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”

About 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.

Ultimately, the churches that existed within the borders of the Persian Empire and India congealed into a body later known as the Church of the East. (Today it is known as the Assyrian Church of the East.) Historians have often branded this tradition of Christianity “Nestorian,” a tradition that was condemned as Christological heresy by the Western Church at the Council of Ephesus in the fifth century. The Church of the East, in fact, never had much to do with the teachings of John Nestorius (d. 451), the one-time Patriarch of Constantinople. The Christological debate, which centered on the Greek word prosopon (i.e., “person”), was an attempt to define the nexus in Christ where his humanity and divinity met. It is not surprising then that the Syriac churches were not especially involved in this debate, not only because their Semitic views avoided attempts at defining God, but also because most of them did not know Greek.

Unfortunately, this was the debate that ended at the Council of Chalcedon by creating a dramatic schism between the European/Byzantine church and her African and Asian sisters–a gap that to this day has yet to be bridged. It was during this time of ecclesiastical formation that the early Syriac poets gained prominence, most notably Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373), Narsai (d. ca. 503), and the unknown author of the Odes of Solomon (typically dated ca. 100 AD). These writers all wrote in Syriac, a variant of Aramaic, and maintained a particularly Semitic outlook in their writings. Sebastian Brock, an important Syriac scholar, describes this outlook: “During this period Syriac Christianity is still only barely hellenized, and its great significance lies in the fact that it thus serves as the only extant witness to a genuinely semitic form of Christianity, as yet virtually untouched by the Greeks.” Much of what westerners know today of Christianity comes to us through Greek thought, which makes the early Syriac writers particularly surprising and enlightening.

Ephrem the Syrian, a fourth century poet and teacher in the Roman border-town of Edessa (modern-day Urfa in Turkey), is the most well-known of the early Syriac poets, and his hymns are still sung in churches of various denominations all over the world. Ephrem converted to Christianity at the age of eighteen, and he soon began to study under James of Nisibis who, according to some accounts, took Ephrem with him to the Council of Nicea in 323. Ephrem soon became a teacher/lecturer (also referred to as a deacon) in a time when much of the teaching in Syriac-speaking churches was conducted through song. Teacher/lecturers would sing a lengthy and exhortative hymn, often of their own composition, which would serve to educate and edify the congregation.

Ephrem was one of these lecturer/teachers and was often seen conducting choirs of female virgins in the singing of his hymns, earning the title given to him in Syriac liturgy: “the Harp of the Holy Spirit.” His musical and exegetical output was so well respected and became so popular that many non-Christians and Jews came to hear the hymns and homilies of Ephrem. He was an ascetic who not only remained celibate but also restricted his diet to bread, vegetables, and water; he even refused to join the priesthood so as not to elevate himself above others. Gregory of Nyssa states that for Ephrem, weeping was just as natural as breathing is for other men. The last years of his life were spent trying to lessen the suffering of the poor, who were starving to death due to a severe famine. Both as a teacher and a poet he stands among the best in Christian history. The beauty of his verse is self-evident:

There is One Being, who knows Himself and sees Himself.
He dwells in Himself,
And from Himself sets forth.
Glory to His Name.
This is a Being who by His own will is in every place,
Who is invisible and visible,
Manifest and secret.
He is above and below.

The last three lines of the above-quoted stanza from his “Hymn Against Bar-Daisan” are indicative of his emphasis on paradox and mystery. It is a trait of all early Syriac writers that, unlike the Greeks who typically seek to define God, the Semitic writers prefer to use paradox and symbolism to discuss the Unknowable. Some may think that this statement overlooks the similarity of the Greek Apophatic tradition, in which God can only be defined negatively (e.g. uncreated, invisible, etc.), and to speak positively of God (e.g. as being wise, or existing) ultimately leads to idolatry. A negative definition, however, is still a definition and is different from the metaphoric, Semitic tradition. In his influential book on Ephrem, The Luminous Eye, Brock states that in order to understand this “theology of paradox,”

one may visualize a circle with a point in the centre where the point represents that aspect of God under scrutiny. The [Greek] philosophical approach seeks to identify and locate this central point, in other words, to define it, set boundaries to it. The [Semitic] symbolic approach, on the other hand, attempts no such thing; rather, it will provide a series of paradoxical pairs of opposites, placing them at opposite points around the circumference of the circle; the central point is left undefined, but something of its nature and whereabouts can be inferred by joining up the various opposite points, the different paradoxes, on the circle’s circumference.

This “non-Greek” approach to theology leads not only to great poetry, but also to some interesting views of human nature:

You looked upon the body, as it mourned,
and on the soul in its grief,
for you had joined them together in love,
but they had parted and separated in pain.
[…]
Body and soul go to court to see
which caused the other to sin;
but the wrong belongs to both,
for free will belongs to both.

The equal weighting of the body and soul, as shown in his “Hymns on the Nativity,” is very much in contrast to the distrust of the fleshly body held by many in the West, such as Augustine. It is also very much in contrast to much of Western philosophy, which often holds to some sort of mind/body or soul/body dualism, such as Descartes.

The use of the words “mind” and “soul” has been a slippery endeavor throughout the centuries, as illustrated by the Catholic Encyclopedia’s online definition of the word “mind.” Some, like Augustine, often use these words in an almost interchangeable manner for that which animates us humans while others, like modern psychologists, make significant distinctions, claiming that “soul” is a religious expression and “mind” a scientific one. In comparing the mind/body relationship espoused by the embodied theories of cognitive science and the soul/body relationship that is put forth by the early Syriac thinkers, I perhaps lean more toward an Augustinian use of the words “mind” and “soul” by simply using both to refer to that which animates our being. This at least is more etymologically correct since the roots of both words, whether in English, Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, often refer to the fundamental act of breathing.

The early Syriac writers in fact believed that both the body and the soul were ontologically the same, because both are together the “image of God.” Frederick McLeod, in his article “Man as the Image of God,” quotes Narsai as claiming, “The Creator willed to call it [the soul] and the body His image,” and, “He [the Creator] fashioned and skillfully made a double vessel, a visible body and a hidden soul–one man.” Ephrem exclaims, “The soul is your bride, the body / Your bridal chamber.” This can also be seen eschatologically. While meditating on how our body and soul can enter Paradise together, Ephrem writes:

If the body grows deaf
the soul does too,
and it grows delirious
when the body reels with sickness.
Though the soul exists
of itself and for itself,
yet without its companion
it lacks true existence;
it fully resembles an embryo
still in the womb,
whose existence is as yet
bereft of word or thought.

Ephrem, like most Christians, believes that the body and soul will be together in Paradise, just as they are now, but in Paradise we will be given new, perfect bodies that will allow us to fully experience God in ways that are impossible to us now:

Bodies,
with their flow of blood,
receive refinement there
after the manner of souls;
the soul that is heavy
has its wings refined
so that they resemble
resplendent thought.
Thought, too, whose movements
are ever in a state of disturbance,
Will become unperturbed,
after the pattern of that Majesty.

What we are presented with in early Syriac Christianity is the combination of two beliefs: first, that God is ultimately unknowable and any attempt to define God is folly–the most we can do is symbolically and metaphorically experience God as He reveals Himself to us. Second, the body and the soul are eternally linked and ontologically the same. When these two views are combined, they lead to a faith that knows God initially through an encounter (our bodies and souls), before having some sort of mental grasp of the nature of God. This gives knowledge an embodied basis and makes the body an epistemological tool, as Susan Ashbrook Harvey, an editor at Hugoye, the foremost electronic journal on Syriac studies, claims in her article “Embodiment in Time and Eternity: A Syriac Perspective.” Neither the body nor the soul can exist without the other, and the soul and the body both participate in knowing God. Harvey states:

Investigation is, in Ephrem’s formulation, the source of all error, all heresy, precisely because it depends on the radical separation of subject from object. It takes place when the mind attempts to be the source of its own knowledge. Investigation is, so to speak, the seeking of disembodied knowledge: therein it fails.

Cognitive Science

The mind is inherently embodied.

Thought is mostly unconscious.

Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

These are the three major findings of cognitive science. More than two millennia of a priori philosophical speculation about these aspects of reason are over. Because of these discoveries, philosophy can never be the same again.

With these words George Lakoff and Mark Johnson boldly begin their revolutionary book, Philosophy in the Flesh, which brings together over two decades of research in cognitive science. Although this field is fairly new, its endeavors vary widely from neuroscience to music theory, from linguistics to religion. Because our study is concerned with mind/body unity and metaphor, we will look at the first and last of their three initial claims.

What Lakoff and Johnson suggest by saying, “The mind is inherently embodied,” is that there is no “mind” that exists in the human brain in which all of our cognitive activity takes place. Neither is “meaning” strictly symbolic, existing out in the world. Embodiment theory, as it is called, radically challenges traditional cognitive categorical structure, and it rejects the notion that mind and body are two ontologically distinct kinds of entities. The “mind” is an organic process that involves our biological/neurological makeup, body, environment, culture, evolution, image schemas, and prototypes. Let us look at an example.

“The grass is green.” This single-predicate statement is simple to understand. A traditional “objectivist” (which, at least partially, includes most of us) would say that this statement is true if the words correspond to the actual grass, in other words, if the statement is an internal representation of an external reality. If one were to say, “The grass is green,” and the grass that is referred to is, in fact, red, then the statement would be false. According to cognitive science, this traditional view is ill-founded.

In order to see the grass as green the following must take place. Light must reflect off the surface of the grass and travel to our eyes, allowing particular wavelengths of light to trigger the cones and rods in our retinas. These, in turn, transfer the information through our neural circuitry into our brain where we consciously realize the color of the grass. This process also depends on the ambient light–if this all is taking place under a black light, the grass will not be seen as green. Also, our social environment plays a role–not all cultures have the same color concepts. Some cultures have as few as two colors in their entire vocabulary.

What we see is that the grass itself does not contain any “greenness,” and neither is there a representation of “greenness” in our brains. Our understanding of “green” is organic and interactional–it exists in our biological/neurological makeup (neural circuitry), our bodies (retinas), our culture (color vocabulary), our environment (the reflected light, ambient light, and grass), our evolving knowledge (over time, our bodies have deemed that only certain wavelengths can stimulate chemical reactions in our eyes that send certain information to our brains), our image schemas (for example, the “container schema,” which we learn in infancy, informs us that things have boundaries and therefore “green” and “red” are understood as distinct from one another), and our prototypes (what we might call “green-green” and its derivations). This is what we call our mind. All of it. Knowledge is, therefore, embodied.

“Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical,” is the other claim we will examine. The sentence “The grass is green” is deceptively simple. One of the main tenets of cognitive science is that its definition of meaning applies across the board, including abstract concepts such as “love,” “justice,” and “God.” In their first book together, Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson make five key claims in understanding how metaphor works in our lives.

First, abstract concepts are mostly defined by metaphor. Second, metaphor is conceptual, a matter of thought, and not only a matter of words. Third, our reasoning and knowledge are built on and out of metaphors. Fourth, conceptual metaphors are grounded in bodily experience. And fifth, most metaphors are based on experiential and conceptual correlations, and not on similarity between objects. Let us look at an example of a metaphor that Lakoff and Johnson discuss.

Time Is Motion

Subjective Judgment: The passage of time
Sensorimotor Domain: Motion
Example: “Time flies.”
Primary Experience: Experiencing the passage of time as one moves or observes motion

This is what they call a primary metaphor; a metaphor that continuously and unconsciously operates in our daily lives. Since time is such an abstract concept, much of the way we reason about, conceptualize, and talk about time comes from embodied domains of experience. In other words: we “map” the attributes of a bodily experience onto the abstract concept. Thus, the Time Is Motion metaphor uses the sensorimotor domain of motion, something we all experience since birth. Notice how it manifests in our language: “I can’t believe I’m already forty–time is moving way too quickly.” “When I saw her, time just stopped.” “As my car was spinning out of control, time moved in slow motion.” Other examples of primary metaphors used by Lakoff and Johnson are Affection Is Warmth, Knowing Is Seeing, Importance Is Big, and Difficulties Are Burdens.

But what happens when multiple primary metaphors are combined into a larger, more abstract concept? We have what cognitive linguists call a “complex metaphor.” These complex metaphors greatly impact the way we think and live our lives. Take for example Love Is A Journey, or Marriage Is A Business Partnership, or God Is An Author. One can see how much of our personal interactions with concepts such as love, marriage, and God are often patterned on more concrete aspects of our embodied lives.

The Early Syriac Poets and Cognitive Science Examined Together

In his “Hymns on Faith” Ephrem writes:

Let us give thanks to God
who clothed himself in the names of the body’s various parts:
Scripture refers to His “ears”
to teach us that he listens to us;
it speaks of His “eyes,”
to show us that He sees us.
It was just the names of such things
that He put on,
and—although in His true being
there is no wrath or regret—
yet He put on these names
because of our weakness.

Response: Blessed is He who has appeared to our human race under so many metaphors.

We should realize that,
had he not put on the names
of such things,
it would not have been possible for Him
to speak with us humans.
By means of what belongs to us did he draw
close to us:
He clothed Himself in language,
so that He might clothe us
in His mode of life.
He asked for our form and put this on,
and then, as a father to his children,
He spoke to us with our childish state.

Ephrem says that we would not be able to know God without his “speaking” to us in metaphor. Cognitive science says that the primary way we understand abstract concepts is through metaphor. Ephrem says that the soul and body are ontologically the same. Cognitive science says that the mind is inherently embodied. Both have an experience-based epistemology, and both believe metaphor to be vital in our conceptual understanding. Through its advances in embodiment theory, cognitive science has shown the importance of non-objectivist thought; in turn we find the early Syriac poets, by choosing to use paradox as a means to know God, also avoiding the trap of strict objectivism.

It is no coincidence that both fields floated to the surface of academic thought during the same era; people needed, and continue to need, something more than what was given to them by earlier modern thinkers. The keen insights of cognitive science and the early Syriac writers into the relationship between the mind and body, the importance of metaphor, and the usefulness of non-objectivist thinking directly challenge the ways in which we understand the nature of truth and meaning.

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