Mor Aphrem — theology in metre.
He wrote nothing systematic and everything in verse: hundreds of madrashe on the incarnation, paradise, faith and the church, composed to be sung by women's choirs he trained himself. He worked in Nisibis until the Persians took it in 363 and then in Edessa, where he died in 373 after a famine relief effort. His Syriac has never gone out of liturgical use.
Ephrem wrote in Syriac at a moment when most Christian theology was being written in Greek, and he wrote almost all of it as verse for singing. His madrashe use paired images rather than definitions — the pearl, the mirror, the harp — which is why he reads as a poet to modern eyes and read as a theologian to his own church. He organised choirs of women to sing the hymns in Edessa, an unusual arrangement for the fourth century and one his biographers emphasise. He is venerated across the divide: the Syriac Orthodox, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Eastern Orthodox and the Catholic Church all keep his feast, and Benedict XV made him a Doctor of the Church in 1920.
The same ground, other faiths
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