As early as the late 1950's, once some of the Dead Sea Scrolls had begun to appear in print, Arthur Vööbus suggested possible links between them and early Syrian ascetics, the bnai qei~m~, or "sons of the covenant", whose first recorded appearance is in the works of Aphrahat of Persia (fl. 330's-340's), Ephrem of Nisibis (+373), and a mid to late fourth-century, anonymous collection of ascetical sermons, the Liber Graduum, or Book of Steps. Vööbus, however, simply stated a connection with the "Essenes", rather in the manner that Jean Daniélou did a few years later in his Jewish Christianity with regard to other early Christian writings. In neither case was there an effort to establish possible lines of transmission, nor generally to speak with the care required nowadays, though I should note in fairness that the matter of transmission, if there were indeed any, remains entirely up in the air. One can, however, find more circumspect and thus more useful discussion of the striking similarities between these two groups of ascetics, the Jewish from around the turn of the era and the Syrian-Christian from three to four hundred years later. Antoine Guillaumont in the early 1970's, basing his argument on Aphrahat's defense of consecrated celibacy against what appear to have been contemporary Jewish objections to it, provided a rationale for Qumran celibacy grounded in the Levitical code for priestly ministry which still appears to have currency in such recent literature as Joseph Baumgarten's article on the same subject during the past decade. In the 1970's and 80's, Robert Murray touched on a number of subjects which bear on what appear to be concerns in common between the two sets of writings, including celibacy, holy war, preoccupation with the Temple, or at least the common and prominent use of temple language, and fellowship with the heavenly priesthood of the angels. The suspected or proposed origins of Mesopotamian Christianity in first or early second-century Palestine might further enhance the possibilities of links with Qumran, particularly since this theory has advanced from its first, tentative proposal in the 1960's to become today, as in the translation and introduction of Aphrahat for Sources chrétiennes by Marie-Joseph Pierre, virtually a given of scholarship, as has the assumption of some continuing contacts -- and tensions -- with the large Jewish population of Sassanid Mesopotamia.

Elsewhere in the homilies, Adam saw the glory, doxa, in Paradise. He was covered with it as with a kind of robe, endyma; dwelt among and was like -- or even higher than -- the angels; and was intended to become God's own dwelling-place, katoikëtërion, on the earth, a temple in short. At the Fall, he was "stripped" of the divine glory, lost the "heavenly" or "true image" (autën tën eikona), together with his fellowship with the angels, and was left "naked", mortal, subjected to the passions and the rule of the "usurper", the devil, often equated in Macarius, as in the Pauline corpus (cf. Rom 5:12; Heb 2:14), with death. In Christ, the glory is recovered. He sends to the faithful the "image of ineffable light", the "deïform and living image," such that the believer's soul becomes what Adam was intended to be: the "great world" sufficient to hold God himself in the form of "the image of the ineffable light of his divinity." Thus here, too, we find the recovery of protological glory and fellowship with the heavenly powers as at once present reality and eschatological hope.

The same notes also appear in the three Syriac writers, if not in such concentrated dosage as in Macarius. Aphrahat devotes a number of lines to Adam's vocation to "become a temple (haikl~) for his Creator." In Demonstration 23, he writes that Christ provided his human body with "a glory greater and more wonderful than that which Adam stripped off" in Paradise, while earlier on, in Dem. 6.18 on the reception of the Spirit, he argues that the grace-filled Christian is clothed "with the image of the heavenly Adam." The Liber Graduum touches on the pre- and post-lapsarian Adam particularly in Discourses 20, 21, 23, and 28. Passages in the last three of these dwell on the first man's commerce with heaven and loss of that communion with the Fall. He was made like the angels and was to have lived among them, but fell away both from them and from the food of heaven, losing as a result his "ministry", teshmesht~, or heavenly priesthood. In Discourse 20, the author dwells especially on purity of heart, holding that the acquisition of this virtue makes the ascetic like Adam before the Fall, and thus signals the recovery of, or return to Eden. My third writer, Ephrem, places the first man higher than Paradise itself in the following verses from Sebastian Brock's translation of the Paradise Hymns:

how much more glorious [shbih] should Adam be / who is in the image [b-tsalm~] of its Planter?

The crown and, as we saw above, robe of glory make more frequent appearances in the Macarian Homilies than in any other of my quartet of Christian sources. It ranks among his favorite expressions, such that crown and/or robe, more frequently the latter, occur around two dozen times by my rough count. On occasion, like the passage from the Manual of Discipline, the robe is clearly associated with -- or even identified as -- the Holy Spirit. At other times it is equated with Christ, the "heavenly man," while in one passage Macarius speaks of the First Person of the Christian Trinity, the Father, as giving his own raiment or, more precisely, "vestment" (stolë), to the believer's soul. The last in particular reminds me of the vestment of light robing the "Great Glory" in I Enoch 14:20, or the later but related haluq, the divine robe, which appears in the hekhalot texts which, interestingly enough, were quite possibly roughly contemporary with Macarius. The latter is in any event very clear that the crown and robe "are not created things," "not made with hands," "of divine light," and indeed "the divine glory" itself, which even now shines within the soul for whomever is given the grace to see it.

The other Syrians all display the same motif, if, with the exception of Ephrem, not so often as Macarius. In Demonstration 6, addressing the subject of the ascetic "single ones" (ihid~ye), Aphrahat speaks of the heavenly wedding garment, playing on Mt 22:11-12, and a few paragraphs later of the "robe not made with hands," presumably the same garment as the "robe of Glory" which he identifies in Demonstration 14 with Christ. The Liber Graduum, in Discourse 3, contrasts the just person clothing the physically naked with visible raiment, with the perfected ascetic whose teaching clothes the spiritually naked with "the uncreated robe (lebush~) of light", which the writer then identifies with the Spirit through an allusion to Jn 7:38: "out of his belly shall flow streams of living water". In Discourse 20, he insists that there can be no entry into "the bridal chamber of light", no "crown or robe", without purity of heart, a remark which follows on the heels of a citation of Jn 14:21 on Christ's indwelling and manifestation.

Ephrem makes frequent use of the robe of light, and of clothing imagery generally, throughout his oeuvre. In his Commentary on Genesis, God "wraps" Adam originally "in glory", and accords the first man "reason, thought, and an awareness of the Majesty (rabbut~)." In the third of the Paradise Hymns, Adam would have been "robed in glory", and would "have acquired glory upon his limbs", had he obeyed the command not to eat, but was "stripped" of what glory he had when he transgressed. It is perhaps of some interest to our theme that Ephrem presents Adam's sin as like that of King Uzziah in 2 Chronicles 26, a prideful usurpation of the high-priestly privilege of entering beyond the veil into the Holy of Holies. Doing so before his time, the first man indeed "beheld the Glory [shubh~] of the Holy of Holies / and trembled", but "he beheld, too, his own shame [i.e., his nakedness] and blushed, / groaning and lamenting". Had he but waited, he would have entered in due time, an event Ephrem describes with imagery borrowed from Aaron's entry behind the curtain of the Tabernacle in Lev 16:12-13. Adam had been commanded to refrain from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, presented in the Paradise Hymns as the temple veil:

These protological and eschatological manifestations of the robe of glory are also, elsewhere in his work, respectively renewed or anticipated by the "clothing with Christ" at Baptism, a note which not only reflects the Pauline corpus, but which in Ephrem and the other Syrian writers provides what is for them a ruling image for the entire drama of salvation: as Adam was stripped of glory, so the Son of the Father stripped himself of his own glory -- an echo, surely, of the ken«sis of Phil 2:6-7 -- in order to restore the vesture of light to fallen humanity, such that the saints "have found, through our Lord, / the robe that belongs to Adam and Eve." The baptismal clothing, continued sacramental life in the Church, and especially the life of asceticism provide as well a present-day anticipation of the eschaton. Thus we find Ephrem in his sixth hymn, on the Eucharist:

Light and glory (doxa) are for Macarius essentially equivalent and, as we have already seen, they appear often in the homilies. What is striking is, as we have also seen, his insistence on them as uncreated, truly divine. Second, he is on at least two occasions, in Discourses 17 and 58 of Collection I, quite specific that the light is neither a metaphor nor a purely subjective illumination of the intellect. Neither is it a product of the latter, a noëma, but a "divine and essential light [theion kai ousi«dës ph«s]...which appears in the soul and shines more than the light of the sun." Each of the two passages is supported by a long catena of scriptural references, chiefly from the NT, which feature the visio dei luminis/gloriae, e.g., Paul's conversion by heavenly light in Acts 9 and 22, the glory in 2 Cor 3:18 and 4:6, "the image of the heavenly man" of I Cor 15:49, and "the body of his [Christ's] glory" of Phil. 3:21. What emerges throughout his writings is thus, third, a thorough-going and, as I have argued elsewhere, conscious effort to "interiorize" the biblical glory language. Nowhere does this effort appear more obviously than in his handling of Ezekiel's merkavah vision. At the beginning of the first homily in the collection of Fifty Spiritual Homilies, he provides a paraphrase of Ezekiel 1, and then offers his interpretation:

The prophet truly and assuredly saw what he saw, but [this vision] also suggested something else...a mystery truly hidden from eternity...and made manifest in the epiphany of Christ. For Ezekiel beheld the mystery of the soul that is going to receive its Lord and become his throne [thronos] of glory, since the soul...which has been illumined by the beauty of his [i.e., Christ's] ineffable glory after having prepared itself for him as a throne [kathedra] and dwelling-place [katoikëtërion], becomes all light and all face and all eye. [II.1.2].

The public worship, in particular of the Eucharistic assembly, is for him a double icon, at once of the heavenly liturgy and of the soul. The first is a very old idea, arguably adumbrated by the "pattern" [tabnit, LXX: paradeigma] of the tabernacle which God unveils to Moses at the climax of the Sinai revelation in Ex 25:9 ff. The sequence, akolouthia, of the Christian liturgy, divided between scripture readings and sermon, the synaxis, and the offering, consecration, and communion in the bread and wine, the anaphora, provides Macarius with an image of the relationship between human effort, askësis, and divine grace. Neither is complete without the other. Synaxis and anaphora require each other in the same way as do human action and God's own action. The miraculous change, metabolë, of the Eucharistic elements is real, to be sure, but it is also an image, icon, of both the inner change, within the soul, and of the eschatological transformation of the body. Likewise, the visible order or arrangement, oikonomia, of the church building and the worshipping assembly at once mirrors and assists the believer's ascent to heaven in order to join the "ministers and assistants" of Christ, and so to participate in the liturgy of the angels. "Ministers and assistants", leitourgoi kai paredroi, here refers at once to the deacons and presbyters standing beside the bishop's throne in Macarius' neighborhood church, and to the angels who serve, together with the Princes of the Presence who stand beside, the divine throne in the heavenly temple. This threefold coördination of heaven, the church, and the soul will also appear in both Ephrem and, especially, in the Liber Graduum, and will achieve its most striking and influential expression in the hierarchies of yet another anonymous Syrian a century later, who chose to write under the sub-apostolic pseudonym of Dionysius the Areopagite. At the same time, however, and less much of the emphasis on the "inner man", Macarius also displays what I think is a decided continuity with the intimations of merkavah mysticism, and the explicit assurances of fellowship with the angels (of which more anon) that we find in the Scrolls.

Aphrahat displays similar interests, though without the specific emphasis Macarius places on expressly reconciling the liturgical and the mystical. The Persian Sage's Demonstrations certainly betray a strong sacramental presence, but rejection of the liturgy does not appear to have been a problem that he was obliged to confront. Aphrahat is, however, quite concerned to emphasize the inner aspect of the visio dei gloriae to his "proto-monastic" readers. This interest appears throughout his oeuvre, most strikingly in his description of the perfected wise man in Demonstration 14.35. The latter begins with a series of questions borrowed from Job 28:12: "Who has perceived the place (atr~) of knowledge...who is fit for the place of understanding?" and answers as follows:

She [i.e., "wisdom"] dwells in the acceptable man, and is implanted in the heart of the sage [hakim~].../.../...in her he possesses a hidden treasure. He flies in his thought to all the heights, and his pondering descends to all the depths. She inscribes within his heart a wonderous thing...all things created are enclosed wihin his thought, and his inclination (yatzer) to receive becomes still more vast: he becomes the great temple of his Creator. Indeed, the King of Heaven enters and dwells in him, and lifts his intellect up to the heights. His thought flies to his sanctuary (beit qudsheh), and the treasure of everything within is shown to it. His mind is absorbed in visions and his heart is rapt in all its perceptions. A thing he never knew is shown [mhawe] to him. He gazes (h~'ar) on that place and contemplates it, and his mind is stupefied by everything that it sees: all the watchers hastening to his ministry, the seraphim chanting the qedushah [mqadshin] to his glory [iq~reh], flying swiftly with their wings, and their vestments white and shining, hiding their faces from his radiance [ziweh], their courses swifter than the wind. There is the throne [tr~wn~s] of the Kingdom established: the Judge makes ready the place of judgement; the chairs of the righteous are arranged for them to judge the wicked on the Day of Judgement...

Thirty years ago Juana Raasch suggested an echo of I Enoch 14 ff. in this passage, and twenty years later Robert Murray favored 3 Enoch for comparison with it. In either case, the echo of the ascent and visio gloriae themes of apocalyptic literature and the later hekalot texts is affirmed, and so, too, by extension is the linkage at once with Macarius two generations later and with the Scrolls long before. All three, the sectarians of Qumran, the Mesopotamian Christian sage writing in Syriac, and the Greek-speaking monk, partake of the same current of interest in mystical ascent and vision, based on Ezekiel 1 and continuing in the apocalypses which begin with I Enoch 1-36. Like Macarius, however, and unlike the Scrolls, Aphrahat interiorizes. He does so, in fact, rather spectacularly in the passage just cited. As Murray pointed out, the third-person, masculine singular pronomial suffixes attached above to the words "ministry" (teshmesht~), "glory" (iq~r~), and "radiance" (ziw~), all have the sage as their closest antecedent. The "place of wisdom", "that place", which Job 28:23-24 locates in God, Aphrahat, playing here as well on the biblical (and perhaps contemporary) resonances of hammaqom, particularly the link between "the place" and the Temple, sites in the heart of the Christian sage. The latter becomes "the Great Temple of his Creator", the topos theou, and in consequence the object of the angels' ministry, the locus of eschatological judgement, radiant with the presence within of the Glory -- in short, the restored image of God. Heaven and all its company are within, and ascent to the throne on high becomes thus the journey ad intra.

There is much to say here, but for purposes of this essay I must content myself with a few, selected points. First, there is Murray's suggestion of a comparison to be drawn with 3 Enoch, which I think most interesting, though oddly enough Murray does not draw what I take to be the obvious comparison between Aphrahat's sage and the transformed Enoch-Metatron of 3 Enoch 9-15. Like the latter, the sage "ascends" to heaven in order to become the likeness of the kevod YHWH, served by the angelic priests in the heavenly temple, shining with divine splendor, possessor of a throne, endowed with the secrets of creation and all the treasury of heaven, knowing the beginnings and reflecting the end, and gazing on the heights and depths. In brief, like Enoch, who actually receives the title, "the lesser YHWH", Aphrahat's sage becomes a god in the image of God. Second, and more narrowly, we find a distinct echo of the shi'ur qomah traditions. The sage, at least interiorly, is obliged to become "vast", rwih, in order to accomodate not only all creation, but "the Great King of heaven" himself. I read this in parallel, first of all, with 3 Enoch 9, whose hero declares he is "enlarged and increased in stature until I matched the world in length and breadth.@ Both Aphrahat and 3 Enoch, in addition, may share this motif with a couple of intriguing passages from the Scrolls. The first, 4Q 427 fr.7 ii 9 from the Hodayot, as Crispin Fletcher-Louis has noted, speaks of the "stature", qmh, of the poor man being "exalted to the clouds", and elsewhere, as argued some time ago by Morton Smith, in 1QH xx 1-3, we find the ascent and "enlarging" of the soul which is joined to the angels "in the tents of glory."

We find another and, for Aphrahat, perhaps mediating instance of mystical expansion and ascent in an early Syriac-Christian poem, the Hymn of the Pearl, which, sometime in the early third century, was placed in the Apostle Thomas' mouth in the apocryphal, Syriac Acts of Judas Thomas. In the poem's climax, the narrator encounters the robe of light bearing the divine image and woven for him in heaven. This is the speaker's heavenly double, who addresses him at one point, telling him that its "stature (qumt~) has grown" in size, thanks to the labors of the Father. The speaker clothes himself with the robe and ascends to heaven to meet Christ, the "radiance (ziw~) of the Father", at the "gate of greeting". He then enters a second "gate", that of the princes or angels, and proceeds at last to a third, the "gate of the King of kings", in order to worship before the throne. The notes of increase in stature, of ascent, of the language of glory and light, of the "gates" to what are perhaps different heavens, and of transformation and access to the divine throne are all -- or most of them -- held in common between Aphrahat, our Qumran texts, and the rabbinic-era merkavah literature. Dating from no later than ca. 220-230, the period of the Acta Thomae's composition, and possibly quite a bit earlier since it is generally held to have been a separate composition, the Hymn of the Pearl might be taken as standing chronologically roughly midway between the Persian Sage and the Scrolls, and might thus be taken as testimony to a certain continuum of these traditions.

Fourth and last, I am obliged to underline a difference I have already suggested in Aphrahat's treatment of the themes of imago dei, shi'ur qomah, and visio gloriae, a difference which he shares with the other Syrian Christian writers under consideration here. For one, he avoids any use of the term "stature", qumt~, in his account of the sage, and I take this omission as deliberate, part of a conscious interiorization of the older traditions. Rather thus, while the "heart" or "thought" (mehshabt~) of the sage expands to include the universe and even God, his external form, as Aphrahat puts it a little further on, remains "earthly", "small", and in fact the sage "makes himself smaller still." In addition, there is the fact that the phrase, "make oneself small", carries for the Persian Sage, as well as for Macarius and the others, an expressly Christological freight. As Guy Stroumsa has pointed out, it is a play on the ken«sis of Phil 2:6-7, itself a passage very likely dependent on the Glory traditions of biblical and post-biblical Israel. In the case of the believer, the same phrase signals humility, as Aphrahat is at pains to point out at length elsewhere, and is thus part of the process of assimilation to the likeness of Christ. Here we touch on the peculiarly Christian appropriation of motifs from Jewish antiquity (though still quite alive -- thus 3 Enoch itself -- in the contemporary Judaism of the period) which would take me outside my subject were I to pursue it. Let it then suffice me here merely to note that for Aphrahat, as for Macarius and my other Syrians, the recovery of the "Glory of Adam" means, first and foremost, being assimilated to Christ, though not simply by way of ascetic exercise and the acquisition of his virtues, which certainly do feature in their understanding, but as well through consciously perceiving him within themselves such that they, too, "in Christ", might become for others as well as for themselves the locus -- indeed, as here, the "throne" -- of the same Glory which appeared to Moses and the prophets, and which these Christian writers understand as having descended from heaven to take flesh and appear on earth as Mary's son. Put another way, they all express, if in a different idiom, what Athanasius of Alexandria summed up as the Christian hope only a few years before Aphrahat wrote on the sage: "God became man that we may be made god."

Turning briefly to the Liber Graduum and Ephrem, the former touches several times on the visio gloriae in the pure heart, twice citing in accompaniment from 2 Cor 3:18, and twice more from Paul's ascent to heaven in 2 Cor 12:2-4. Once the Liber states expressly that the vision of glory is available in this life as well as in the next: bh~n ~lm~, literally "in this age," and a couple of discourses later adduces Stephen in Acts 7:55-56 and, again, Paul in the apocryphal Acta Pauli as exemplars. In Discourse 12, we find an argument functionally identical to the one we saw Macarius making for the public liturgy of the Church as the divinely-given pattern for the soul's transformation, thus:

The last closes with quotations of Mt 5:8 and Ps 24:3-5, the first of which suggests an eschatological reading of the passage I just cited, but, given the assertion elsewhere of the visio dei luminis in this life, I think we may take it as including both eschatological hope and present possibility, putting the Liber Graduum thus in the same company as Aphrahat and Macarius. Finally, there is the interesting passage in Discourse 28 where, after declaring that "the Glory of God Almighty appeared to Moses... like a human being [shubh~ d-m~ry~ ahid kul... a(i)k bar n~sh~]", presumably a reference to Ex 33-34, but surely carrying a hint as well of Ezekiel's explicitly humano-form kavod, the Liber underlines the importance of the revelation of the tabernacle as enabling Israel to see corporeally what Moses had seen spiritually.

My survey and selection of material has been far from complete. Those familiar with the Scrolls will doubtless be able to think offhand of texts that I have left out. I am myself painfully aware of many passages from Macarius that I should like to have included, but failed to find space for, while the very considerable library of Ephrem's works would surely have provided much that I have overlooked. His Paradise Hymns will have to suffice to represent him here, as will the materials assembled here be obliged to fill in for whatever I have missed in my other sources. Yet I do venture to propose that even this modest assembly of texts should be enough to offer support for the thesis advanced in my introduction, that, at the very least, we can say that these fourth-century Christian writers were drawing on many of the same sources and currents as did the sectarians of Qumran during the late Second Temple era, and moreover that they were doing so, at least in the case of the Syriac writers, while deploying a technical vocabulary for divine glory, splendor, might, image, and likeness -- e.g., shekint~, iq~r~, ziw~, rabbut~, dmut~, tsalm~ -- that they shared more with their Jewish contemporaries than with their Greek-speaking co-religionists. There are certainly echoes of the Greek philosophical tradition in Macarius, such as the startling mating of Ezekiel with the Phaedrus that we saw above, as well as a definite trace of the Alexandrian Christian inheritance of Clement and Origen. He was a Greek speaker, after all, and a relatively cultivated one at that, but there is next to nothing of those influences at work in the Syriac writers (beyond a kind of generalized, Hellenistic "background noise" that was common to virtually all of a territory that, by their day, stretched from Ireland to the Indus), while Macarius himself, for all his Hellenic inheritance, remains soaked in the motifs common at once to his contemporaries, and to the Scrolls long before.