Beauty will Save the World: Insights from Ephrem the Syrian -- by Sebastian Brock
Beauty in the Christian Life: St Ephrem the Syrian
Sebastian Brock
Delivered at Bose conference “Called to Life in Christ” – September 4, 2019, and adapted by permission for the website of the Institute of Sacred Arts, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary
Reflecting on the theme of beauty in the Christian life, there is much insight to be gained from St Ephrem the Syrian’s profound theological vision. Particularly as he applies this vision to Genesis 1:27—on human beings being created in the image of God, and the use of mirror imagery in this connection—it is possible to shed some light on Dostoevsky’s famous, but enigmatic, words in his novel The Idiot: “Beauty will save the world.”
Turning to the theme of beauty, as expressed poetically in his Hymns, Ephrem proceeds in four steps:
The starting point is the biblical text of Genesis 1:27: “God created human beings in his own image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
This means that the Beauty of God is also reflected in His image; thus Ephrem speaks of the “beauty” of the primordial Adam.
At the Fall, which Ephrem understands to be a freely-chosen act of disobedience to God’s instructions, Adam and Eve lose their “beauty” (the original “garment of glory” with which they had been created).
Following the Fall, God’s aim is to restore to Adam and Eve. that is, to humanity/human beings the Beauty of the image in which they had originally been created. Since, however, God has no intention to use any form of compulsion, the process of restoration requires cooperation on the part of humanity. Here Ephrem envisages a process of synergy, in the form of effort and askesis on the part of each individual human being, and grace on the part of God, which brings about the cleansing the marred image of God, in order that its original beauty might be restored – and once restored, this beauty will be the means by which the world will be saved.
In describing these four main stages he draws on images drawn from everyday life, in particular the putting on and off of clothes, and of looking into a mirror, and before proceeding further, it will be helpful to say a word or two about each of these.
The Imagery of Clothing
Ephrem and his fellow Syriac poets like to describe the entire span of salvation history by means of clothing imagery. Following a tradition that has its roots in Judaism, Adam and Eve – humanity – at their creation were clothed in “raiment, or garments of glory” (which could also be translated “garments of praise); these were lost as a result of their wilful disobedience of God’s command. Following on from the Fall, God’s entire aim is to restore to human beings this original “raiment of glory,” but ruling out any form of compulsion. In order to make manifest to humanity his intention and to reveal something of himself to humanity, he first of all allows himself to be “clothed in words,” or in language, in the Old Testament, where he allows himself to be described in terms and language that are totally inadequate as far as his true Being is concerned. Finally, at the Incarnation God the Word “puts on the body” – a phrase that is widely found in early Syriac writers and which renders the Greek esarkothe in the original Syriac translation of the Nicene Creed. At Christ’s Baptism he is conceived as having placed the “raiment of glory” in the waters of the river Jordan, ready to be taken up by his followers, at baptism. The garment thus becomes available in potential at every Christian baptism where, as a result of the sanctification of the baptismal water, when the Jordan’s water is, as it were, re-activated. The newly baptised are thus described as “putting on the raiment, or garment of glory.” At this initial stage the “raiment of glory” is described as being given “as a pledge”, and its full realisation will only occur in the world to come – provided that in this life the individual has preserved it in a state of purity and cleanliness, and has not soiled it through sin and wrongdoing. It is often compared to the “wedding garment” of the parable in Matthew chapter 22:
The First-Born wrapped Himself in a body
as a veil to hide His glory.
The immortal Bridegroom shines out in that raiment:
let the wedding guests, in their raiment, resemble Him in His. (And addressing his readers directly)
Let your bodies – which are your clothing –
shine out, for they bound with fetters
the man whose body was stained. [Nisibene Hymns 43:21]
The Imagery of Mirror
The other image from daily life, in which Ephrem delights, is that of the mirror, this being something that one is likely to look into every day. As with clothing imagery, mirror imagery has its roots in the biblical text where it is used in different ways by both Paul and James. At this point one needs to recall that mirrors in antiquity were not made of glass, but of metal, and in order to function properly they needed to be kept in a high state of polish, thus requiring effort on the part of the owner. Thus, for example, Ephrem explains:
One complains about a mirror if its clarity is obscured,
because it has become spotted, or grime has built up,
covering it over for those who look into it.
Beauty is no long adorned in that mirror,
blemishes are no longer reproved in its reflection. [Nisibene Hymns 16:1-2].
Mirror imagery is used in two main ways by Ephrem and the Syriac Fathers. According to the first way the mirror is represented as being outside the individual person, and is identified as being provided by some external entity, very often the Gospels. This, as we shall see, is how Ephrem most often employs the image. From another perspective, the mirror can be described as being internal: its proper function, achieved only when it is in a state of high polish, is to provide a true reflection of the divine image in which human beings are created. We will look at both of these below, the internal mirror and the external one, but first turning to Ephrem’s reflection on beauty.
On Beauty
On various occasions Ephrem, like Plotinus, describes God as “Beauty”, as it were personified. In the Hymns on Paradise Ephrem speaks of God’s “sublime Beauty,” or “the Beauty of his hiddenness,” only a glimpse of which is given to human beings, and it is this radiance of God’s Beauty which “makes people shine in various degrees” [H.Par. 9:24-25], depending on how much they reflect it in their lives. The “hiddenness of God’s Beauty” is revealed supremely in Christ. thus in the Hymns on the Nativity Ephrem writes:
The hidden Light descended and His Beauty shone out from the body” [Nat. 1:6],
and
In the winter, when all creation is downcast, Beauty shone out, giving joy to all created beings [Nat. 4:120].
Elsewhere Ephrem explains why, by contrast, the second person of the Trinity did not reveal himself on Mount Sinai:
Just as He was helpful in not manifesting His face and image on Mount Sinai
– lest He provide an excuse for paganism to depict Him erroneously for human beings,
so He further assisted by putting on the likeness of a (human) person
in order to manifest to us His Beauty, and that we might become aware of His comeliness. [Fid. 26:10]
Addressing Christ directly, he states “All who look upon You will be sustained by Your Beauty” (Par. 9:29].
Since Adam/humanity is created in the image of God, this means that Adam too, as long as he remained in the Garden of Eden, partook of the beauty of God. In his Hymns on Paradise Ephrem is taken up by “waves of beauty” to an ocean “in whose beauty he sees those who are even more beautiful – that is the saints – and he reflects on how much more glorious Adam should be, being “in the image of the Garden’s Planter” [Par. 6:5]. This primordial beauty, however, was lost at the Fall: “Free will rendered ugly the beauty of Adam since he wished to become a god” [Virg.48:15].
Not surprisingly, it is the fallen situation of Adam/humanity, and the ways by which this primordial beauty might be restored, that Ephrem is most concerned with. Two different aspects should be distinguished: first, the initiatives taken by God, and secondly, the forms of human response.
A precondition, as it were, for all God’s various initiatives in relationship with humanity is that any element of compulsion should be ruled out:
He is the Good One who, although He could have used compulsion,
making us beautiful again without involving any labour on our part.
He Himself laboured by all sorts of means
so that we might be pleasing by our own volition,
so that we ourselves might depict our beauty
with the paints that our free-will puts together;
whereas if He were to adorn us
We would resemble what someone else
was depicting and embellishing with his paints. [Fid. 31:5].
As we have already seen, one important stage in salvation history occurred when God allowed himself to be “clothed in words”, that is, allowed himself to be described in human language and terms comprehensible to us human beings. Such terms, Ephrem insists, are just metaphors which God uses as a means of communicating to human beings something about divine Reality. Frequently he warns against taking such language about God literally, and this applies too to the biblical description of Paradise: “Paradise has clothed itself in terms akin to you; don’t misinterpret them by taking them literally” [Par. 11:7-8].
Beauty, whether it be the beauty of God, or (especially in the Hymns on Paradise) the beauty of Paradise, or of the Pearl as a symbol of Christ, serves as a means of enticement, drawing a person in the direction of God:
Your beauty entices me on
to accompany Your majesty,
while your glory terrifies me:
whether to remain or to come,
I am overwhelmed by both of them. [Fid. 32:4]
In the previous verse Ephrem points out that, at a starting point, a person must have the right attitude:
Your fountain, Lord, is hidden from the person who does not thirst for You,
Your treasure is empty for the person who hates you:
love is the Treasurer of Your heavenly treasure.
It is not only God’s beauty, but also (especially in the Hymns on Paradise) the beauty of Paradise - “the beauty of which no mirror is capable of reflecting” [Par. 4:9], or indeed beauty in nature, such as a pearl whose multiple aspects provide Ephrem with material for a famous group of five poems where he explores its rich symbolism.
The Internal Eye and the External Mirror
But beauty, in order to attract, needs first to be seen. Here Ephrem explains himself by way of the images of the interior eye and the mirror: in both cases they need to be in a state of clarity and luminosity in order to function properly. Just as the physical eye functions by light, so the interior eye, or eye of the heart, functions by means of faith: in both cases, without either light or faith, neither eye nor mirror can function – with the result that beauty, whether physical or divine, cannot be seen. In order for either form of vision to begin to function, just a modicum of light or faith is needed: in the case of the interior eye, a bare acceptance that, beside the material world, there is a spiritual world, is sufficient as a starting point. The interior eye’s initial glimpse of faith then serves to increase that faith, and so there is a spiral-like progression in what the interior eye perceives: divine beauty is no longer invisible to the individual, but he/she becomes more and more aware of it and of its force of attraction, drawing the individual onwards towards God.
Turning to Ephrem’s other image, of the external mirror. Most frequently this mirror is the Scriptures, or just the Gospel. In a prose work Ephrem has a remarkable passage where he makes extended use of this imagery; this is worth quoting at some length:
You will do well not to let drop from your hands the polished mirror of the holy Gospel of your Lord, for it provides the likeness of everyone who looks into it, and it shows up the resemblance of all who peer into it. While it preserves its own nature and undergoes no change, being completely free from any dirt, nevertheless when coloured objects are placed in front of it, it changes its aspect, though in itself it undergoes no change: when white objects are set before it, it turns white, when black ones, it takes on their colour; … with beautiful objects, it reflects their beauty; with ugly, it becomes unsightly, like them. It depicts in itself every limb of the body: it rebukes the defects of the ugly, so that they may remedy themselves, and remove the filth from their faces. To the beautiful, it declares that they should be careful of their beauty, so that it does not become spotted with dirt, but rather, they should add to their natural created beauty with adornments of their own choosing. Although it is dumb, the mirror speaks; in its silence it cries out. Although you might think it is a dead object, it makes its proclamation. … Just as this natural mirror is but a figure of the Gospel, so too the Gospel is but a figure of the beauty that is above, which does not fade, and at which all the sins of the created world are rebuked. [Letter to Pubius 1-2]
Ephrem goes on to combine this image of the Gospel as a mirror with that of the interior eye: for those whose interior eye is luminous – that is, filled with the light of faith – the Kingdom of Heaven, which is depicted within the Gospel, becomes more visible:
There (in the mirror of the Gospel) the lofty ranks of the good are to be seen on high, there the raised ranks of the intermediate can be distinguished, and there, low down, the ranks of the wicked are marked out. [Letter to Publius 2]
Furthermore, at the Last Judgement, the mirror of the Gospel will function as the means of judgement, simply by reflecting back to each individual the beautiful works of the good, and the ugly actions of the wicked. [Letter to Publius 10]; the judge is in effect internal, in that the original hidden beauty of the image in which each individual was created rebukes all the ugliness, caused by sin, which during a person’s lifetime has built up. [cf. Eccl. 3:4].
In one of the Hymns on the Church [8:5] it is Jesus himself who is the mirror: reflecting the wording of Acts 7:55, describing Stephen’s experience just before his martyrdom, Ephrem tells his readers: “polish your beauty and gaze upon Jesus your mirror.” Jesus is of course the Second Adam, who is the true and unsullied Image of the Father. Although Ephrem does not expressly speak of the mirror as also being internal to each human being, his wording “polish your beauty” seems to imply this.
Conclusions
Considering Ephrem’s emphasis on beauty, and in particular the Beauty of God, together with imagery we hear of in Ephrem and elsewhere of the mirror the heart, one might describe the process of salvation along the following lines: created “in the image of God”, Adam/humanity in an unfallen state was able to reflect in the internal mirror of the heart the beauty of the Image of God, whose perfect form was in due course manifested at the incarnation in Christ. At the Fall, the internal mirror became corrupted and no longer functioned properly as a reflection of the Beauty of God; it then becomes further overlaid with the grime produced by sin in each individual. The coming of Christ, the Second Adam who is the very Image of God, along with the institution of Christian baptism, provide the means towards the re-polishing of the internal mirror of the heart: the state of this internal mirror of the heart is restored in so far as it now has the potential to function again properly, this being provided by the “pledge” of the Holy Spirit given at baptism.
The full restoration, however, of the mirror of the heart, so that it functions again properly by fully reflecting the image of God, is something that requires on the part of each individual baptised person the effort of continually polishing and re-polishing their internal mirror so that it once again reflects the divine Beauty properly. This process of re-polishing the mirror is nothing other than the askesis, taking on many different forms, of a life lived in Christ, a life which is one of synergy, involving the cooperation of the individual always seeking to act in harmony with the Holy Spirit.
In brief, one can say that salvation is achieved once the internal mirror of the heart is in such a highly polished state that reflects once more the Beauty of the image of God in which human beings were originally created. In this way, with the help of St Ephrem, we are provided with a key towards understanding what might be meant by Dostoevsky’s enigmatic statement the “Beauty will save the world.”