Saint Aphrahat the Persian Sage: Christ & the Victory over Death



And when Jesus, the slayer of Death, came, and clothed Himself in a Body from the seed of Adam, and was crucified in His Body, and tasted death; and when (Death) perceived thereby that He had come down unto him, he was shaken from his place and was agitated when he saw Jesus; and he closed his gates and was not willing to receive Him.  Then He burst his gates, and entered into him, and began to despoil all his possessions.  But when the dead saw light in the darkness, they lifted up their heads from the bondage of death, and looked forth, and saw the splendour of the King Messiah.  Then the powers of the darkness of Death sat in mourning, for he was degraded from his authority.  Death tasted the medicine that was deadly to him, and his hands dropped down, and he learned that the dead shall live and escape from his sway.  And when He had afflicted Death by the despoiling of his possessions, he wailed and cried aloud in bitterness and said, “Go forth from my realm and enter it not.  Who then is this that comes in alive into my realm?”  And while Death was crying out in terror (for he saw that his darkness was beginning to be done away, and some of the righteous who were sleeping arose to ascend with Him), then He made known to him that when He shall come in the fulness of time, He will bring forth all the prisoners from his power, and they shall go forth to see the light.  Then when Jesus had fulfilled His ministry amongst the dead, Death sent Him forth from his realm, and suffered Him not to remain there.  And to devour Him like all the dead, he counted it not pleasure.  He had no power over the Holy One, nor was He given over to corruption.

5.  And when he had eagerly sent Him forth and He had come forth from his realm, He left with him, as a poison, the promise of life; that by little and little his power should be done away.  Even as when a man has taken a poison in the food which is given for (the support of) life, when he perceives in himself that he has received poison in the food, then he casts up again from his belly the food in which poison was mingled; but the drug leaves its power in his limbs, so that by little and little the structure of his body is dissolved and corrupted.  So Jesus dead was the bringer to nought of Death; for through Him life is made to reign, and through Him Death is abolished, to whom it is said:—O Death, where is thy victory?

(Complete Text: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf213.iii.ix.x.html)

Who is Aphrahat the Persian Sage?
For now, however, a few more words of introduction to Aphrahat the Persian Sage are in order. He is a mysterious figure, though not because any wish on his part to cloak himself with obscurity. To the contrary, he writes to his correspondents as someone who is well known to them. He appears, in fact, to have been quite prominent in the Christian Church of the Persian Empire during the first half of the fourth century [4]. The mystery is rather that we know and hear nothing about this Church prior to the writings of Aphrahat himself. His is the first Christian voice from East of the Tigris that we can be certain of placing and dating securely, thanks entirely to the fact that Aphrahat himself is kind enough to supply us with the exact dates of his twenty-three discourses or, as he calls them, Demonstrations (tahwyata): the first ten in A.D. 337, the next twelve in 344, and the twenty-third in 345 [5]. Yet the Church which his Demonstrations assume is clearly numerous, widespread in Mesopotamia and at least in Western Iran, and possessed moreover of long-standing institutions. An entire, hitherto-unglimpsed Christian universe appears thus for the first time in these writings, even though this is obviously a world which has been around for a long time -- perhaps even for centuries -- before it does so appear [6].
There are many things of great interest about this "third world" which can and do shed light on the much better-known "worlds" of Greek and Latin Christianity. Its Semitic character at once betrays a number of traits unique to itself and, more importantly for my purposes here, reveals with perhaps especial clarity, thanks to its relative freedom from the technical vocabulary of Hellenistic philosophy, the great pool of Jewish traditions out of which Christianity itself originally coalesced, and from which it continued to draw -- whether in Syriac, Greek, or Latin -- throughout its early centuries [7]. All the materials, so-to-speak, for the foundational doctrines of the Church derive from this source, which is finally nothing more nor less than the single revelation of God to Israel as lived in the centuries prior to Christ and, in the fullness of time, as re-shaped by the inherent demands of the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth crucified, risen and enthroned at the right hand of the Father [8]. Since this is clearly a huge topic, and since my space is limited, I shall focus on the particular subject of the transfigured holy man, whom we shall find complete in our Mesopotamian author twenty years before -- and a thousand miles removed from -- St. Athanasius' portrait of the "father of monks" in the famous Vita Antonii [9].
Aphrahat, too, was writing to and about Christian ascetics. One of the institutions that we find fully-formed in the Persian Church of his day, indeed so much an assumed part of that Church's life, and already so old as to require renewal, is that of the "sons" and "daughters of the convenant", bnai/bat qyama, who are consecrated "single ones", ihidaye, or "celibates" -- though the theological resonances of both qyama and ihidaya are much richer and more subtle than simply these handy definitions [10] Unlike Egyptian monasticism, which was in process of taking on its mature forms even as Aphrahat was writing, these native, Syro-Mesopotamian ascetics were not physically separated off from the larger Church in discrete communities and living outside the towns and villages under their own leaders, as in the nascent monastaries of St. Pachomius, or in the villages of monks at Scete, but were rather attached to their local churches under the supervision of the bishops and living in small groups within the town or city [11] Later on, to be sure, during the latter days of St. Ephrem of Syria (+373), the Egyptian form of organized monasticism began to appear in Syriac-speaking churches and would eventually predominate.
This was not the case when Aphrahat wrote, however. By this fact alone, he offers proof that organized Christian asceticism was both older and more widespread than the monastic explosion of fourth-century Egypt, and his "proto-monks" have as a result been the focus of a modest scholarly industry for the past century. Only with the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, however, has it begun to become apparent just how old Christian asceticism is, and how rooted in Jewish traditions of the era immediately before Christ. Here again, Aphrahat's ihidaye -- and the very phrase, "sons of the covenant" -- are extraordinarily revealing. Affinities between them and the Jewish covenanters have been noted in scholarly literature since the Scrolls first began to appear in print during the later 1950's [12]. More recently, Antoine Guillaumont provided a rationale for the Qumranites' celibacy based in great part on an analysis of Aphrahat, and the rationale still stands in scholarly circles [13]. In brief, the Persian Sage argues for celibacy on the basis of the levitical holiness code for priestly ministry in the Tabernacle or, later, in the Temple [14]. Similar concerns appear to have moved the Jewish convenanters four hundred years before, with the difference that, for our Christian writer, the continuous temple service -- requiring thus continuous abstention even from the sanctified sexual activity of marriage -- is that of the ministry of prayer within the temple of the body and so, as we shall see momentarily, before the presence of God in the heavenly temple. Obviously, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the "hatred of the body" supposedly characterizing early Christian asceticism and allegedly resulting from pagan, chiefly Platonist influences.
Alexander Golitzin
The Place of the Presence of God: Aphrahat of Persia's Portrait of the Christian Holy Man. An Essay in Honor of Archimandrite Aimilianos of the Monastery of Simonos Petras, Mount Athos