Syrian Authors from the Classical Period
Although the fourth-century Ephrem is aware of and reveres the traditions about Thomas known from the Acts of Thomas111 he refrains from using mother language of the Spirit.
Uncomfortable with Bardaisan’s language of a mother figure, Ephrem most likely wanted to avoid any associations with that thought world. As a result, Ephrem rejects identification of the spirit of Gen 1:2 with a mother dove. He knows the tradition, as his Commentary on Genesis makes clear, that others refer to the hovering ruha as the Holy Spirit[1406] [1407] but says that those who are “faithful” look elsewhere for references to God’s spirit. Ephrem explicitly argues against views of the Marcionites and Bardesanites that suggest a Father-Mother-Son triad, fearing that it stems from local polytheistic systems.This does not, however, prevent him from using feminine imagery for God in striking ways. Ephrem regularly identifies the Spirit as feminine, although he does not dwell on or develop this concept.[1408] He is not afraid to use nursing imagery to speak of the way in which Christ gives life: “He is the living breast; from his life the dead have sucked living breath - and come to life.”[1409] Even the image of God as a bird comes into play in Ephrem’s many references to God’s “wings,” despite his rejection of the idea that the Spirit “hovers” in Genesis.
Most salient is Ephrem’s use of the image of the womb of God. Syriacspeaking Christianity developed the idea of three “wombs” in Jesus’s life: the womb of Mary, from which he was born, the womb of the Jordan in which he was baptized (the font then becomes a “womb” for the newly baptized), and the womb of Sheol, into which Jesus descended. But Ephrem, building on language of birthing known from the Odes of Solomon, envisions the womb of God: “If anyone seeks Your [i.e., the infant Jesus’s] hidden nature behold it is in heaven in the great womb of Divinity.”[1410] Of all the wombs in the world, only one, that of the “Great One,” truly sufficed.[1411]
Although Ephrem rejects use of mother language for the Spirit, his younger contemporary Aphrahat has no such hesitations.
Aphrahat addresses the “sons and daughters of the covenant” who had renounced marriage in order to lead ascetic lives with a creative exegesis of the Adam and Eve story. In a discussion of Gen 2:24 and the need for a man to leave his father and mother in order to marry, Aphrahat declares, “The meaning is this. As long as a man has not taken a wife, he loves and reveres God his father and the Holy Spirit his mother, and he has no other love.”[1412] Aphrahat is also familiar with and comfortable using the language of the Spirit “hovering” like a mother bird: “From baptism we receive the Spirit of Christ, and in the same hour that the priests invoke the Spirit, she opens the heavens and descends, and hovers over the waters, and those who are baptized put her on.”[1413] The Spirit’s hovering over the waters also allows her presence to be bestowed, for “from baptism we receive the Spirit of Christ.”[1414]Just as Aphrahat commented on Gen 2:24, so also the Macarian homilies, which come from approximately the same time and region, also speak of the Spirit as Mother:
It is right and fitting, my children, for you to have left behind all that is temporal and to have set off for God: instead of an earthly father, you are seeking the heavenly Father, and instead of a mother who is subject to decay, you have as Mother the excellent Spirit of God, and the heavenly Jerusalem.[1415]
The image of a hovering divine spirit at creation that we have seen before, alluding as it does to the activity of a mother bird over her nest, gave rise to further reflection by these Syrian authors, who commonly employ the verb rahheph (“hover,” “brood”) to describe the activity of the Holy Spirit, combining the action of a bird with the designation of the Spirit as “Mother.” The seventh-century Martyrius speaks of the “all-holy Spirit, who, like a mother, hovers over us as she gives sanctification,”[1416] while the medieval Moshe bar Kepha says that the Holy Spirit “hovered over John the Baptist and brought him up like a compassionate mother.” Liturgical texts speak of the Spirit “hovering” both over the waters of the baptismal font and over the bread and wine of the Eucharist.
Just as the biblical texts began to construe ruha as grammatically masculine, so also Syriac-speaking authors gradually shifted away from use of feminine adjectives and images for the Spirit. Treatment of ruha as masculine begins in the early fifth century and becomes more common over time, but even this does not completely eliminate identifying the Spirit as Mother. The eighth-century John the Elder, while treating the Spirit grammatically as masculine, can still declare that the Spirit “is called by the feminine term ‘Mother.’”[1417]
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