Spiritual Senses

Christopher Buck, “Sapiential Theosis: A New Reading of Ephrem the Syrian’s Hymns on Paradise.” Journal of the Assyrian Academic Society 9.2 (1995): 80–125. 

ABSTRACT

A fresh reading of the Hymns on Paradise (HdP) discloses how Ephrem the Syrian reworked soteriological presuppositions and thought-forms current in fourth-century Syria to effect a transformation of the doctrine of theōsis (deification), freeing it from its substantive categories, to lay emphasis on divinization at the sapiential level. See, for instance, HdP XII.15, where Ephrem states that “the human person can become / the likeness of God, / endowed with immortal life [i.e. theōsis] / and wisdom [i.e. sapience] that does not err” (HdP XII.15, HyP 166). While the form of the doctrine with its anthropological considerations was kept intact, the manner of Ephrem’s affirmation of theōsis was tantamount to its sophistication, in what amounted to a reformulation of the doctrine itself. In Ephrem’s eschatological scheme—which exalts form over substance—body, soul and spirit are rarefied beyond physicality, while corporeality is maintained. Even the argument for the body’s afterlife existence—the instrumentality of the senses being required for the soul’s ability to perceive—is effectively undermined by the obviation or precluding of the senses in the soul’s immediate cognition of the delights of Paradise. This innovation lent Ephrem’s doctrine of theōsis a greater potential for realization, in which eschatological Paradise came to enjoy a more edifying immediacy among the faithful.

The Resurrection, therefore, in Ephrem’s conception of it, is not simply an “arising” in the sense of revivification. It is an “arising” in the sense of a spiritual ascent, in which the whole tripartite being of man is “raised” to new life and to new heights. In what manner may we conceive of this? In this present life, in what really amounts to a realized eschatology for Ephrem, “the mind ... is spiritual” and it is the mind in mystic transport, and, at the eschaton, something like the mind into which the resurrection body is transformed, that can attain the environs of Paradise and, by the blessing of its Creator, enter into its Garden. There is in fact the suggestion that the metaphors Ephrem employs for his portrayal of Paradise may be decoded. From HdP VI.6 and elsewhere, we may thus infer: Symbols of Paradise (Symbol = Referent): Bud = Heart; Produce = Rational Speech; Fruit = Words (Deeds, VI.11); Plants = Truth; Sweet Scents = Love; Blossoms = Chastity (VI.12); Beauty = Mind (VI.13); Flowers = Virtuous Life (VI.13); Garden = Free Will (VI.13); Earth = Human Thought (VI.13); Trees = “Victors” (VI.14); Treasure Store = Hidden Mysteries (VI.25).

Paradise and paradigm:

Images and ideas are the twin hemispheres of the religious mind. The bicameral interaction of the imaginal and the abstract focus the believer on the archetypes of belief. To give a more complete description of any religious worldview, concepts should be complemented by conceits. In Ephrem, the Church is imagistically conceived of as Paradise. Since it is an extended metaphor, its imagery is extensible. Individually and collectively, paradise imagery can represent different facets of church life and experience. The phrase from the Lord’s Prayer—“on earth, as it is in Heaven”—perfectly expresses both imagistically and ideologically the Ephrem’s artifice at work in the HdP.

Ephrem’s Paradise is at once ecclesiastical and eschatological. Its imagery expresses a paradigm of purity. This is a purity that “cures.” It cleanses the soul of the “disease” of mortality. It restores primordial immortality. Life in Paradise, in both worlds, is for the pure. The pure in heart are Christians who are sexually pure and morally stainless. On this point, perhaps Ephrem and Bardaiṣan might agree. In a quote from Theodore bar Koni, Bardaiṣan, in one of his lost songs, taught: “And lo, the natures, all of them—with created things they hastened, to purify themselves and remove what was mingled with the nature of evil” (Segal 1970, 38). Although Ephrem rejects Bardaiṣan’s creation myth, the pursuit of ethical purity in both systems is, in nonascetic terms, comparable. In fine, Syriac Christianity’s response to Late Antiquity is the quest for purity, in which chrism, baptism, and the Eucharist become the ointment, fountain, and elixir of immortality, while the imagery of Paradise ennobles the sanctified soul.

In my communication I examine the significations of the term πεῖρα, which can be encountered 20 times in the One Hundred Gnostic Chapters, being the key-notion in the closing considerations of four chapters (23, 24, 31, 32). The inherent intention is to show that Diadochus invests this word with an original use: it doesn’t have the usual signification of test, trial, temptation, but designates the experience acquired on different stages of climbing onto the spiritual ladder. For Plato (The Republic, Gorgias) and Aristotle (Metaphysics), it was the term ἐμπειρία which designated the experience gained through the bodily senses, leading to a kind of knowledge acquired by practice. For Diadochus, on the contrary, πεῖρα comes to represent the experience acquired through spiritual senses. It leads to knowledge of the truth, involving the ability to discern between the causes of inner sensations, ability actualized by noetic illumination. This experience accompanies the pilgrimage of the human being towards the perfection of the resemblance to God and can become manifest as initial experience of faith (ch. 23), of immaterial sense (ch. 24), of discernment between the divine and the illusionary consolation (ch. 31, 32, 33), experience of the gnostic or of the theologian (ch. 72), experience of two desolations (ch. 87), experience of God’s charity (ch. 91). The scope of my research includes also the analysis of the correlations between experience (πεῖρα) and charity (ἀγάπη), knowledge (γνῶσις) and illumination (φωτισμός).

John Smith (1618-1652), long known for the elegance of his prose and the breadth of his erudition, has been underappreciated as a philosophical theologian. This book redresses this by showing how the spiritual senses became an essential tool for responding to early modern developments in philosophy, science, and religion for Smith. Through a close reading of the Select Discourses (1660) it is shown how Smith’s theories of theological knowledge, method, and prophecy as well as his prescriptive account of Christian piety rely on his spiritual aesthetics. Smith offers a coherent system with intellectual intuition informing natural theology and revelation supplemented by spiritual perception via the imagination too. The central uniting feature of Smith’s philosophical theology is thus ‘spiritual sensation’ broadly construed. The book closes with proposals for research on Smith’s influence on the accounts of the spiritual senses developed by significant later figures including Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) and John Wesley (1703-1791).

Revision of 2015 PhD thesis (http://hdl.handle.net/2144/15615) at Boston University.