09/06/2026
Today we remember Columba, Abbot of Iona, Missionary, 597 and Ephrem of Syria, Deacon, Hymn Writer, Teacher of the Faith, 373.
Columba will be well known to many, but perhaps not so Ephrem.
The Collect for St Columba
Almighty God,
who filled the heart of Columba
with the joy of the Holy Spirit
and with deep love for those in his care:
may your pilgrim people follow him,
strong in faith, sustained by hope,
and one in the love that binds us to you;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Of Ephrem, Pope Benedict XVI described him as "Christianity's most important Syriac-speaking representative" — someone who "uniquely succeeded in reconciling the vocations of theologian and poet." Saint Jerome, writing twenty years after Ephrem's death, said his works had become so influential that they were being read publicly in some churches after the Sacred Scriptures themselves. Gregory of Nyssa called him: "The splendour of his doctrine and life illumined all the earth, for he is known in almost every place where the sun shines."
Like the Wesley’s many years later Ephrem recognised the value of good theology wrapped up in song and tune. And what Ephrem did in Edessa was one of the most creative acts of Christian pastoral strategy in the history of the Church.
He noticed that the heretical sects were spreading their theology through songs — through popular melodies that ordinary people, including illiterate Christians, could easily memorize and carry through their daily lives. Bardesanites had produced a particularly extensive body of hymns. The music was beloved. The theology embedded in it was, in Ephrem's view, poison.
His response was to take those same melodies — the ones Edessa was already humming — and compose entirely new lyrics filled with orthodox Nicene doctrine. He wrote teaching hymns (madrāšê in Syriac), setting rich theological content to the tunes people already knew and loved. He then organized and rehearsed all-female choirs to sing these hymns publicly in the forum of Edessa, giving the city both a liturgical experience and a theological education at the same time.
This was not merely clever. It was a form of catechesis that no treatise or sermon could replicate. Doctrine set to music that people loved became doctrine that people carried, remembered, and passed to their children. Sozomen, the church historian, credited Ephrem with composing three million lines. Even if that number is exaggerated, his surviving 400-plus hymns represent only what was preserved — a fraction of an output described by contemporaries as almost incomprehensibly vast.
