By Fr. George Dorbarakis
Venerable Ephraim was from the East, Syrian by origin. He learned piety and faith in Christ from his forefathers and lived in the time of Theodosius the Great. From his childhood he embraced the monastic life, and it is said that grace was poured out upon him by God. Through this grace, having written a great many compunctionate works, he guided many toward virtue and became an example of ascetic excellence for later generations.
Venerable Ephraim the Syrian is among the most well-known Venerables and Fathers of our Church, in the sense that he is known even by those who do not know him. What do we mean by this? One may not be aware that the quintessential prayer of Great Lent — "Lord and Master of my life” — is his prayer, yet one has certainly heard it, has perhaps whispered it himself, and may even have incorporated it into his own prayers. And this means that he has been challenged — and is challenged each time by this prayer — to live repentance as a struggle against evil passions: idleness, curiosity, love of power, idle talk, and to acquire the virtues of chastity, humility, patience, and love, through which one lives in the presence of God.
It is therefore no coincidence that his hymnographer, Saint Theophanes, on the one hand presents him as a preacher of repentance, and on the other as a “divine vessel of compunction.” As the kontakion and especially the oikos of the kontakion emphasize: “By your words and your deeds you rouse the slothful to repentance.”
Tears of compunction constituted the principal element of the Saint’s life, just as his writings caused — and continue to cause — tears of compunction. According to Saint Theophanes, “You passed your life blamelessly, washing yourself with your tears.” What made the Saint live in tears and have compunction literally as a constant companion of his life was his continual remembrance of death and the judgment that follows it. Indeed, whoever remembers his death with awareness, whoever keeps in mind that judgment follows, is the one who attains great heights of holiness, because he has a constant incentive not to sin. As Scripture says: “Remember your end, and you will never sin” (cf. Sirach 7:36).
And of course, the Saint did not live in a fearful — that is, a pathological — atmosphere. The fear of judgment did not function for him as a kind of spiritual terror that negatively distorts the soul and even the body of a person. Rather, this fear was the fruit of his love for the Lord — lest he fall away from His embrace, lest he lose His grace. “You were wounded by love for the Almighty Lord, and for this reason you spent your entire life in lamentations, O venerable one, crying out in amazement: take back from me, O Savior, the waves of Your grace, keeping it rich for me for the life to come.” The Saint asked not to have such abundant grace in this present life, lest it be diminished in the life to come. The chief characteristic of his life, therefore, was his deep eros for the Lord. This eros caused him to shed tears continually and to live always in expectation of his meeting with the Lord.
And we must not overlook that which enabled the Saint to live with heartfelt mourning and repentance, so as to remain in the love of the Lord: self-control. The Saint lived in unceasing self-restraint — the prerequisite for love toward God and for charismatic compunction — a fact the Hymnographer again highlights in the oikos of the kontakion through a specific incident. “Desiring to follow in the footsteps of the path of John the Forerunner, you withdrew alone from the world and dwelt in the desert. Seeing this, the enemy, the devil, stirred up a shameless harlot, thinking that with the ancient weapon, lust, he would overpower your courage and defile your purity.”
The incident is well known: the enemy, the devil, put it into the mind of a prostitute to seduce the Saint. She went and made immoral proposals to him. And he, undeterred and rather deeply grieved by her degradation, took her and led her to the middle of a public square, where he urged her to tell him exactly what she wished to do. When she expressed her astonishment that such things are not done in the middle of the street, she heard his reply: “How, then, can I do something before God, when you are ashamed to do it before men?”
Immediately our mind turns to Saint Joseph the All-Comely, the son of Jacob, who, when similarly tempted by his master’s wife in Egypt, spoke the same words: “How then can I do this great wickedness and sin before my God?” (Gen. 39:9).
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
