Blackwell Reference Online

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A remarkable volte-face has taken place in the last hundred years with regard to the scholarly opinion concerning Ephrem the Syrian. Just over a century ago the learned Cambridge theologian F. Crawford Burkitt (later Norris Professor of Divinity) simply could not restrain himself from making what now seem patronizing and blinkered comments:What has given S. Ephraim his magnificent reputation is hard to say … Ephraim is extraordinarily prolix, he repeats himself again and again, and for all the immense mass of material there seems very little to take hold of. His style is allusive and unnatural as if the thought was really deep and subtle, and yet when the thought is unravelled it is generally commonplace … it has no merit either of simplicity or of subtlety in the choice of words … Judged by any canons that we apply to religious literature, it is poor stuff … He goes on from symbol to symbol, and the points he emphasises are sometimes striking, sometimes preposterous, but always fanciful … His fatal want of intellectual seriousness helps to explain to us why his Church became strongly orthodox under Rabbûla, and yet sank permanently a hundred years later into heterodoxy and schism.(Burkitt, 2004, 95, 96, 104, 110)Clearly these opinions were well entrenched, for 70 years later J. B. Segal could write: “His work, it must be confessed, shows little profundity or originality of thought, ... log in or subscribe to read full text