the New Pantagruel

The Early Syriac Poets and Cognitive Science

by Micah Hayes

A Look at Their Surprisingly Similar Views on Mind/Body Unity and Metaphor

“Who hath known the mind of the Lord?” the apostle asks; and I ask further, who has understood his own mind? Let those tell us who consider the nature of God to be within their comprehension, whether they understand themselves – if they know the nature of their own mind. – Gregory of Nyssa, from “On the Making of Man”

bout thirty years ago many philosophers began to grow weary of the systematic and objectivist traditions that were handed down to them by their modern predecessors. This was a time when contemporary French philosophy was well under way with people like Jacques Derrida questioning the very foundations of our systems of language and thought. It was a time when the word “metaphor” began to be thrown around quite a bit, often referring to something much more than a simple literary device. Perhaps these new ideas sent many young scholars into other fields of study that previously had been on the fringes of the intellectual community. These younger thinkers thought that truth, language, and meaning were far too complex to be contained in any logical equation. Since that time many of the fringe fields they delved into have matured into respected and important schools of thought, such as the development of the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science in the 1970s. Scholars like the philosopher Mark Johnson and the linguist George Lakoff felt that their predecessors too much resembled the Logical Positivists by claiming that language, meaning, and truth could be empirically defined and scientifically examined. The cognitive scientists wanted to examine meaning through a more fluid and organic approach that would avoid a strictly objectivist understanding of the world. They found metaphor to be essential in conceptual understanding, and they thought that the Cartesian mind/body split was a trap. Cognitive scientists think that the word “mind” is simply a term we use to describe ongoing and complex organic-environmental interactions between our brains, bodies, social and cultural traditions, evolutionary developments, and prototypes.

It was also around this time in the 1970s that the field of early Syriac studies began to flourish and become an important part of the academic community. This field had existed before, but it was during this time that people like Robert Murray and Sebastian Brock began to bring Syriac studies to the attention of Anglo-American academics. In the early Syriac thinkers, contemporary scholars found a view of Christianity that was almost completely Semitic and virtually untouched by the Greek tradition of thought–the Syriac view truly valued mystery, metaphor, and paradox, and took a different approach to the profound philosophical problem of the soul/body split. These ancient Syriac Christians were not Gnostics or Marionites or any of the other countless early versions of Christianity that were mostly discarded by the political and creedal systematizing of the third and fourth century church; instead, these Syriac writers maintained an orthodox position of faith.

Both the early Syriac poets and the field of cognitive science hold fast to a unity of body and mind, and both understand metaphor to be essential to our conceptual understanding. It may seem odd to bring together an ancient group of Christian writers and a contemporary naturalistic philosophy of language and meaning, but each has more in common with the other than scholars working in either field probably realize. The poetry of Ephrem the Syrian and other early Syriac poets reveal unusual views of the relationship between body and soul, and their unhellenized aversion to defining God led them to embrace a “theology of paradox” largely through metaphor. Similarly, in the field of cognitive science the mind is inherently embodied, and concepts are largely metaphorical. By studying the similarities in these disparate and often misunderstood fields, one may attain a better appreciation of the importance of metaphor, the usefulness of non-objectivist thought, and acquire some new perspectives on the relationship between the mind and the body.

Ephrem and the Early Syriac Poets

Philip Jenkins’ book, The Next Christendom, describes how westerners have tended to ignore the history of the Christian church outside of the borders of the ancient Roman Empire since the time of the Roman historian Eusebius in the fourth century. We now believe that Christianity is a European affair and a Western religion. We forget that after the time of Christ, Christianity spread like ripples from a pebble thrown into a pond and that, within one or two hundred years, churches had sprouted in Egypt and Ethiopia, in Syria and Armenia, and even in Persia and India.

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