatological imagery of Ephraim as the author of The Lay on the Last Judgment, cf. Fedotov 1935, p. 119 and others. However, the belonging of this work to Ephraim, as it was known in Greek and Slavic translations, is disputed. In any case, the "spirit" of Ephraim's work, the typical motives of Ephraim are present in it.

15In the 1836 poem "The Hermit Fathers and the Immaculate Wives..."

16As you know, the traditional Russian designation of Isaac of Nineveh is " Isaac the Syrian " (together with Ephraim the Syrian ), or "Isaac the Syrian". About Dostoevsky as an attentive reader of Isaac, who learned a lot from him, for example, for the arguments of the elder Zosima about hell as the impossibility of loving, see: Dostoevsky 1976, note, passim; and also: Grossman 1922, p. 45.

17Acts of the Apostles 11:26.

18It is characteristic that the Roman emperors, who were sympathetic back in the 3rd century. to Christianity and this partly anticipated the policy of Constantine - people from the East, like the Syrian Alexander Severus (whose mother Julia Mamea, when she was in Antioch, invited the famous Christian theologian Origen), and later Philip the Arab. As an ideology that opposes both Greco-Roman paganism and Persian Zoroastrianism and, insofar as it sanctioned the identity of the border peoples - both the Arabs in the south and the Armenians in the north, but above all the Syrians - Christianity replaces the Jewish faith in the zone of "buffer" states, which had the same functions. It is worth recalling the conversion to Judaism of the Adiabene (Syrian) queen Helen around 30, the situation of the Jews in Edessa on the eve of the Christianization of the latter (see: Philips 187b) and the spread of Judaism among the Arabian tribes, etc. About the specific coloring that Christianity received in the context ethnic identity of individual peoples of the Middle East, cf. sharp and really deep, although unnecessarily “prophetic” (in the spirit of the traditions of German idealism) remarks in the work of A. Dempf (Dempf 1964, S. 258–276). For the question of Christianity in Syria, see Barnard 1978, p. 194–223.

19See Philips. Op. cit

20See: Shifman 1977, p. 285–297.

21See: Loofs 1924. The latest attempts to reconsider Paul's political personality seem to us unfounded.

22The history and especially the prehistory of the most ancient translations of the Bible into Syriac (the so-called "Peshitta" and others) are, due to poor documentation, a lot of controversy, but, in any case, go back no less than to the 2nd century BC. Apparently, the Syrian consolidated Gospel of Tatian belongs to the 170s (see: Pigulevskaya, op. cit., pp. 116–117).

23Cf.: Black 1967.

24Wed quote from ps. 10, 4 in the first words of Roman's kontakion for the Week of Vaii (No. 16 according to Maas-Tripanis, No. 32 according to Grodidier de Maton).

25As you know, the opening words of the "Confession" are taken from Ps. 144, 3.

26After the discovery of private letters from administrative documents of the Roman era on papyri from Egypt greatly enriched our knowledge of everyday “koine”, a number of words and phrases that were considered biblical words can no longer be considered as such (cf.: Deissmann 1909, S. 37 –99). But with this necessary reservation, the concept of biblicalisms is not abolished, the problem of biblicalisms is not removed.

27See our translation of this sequence; Monuments of Medieval Latin Literature…, p. 189.

28In the famous letter 22, Jerome tells how in a dream the angels scourged him, and the Judge reproached: “You are not a Christian, but a Ciceronian!”

29Compare: Brockelmann 1928, p. &8–94.

thirtyFrom the vast literature on Bfrem we point out: Pigulevskaya. Decree. op., p. 130–140; El-Khoury 1976.

31Bardenhewer 1924, S. 342.

32Compare: Wright 1902.

33The third deacon in the history of early Christian hymnography is Jared, the hero of Ethiopian legends.

34Compare: Pigulevskaya. Decree. op., p. 132–133; Baumstark 1922, S. 35, Fufinote 2.

35Under the name of Gregory of Nyssa, a word of praise to Ephraim has been preserved (Migne. PG, t. 46, col. 819–850). A number of Ephraim's writings have come down only in Greek translation; however, their belonging to Ephraim is often disputed, and in general the “Greek Ephraim” is one of the difficult problems of patrology, see: Hemmerdinger-Iliadon 1950, col. 800–815.

36The influence of Ephraim's eschatological motifs is recorded in the alliterative poem about the end of the world "Muspilli" (end of the 8th - beginning of the 9th century, Bavarian monastic environment) and in the rhymed arrangement of the Gospels of Otfried of Weissenburg (c. 865, the circle of Raban Maurus). To this list should also be added the Anglo-Saxon poet of the 9th century Kyunevulf. See Grau 1908.

37See Andrae 1932, pp. 71–72; Beck 1951, S. 71, Fimnote 2; Grqffin 1968, p. 103, note 1.

38Baumstark Op. cit., S. 35.

39See Beck 1958, pp. 341–360; Barnard. Op. cit, p. 202–207.

40According to the hagiographic tradition, even the famous Christmas hymn of Roman the Melodist ( Η * παρθένος σήμερον ... - 24 long stanzas, united by a strictly logical plot unfolding, shining with careful rhetorical finishing of the syllable and impeccably sustained complex metrical organization) is nothing but a divinely inspired improvisation (motive , repeated in all hagiographic texts about Roman, for example, in the note Minology of Basil Π - Migne. PG, t. 117, col. 81; cf.: Averintsev 1977a, p. 448-449). This legend is very interesting to the historian of hagiographic topoi; but if the historian of hymnography can draw anything from it, then perhaps the most general (although, perhaps, not always superfluous) reminder that even such a finished hymn of Romanus is, in its internal assignment, not quite a “work of literature” in that sense in which the Aeneid is a work of literature, so that Virgil's poetry allows for an interest in the details of the psychology of creativity (manifested, for example, in Suetonian's biography of Virgil, ch. 22-24), while Roman's poetry does not (and one of the functions of the legend is block the possibility of such interest); in other words, Roman still stands between a "writer" and, say, a biblical prophet, although he is much closer to a "writer" than Ephraim.

41Wed attempts to introduce, for the convenience of the reader, explanatory headings for the psalms and chapters of the epistles in the standard German editions of Luther's translation of the Bible (missing from Luther); The contrast between the straightforwardness of the title and the unpredictability of the movement of thought in the text is quite instructive.

42As well as their followers in modern times - not only the ode painters of classicism, but also the young Goethe and Hölderlin.

43Gasparov 19806, p. 368.

44Ibid, p. 374.

45Gasparov 1980a, p. 354.

46According to the report transmitted by Sozomen, Ephraim wrote a total of about three million (!) couplets (Hist. eccl. Ill, 16, Migne, PG, t. 67, col. 1088 B).

47Compare, for example: Lehmann 1941, S. 71–74; Lewis 1967, p. 1–5.

48And also, perhaps, the charismatics of the early Christian communities, from whose spirit so much was preserved by Syrian Christianity in the time of Ephraim. New Testament texts speak of "prophets" as a universally recognized rank in the elementary church: "whoever prophesies speaks to men for edification, exhortation, and consolation" (1 Corinthians 14:3).

49The words of Amos: "I am not a prophet and not the son of a prophet" (Book of Amos 7, 14) - suggest the heredity of the prophetic dignity as the norm (cf. below note 44).

50This is the relationship between Elijah and Elisha (1 Kings 19:16-21; 4 Kings 2:2-14).

51Compare: Hempel 1939, p. 113–132; Sellin, Fohrer 1969, pp. 380–392.

52The everyday, social characteristic of the phenomenon of Old Testament prophecy includes, for example, the story about Saul: “When they came to the hill, behold, they met a host of prophets, and the Spirit of God descended on him, and he prophesied among them. All who knew him yesterday and on the third day, seeing that he was prophesying with the prophets, said among the people to each other: what has become of the son of Kisov? Is Saul among the prophets?!” (1 Kings 10, 10-11). It is precisely the fact that a person who has always stood outside the corporation (“the host of prophets”), by sudden inspiration, joined in their ecstasy, causes amazement; this was not normal. Another name for the corporation, emphasizing the sign of hereditary belonging to it (see note 41 above), is “sons of the prophets”. It is assumed to be generally understood, for example, in 2 Kings 2, 3: “And the sons of the prophets who were at Bethel went out to Elisha,

53On the opposition between the types of "prophet" and "writer", as well as on the significance of the very fact of the existence of a rhetorical theory for the constitution of the type of "writer", see: Averintsev 1971, p. 206–266.

54The problems of Hebrew metrics remain largely obscure. There are numerous attempts to explain deviations from the metric norm, as we understand it, by interpolations; but the very possibility of this kind of interpolation (the Greek hexameter interpolator will add an extra line, but not an arbitrary number of words) indicates that the norm was not very clearly felt.

55De Paradiso 1, 12, 5.

56As applied to texts, in the traditional notation of which there is no graphic division into verses, the concept of verse is conditional. Some substitute for highlighting our "line" is the asterisk, which marks the end of the column in the manuscripts of Byzantine hymnographic texts.

57For example, here is a diagram of each stanza from Roman's most famous Christmas carol.

58In modern Hebraic studies, attempts are being made to reconstruct the regular strophic structure in such monuments of Hebrew poetry as the “song of wisdom” in the Book of Job, ch. 28 (specially the repetition in verses 12 and 20 is considered as a remnant of a refrain that fell out in other places; it is generally assumed that the structure is obscured by later deformations), see: Fohrer 1963. However, these attempts remain purely hypothetical.

59This uniformity is sometimes interrupted a little; for example, in a stanza of twelve quintuples, the eighth quintuple may be replaced by a two-syllable.

60The complex stanza of Greek church hymns, like the complex stanza of Pindar, was, no doubt, connected with the shape of the returning melody, see: Wellesz 1949; Wellesz 1957; Wellesz 1966; Werner 1959.

61Aristotle, for another reason (in connection with the characterization of the ideal epic action), defines “whole and finished” as “having a beginning, a middle and an end” (“Poetics” XXIII, 59a 18, translated by M. L. Gasparov). We had to write about the importance of the phenomenon of the introduction for the ancient understanding of the literary text as an aesthetic whole, a form closed in itself, in another place: clear contours, unable to shrink or spread in violation of its measure ... ”(Averintsev 1971, p. 224).

62We have considered these functions in relation to Roman's hymns (Averintsev 1977a, pp. 210–220).

63Graffin 1968, b. 16.

64Examples of sound and word play are abundant in the blessings of Jacob (Genesis 49:3-27) and Moses (Deuteronomy 33:1-29), see: Sellin, Fohrer. Op. cit., S. 71.

65Such a reconstruction was carried out by a whole branch of Semitology in the Anglo-Saxon countries. The results of the work of several generations of scientists are summed up in the book by M. Black (Black. Op. cit.).

66The first ikos, the ninth and tenth hayretisms.

67For this system of paired conjugations, see: Averintsev 1977a, p. 234–236.

68One of the most striking examples is the Good Thursday hymn about the betrayal of Judas (No. 17 according to the edition of Maas-Trypanis).

69Xydes 1948.

70As is known, the word "demiurge", applied by Plato and the Platonists to the creator of the universe, was normally used in Greek when applied to the master. Another word - " ποιητής " - designates in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed God as the "creator" of heaven and earth; one of the meanings of the same word is "poet".

71“If the demiurge of any thing looks at the invariably existing and takes it as a prototype when creating the idea and potential of this thing, everything will necessarily turn out beautiful” (“Timaeus”, 28a, trans. S. S. Averintsev: Platon 1971, p. 469 ; .

72Danilova 1970, p. 163.

73For the principle of ενάργεια as one of the central characteristics of the Greek literary tradition, see: Averintsev 1971, p. 224–229. The means of creating visualization in Roman's poetics are still to be studied, but one can first note the saturation of the text with participial constructions that clarify the circumstances of the mode of action; for example, in the Christmas hymn about Mary worshiping the Christ child - “having drooped ( κύψασα ), she bowed, and for a - weeping ( κλαίουσα ), she said ...” (No. 1 according to the edition of Maas-Trypanis).

74For the difference between "Greek thinking" and "Syriac thinking", that is, the linguistic determination of thought and imagination in Greek and Syriac Christian literature, see Adam 1965, pp. 96-102.

75Cf. Argan 1955, pp. 101–109.

762 Maccabees 7:1-41. We are talking about the Jews executed for loyalty to the paternal religious traditions during the time of the Hellenistic monarch Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175-164 BC), in whom the church saw fellow Christian martyrs; in the Orthodox calendar, they are given a special holiday on August 1, Christian tradition calls them names that are not named in the biblical text.

77An example is the most characteristic and successful hymns from the cycle dedicated to the martyrs of the Latin Christian poet of the 4th-5th centuries. Prudentia "Peristefanon" - about Saints Lawrence, Eulalia, Vincentius, Cassian, Roman, Hippolyte, Agnes. A more or less pure dominance of the narrative element is observed in all 14 poems of this cycle.

78Such, for example, is the hymn of Romanus the Melodist to all martyrs (No. 59, according to the edition of Maas-Trypanis). This also includes small hymns, which are usually called "stichera" and "praises." A late textbook of rhetoric, already summarizing the experience of Byzantium in a different era, offers an exemplary encomium to the martyrs: “... Did you mention a martyr; then at the same hour he gave him a thousand crowns of snot, and with one word he concluded innumerable panegyrics and commendable words. Martyrs, if you don't know yet, by strength, veins, and soul are the essence of all Christian living. They are the Pillars, upon whom rage and ferocity have been squandered by the wrath of the Torturers inflamed. They are bright candles, which in the darkness of the Idol of service shone brighter than the Sun. They are the very Briarei, who fought with hundreds of hands, and still wanted so many bodies for themselves, for greater resistance to their enemies ... ”- etc. (Zlatoslov ... 1779, p. 22-23).

79Such, for example, are both hymns of Roman in honor of the 40 martyrs of Sebaste (No. 57 and 58 according to the edition of Maas-Tripanis).

80Kukuly - letters, “hood”, as it were, the “cap” of the hymn: the beginning of the kontakion or akathist, a special introductory stanza, connected with other stanzas (ikos) by a common refrain, but differing from them in a different metric structure, smaller size and specific content “prooimia” (either a concise summary of the topic, or an appeal to God or believers).

81Here and below our translation, according to the edition: Ephraem 1889, coll. 685–695.

82Hymn. De Paradiso VIII ("Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium", 174).

83Hymns built according to the formal model of the Akathist to the Mother of God began to appear in Greek hymnography at the end of the Byzantine era, approximately seven or eight centuries after the appearance of their model. In Greek usage, they are called ikos, reserving the name Ύ μνος Ακάθιστος for a sample, and in Russian - akathists; what the Greeks call "Ikos on Jesus Christ" is called "Akathist to Jesus Christ" by Russians. The composition of new "akathists" in a Russian provincial monastery at the end of the 19th century is the theme of Chekhov's story "Holy Night".

84As is known, even the texts of the earliest litanies ("Loretan", "To All Saints") were repeatedly processed over the centuries.

85An example is the sonnet of the German poet of the 17th century. Andreas Gryphius "An die Sternen", in which the stars are successively called "fires", "lamps", "diamonds", "flowers", "guardians", "witnesses", "heralds".

86In a poem by another German poet of the same era, K. Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau, the very first two lines ask the question: “what is the world?” There follows a long series of answers, each of which takes up a line: this is a meager and short flicker, fleeting lightning, a motley field of friction, a beautiful-looking hospital, a house of slave labor, a tomb covered with alabaster, etc.

87Brockelmann. Op. cit., 579b.

88A monument to this popularity is the poem about the phoenix, which came down under the name Lactantia (Russian translation by Yu. F. Schulz, see: Monuments of Late Antique Poetry, pp. 184–188).

89Ephrem 1961, h. 9.

90The Old Testament text says that God creates by his servants - "flaming fire" (ps. 103/104, 4). There are stories of angels rising in a column of sacrificial smoke, as in the episode of the sacrifice of Samson's future parents (Judges 13:20-21 ); angels are mentioned in the form of fiery wheels - ofanim (Ezekiel 1, 10). Christian hymnography and hagiography constantly speaks of the "firelikeness" of the angelic nature. Pseudo- Dionysius the Areopagite notes the affinity of angels with the fire of lightning and with the purifying fire of sacrifice (De coel. hier. VII, 1).

91A typical example is Exodus 28:29-30, cf. Buber 1964, pp. 1095-1109.

92Apart from the Semitic languages, Greek, Latin, and the whole family of Romance languages, this is the case in the Slavic languages; the exception is the Germanic languages, where the semantics of "spirit" is etymologically connected with the semantics of ecstatic horror.

93Buber. Op. cit., S. 1097–1104.

94Brockelmann. Op. cit., 718ab; Lisowsky 1958, S. 1321–1323.

95Down to modern Hebrew; see: Shapiro 1963, p. 567. On the contrary, the Greek πνεΰμα in the modern language has completely lost the semantics of "wind"; see: Horikov, Malev 1980, p. 634–635.

96Brockelmann. Op. cit., 722b.

97Wed psalm 80/81, 11.

98Hymn, de Fide Χ , 1 ("Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium", 154. Louvain, 1955).

99Same place, 22.

100Wed above note. 82; and also, our comments in the book: Myths of the peoples of the world, vol. I. M., 1980, p. 76–77.

101For this material, see: Barnard. Op. cit., p. 194–223.

102This deviation characterizes, as is known, the Antiochian school, which was, as it were, a connecting link between Syriac and Greek-speaking theology.

103Compare: Averintsev 1977a, p. 173–174.

104The words of the interlocutor of the child Simeon, the future stylite, from the life of this saint, see: Life of Simeon, p. 25.

105Lisowsky. Op. cit., S. 893.

106VII Nemean ode, fifth epod, trans. M. L. Gasparova, see: Pindar. Bacchilid 1980, p. 143.

107The luxury of pattern and depth of the heart: the poetry of Grigor Narekatsi // Literary Armenia, 1986, No. 1, p. 49–60; Grigor Narekatsi. Book of Sorrows. M., 1988, p. 11–26 (Monuments of the written language of the East. LXXVII).

108Chet Menaion for 21 months of Mekehi (cf. also the Life of Gregory of Narekatsi, p. 321).

109Per. L. A. Khanlaryan, to whom the author expresses his most heartfelt gratitude for her comprehensive and generous assistance.

4U2C

A Prayer Before Communion
by St Dimitry of Rostov

Open, O doors and bolts of my heart
that Christ the King of Glory may enter!
Enter, O my Light and enlighten my darkness;
enter, O my Life, and resurrect my deadness;
enter, O my Physician and heal my wounds;
enter, O Divine Fire, and burn up the thorns of my sins;
ignite my inward parts and my heart with the flame of Thy love;
enter, O my King, and destroy in me the kingdom of sin;
sit on the throne of my heart and [You] alone reign in me,
O Thou, my King and Lord.

(analytics)

2015 Calendar in English

2014 Calendar in Italiano

QUOTES from around
"God loves us more than a father, a mother, or a friend can love, or whoever else, and even more than we ourselves can love ourselves" (St. John Chrysostom)
+ + +
"Do not skip the occasion to pray for any man by his asking or by the asking to pray for him by his kin, friends, fans or acquaintances. The Lord looketh with favor at a prayer of our love and at our daring before Him. In addition, a prayer for others is also very useful to the one praying for others: it cleanses the heart, strengthens the faith and the hope in God and warms up love of God and neighbor." (St. John of Kronstadt)
+ + +
"Persecutions and embarrassment are useful to us, for they strengthen the faith" (St. Nikon Belyaev, the Elder of Optina)
+ + +
"A disciple of Christ is only then carrying his cross right, when one acknowledges that namely the sorrows sent to him, and no others, are necessary for one's formation in Christ and [for one's] salvation" (St. Ignatius Brianchaninov)
+ + +
"There is an external cross – it lies on the breasts. These are sorrows, misfortunes, privations, illnesses, attacks, slandering. There is an internal cross – selflessness with self-mortificaiton, i.e. the fight with oneself, ruthless fight with oneself. There is a spiritual cross, God's or Divine [one] – the crucifixion on God's will" (St. Theophan the Recluse)
+ + +
"Do not be like a horse that can be ridden by any person or demon. Be serious, firm and steadfast" (St. Serafim Sobolev)
+ + +
"Remember of your sins and you will be assured that you are always worthy of punishment" (St. Serafim Sobolev)
+ + +
"It is namely repentance, which reaches its fullness in deep lamenting, and couples with the revelation of thoughts, that opens up the spiritual eyes, making them capable of seeing God's greatness" (Metr. Hierotheos of Nafpaktos goo.gl/6EM7YB in Russian)
+ + +
"The Church is no gathering of holy persons but a crowd of sinners" (St. Ephraim the Syrian)

Orthodoxy

(Gr., Ὀρθοδοξία).

The etymology of this word is more complex and controversial than most think. It is made up of two Greek words, ὀρθός and δόξα. The first word, orthos, means “right,” “correct,” or “straight.” While the second word, doxa, means “glory,” it has also been used in historical forms of Greek to express thought, belief, opinion and even anticipation. Orthodoxy, therefore, refers to correct belief, correct thought or thinking, and, by extension—as the Church Fathers often use it—rightness of confession or faith. Although amateur etymologists, who do not understand or take into account the development of the Greek language, often overlook or deny this fact, it also means rightness or correctness in worship, by virtue of its modern meaning of “glory”; i.e., the proper way to glorify (or worship) God."

+AC

Свети Царствени Новомъченици
St.St. Royal Newmartyrs Otpevanie
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B1z8IX4I98nkNWU3YTFhNWUtYmQ3My00NmE1LThmNjEtM2RkNzc3NmU5ZmRm&hl=en&authkey=CMarmqoJ

Otpevanie of Br. Jose (Joseph) Muñoz-Cortes (in monasticism named Ambrose)
1997

Брат Иосиф
2012 [1:33]

Optina New-Martyrs
1993

EQUATION OF POWERS
[EQUATION OF ENERGIES]

... Let no man, therefore, imagine that we argue about times, months, and days – or suffer privations and persecutions for the sake of full moon and equinoxes (cf. Col. 2:16). To us, the Great Indiction [Cycle], the Julian Calendar, and the Orthodox Paschalion are not one system of measuring time among many others. They are the fruit of the collective genius and work of a number of anonymous champions of science and Faith, an integral part of the precious heritage of our universal Church Tradition, to which the Holy Orthodox Church holds firm, proclaiming its Good Tidings to the world.

[INSPIRED WORDS (about THE CHURCH CALENDAR OF THE FATHERS...) – from the Introduction to the 1994 Church Calendar of the Orthodox Old Calendar Church of Bulgaria – by Bishop Photii of Triaditsa] (as translated and printed in “Orthodox Tradition” Volume XII, Number 4, 1995)

РАВЕНСТВО НА СИЛИТЕ [РАВЕНСТВО НА ЕНЕРГИИТЕ]

... И така, да не помисли някой, че ние спорим за времена, месеци и дни, че търпим лишения и гонения заради пълнолуния и равноденствия (срв. Кол. 2:16). За нас календарно-пасхалистичната система на Великия индиктион не е просто един от многото календари. Плод на гениалното съборно творчество на безименни подвижници на науката и вярата, тя е неразделна част от драгоценното наследство на общоцърковното Предание, което Светата Православна Църква съхранява и благовести на света!

[ВДЪХНОВЕНИ СЛОВА (за ОТЕЧЕСКИЯ ЦЪРКОВЕН КАЛЕНДАР...) – от Увода към Православен календар за 1994 г. на Българската Старостилна Православна Църква – от Триадицкий епископ Фотий]

St Vladimir of Kiev

Holy, holy. holy...
БъЛъ Тъ /Vladi-/ - велик прави, велик баща - т.е. могъщество, власт, владетел, намира широко лексикално разпространение - владея, владика, власт, validus/силен, могъщ/, die Gewalt/власт, сила/, valid/солиден/ и пр.
На езика на азите прабългари Владимир - БъЛъТъ МъИРъ означава “владетелски син”, “син на могъщия”.
In the language of the Azies Protobulgarians Vladimir - BuLuTu MuIRu means “ruler's son”, “son of the mighty”.

for you ... за теб...
for Love, за Любовта,
that keeps която ми
me going дава сили

защото как може малката песъчинка да не обича морето

for how could the little sand grain not love the sea

Пиша този блог за всичките си приятели и непознати - и особено - с уважение и възхита за Православните американци (което включва мнозина руснаци и други емигранти от традиционно православни страни, как бих могъл да не спомена тук брат Йосиф Муньос! (Кортес) - хора, които изпъкват- силно стърчат! ...), на които се възхищавам - за смелостта, разумяването, искреното и чистосърдечно усилие, осъзнатата им ежеминутна борба...

I'm writing this blog for all my friends and people unknown to me - and especially - with respect and admiration for the Orthodox Americans [which includes many Russians and other expatriates from traditionally Orthodox countries, how can I not mention here brother Joseph Munos! (Cortez) - people who stand out - protrude a lot! ...] whom I admire - for their courage, comprehension, sincere and pure-hearted efforts, ans their conscious minute-by-minute fight...

На тях им липсва спокойствието да са Православни по произход, обичай, да (си мислят, че) дишат Православен въздух - точно същите неща, които пък на нас тук ни пречат - пречат ни да постигнем това, което те вече имат - напълно осъзнатата действеност на Православни християни...

They lack the calmness to be Orthodox by descent, by habit, to [think they] breathe Orthodox air - exactly those same things that hamper us here from - are an obstacle for us to achieve what they already have - the fully aware pro-activeness of Orthodox Christians...

Това, което нас ни успива, тях ги подбужда към постоянна борба - и ги храни с увереността - със знанието, че Църквата е тяхна... (Един ли е само пътят - и възможно ли е да бъде определен от прашинката в крайпътния прашоляк?!...) 'Айде стига... Не ставай глупав - и извини злощастните ми усилия! /ВД/

What makes us dormant - prompts them to permanent fighting - and feeds them with the conviction - with the knowledge that the Church is theirs... [Is the path just one - and could it possibly be defined by the sand grain in the roadside dirt?! ...] Come on... Be wiser - and excuse my poor efforts! /VD/

9 юни 2010 г. / May 27, 2010 - you see!
празнува се venerated
Св. Иоан Руски St. John Russian

Жизнь в 100 словах: (Игорь Аглицкий)

Колыбель. Пеленки. Плач.
Слово. Шаг. Простуда. Врач.
Беготня. Игрушки. Брат
..Двор. Качели. Детский сад.

Школа. Двойка. Тройка.Пять.
Мяч. Подножка. Гипс. Кровать.
Драка. Кровь. Разбитый нос.
Двор.Друзья. Тусовка. Форс.

Институт. Весна. Кусты.
Лето. Сессия. Хвосты.
Пиво. Водка. Джин со льдом.
Кофе. Сессия. Диплом .

Романтизм. Любовь. Звезда.
Руки. Губы. Ночь без сна .
Свадьба. Теща. Тесть. Капкан.
Ссора. Клуб. Друзья. Стакан.

Дом. Работа. Дом. Семья.
Солнце. Лето. Снег. Зима.
Сын. Пеленки. Колыбель .
Стресс. Любовница. Постель.

Бизнес. Деньги. План. Аврал.
Телевизор. Сериал.
Дача. Вишни. Кабачки.
Седина. Мигрень. Очки.

Внук. Пеленки. Колыбель .
Стресс. Давление. Постель.
Сердце. Почки. Кости. Врач.
Речи. Гроб. Прощанье. Плач. ... 2001 г

pra-pra-pra
blah-blah-blah

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