Silent Praise: Ephrem the Syrian’s Sentence Acrostic as Artistic Apophasis

AbstractOne of the earliest Christian treatments of negative theology appears in the mid‐fourth‐century poem Hymn on the Church 9 by St. Ephrem of Nisibis. This Syriac dialogue poem, in which the poet’s personified Reason and Love dispute the proper form of response to the transcendent LORD, charts a distinctive path across what was and continues to be a central, but nevertheless highly disputed, theological and philosophical concern: the sayability and unsayability of God. The poem has typically been interpreted as showing Ephrem to hold to a contrastive understanding of speech and silence. I argue that attention to two structural features of the poem, its dialogical form and its previously unrecognized sentence acrostic, shows that Ephrem instead articulates apophasis and kataphasis as always mutually implicated. Words, for Ephrem, are capable of saying more than what they state out loud. The poem is important, then, as an early and paradigmatic instance of a form of negative theology that some constructive Christian theologians have recently emphasized, but less often displayed in practice. Furthermore, Ephrem’s poem invites a reconsideration of the relationship of the theologian and the poet, as the creative capacities of poetic theology come more clearly into focus.