A key passage from 23.52 clearly
indicates the subordinate position of Christ:
We rejoice in you, beloved infant,
for you have prepared for us a path to the place of our desire. We give thanks
to you, healer of our diseases, for you have hidden your Spirit in us, a remedy
for our bodies. Through you we worship your Father, the Most High, who has
raised us up in you and called us to be with him. Through you we give thanks to
the one who sent you, who desired that we might live through the death of his Only-Begotten
One. Through you we glorify the Self-Existent One, who separated you from his
being and sent you to us. Through you we exalt the One who sits in his
holiness, who has himself sanctified our bodies through the pledge that we have
received. We will give thanks with our mouths as much as possible to the Strong
One who has come to give life to the weak. We will be diligent each day to
speak praise through the beloved Son to the Father who sent him.
The believer rejoices in and gives
thanks to Christ, but only the Father, the Most High, the Self-Existent One, is
worshipped, glorified, exalted, and praised, through the mediation of Christ.
Elsewhere in the Demonstrations
the same pattern holds: the reverence due to the one true God is not the
same as that due to Christ. I make this statement not as a summary of what
Aphrahat explicitly says (rarely do ancient texts tell us directly what we wish
to know), but rather as an indication of an important distinction that appears in
his language of worship (For further examples of “conspicuously theocentric”
language of worship, see 2.20; 4.17; 5.16; 14.15, 39; 15.2; 18.4; 21.17, 19). (Adam
Lehto, The Demonstrations of Aphrahat, the Persian Sage [Gorgias Eastern
Christian Studies 27; Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2010], 59)
If Aphrahat’s depiction of Christ
is archaic and primitive from the perspective of Nicene orthodoxy, it
nevertheless preserves an important legacy from early Christian thought, and
shows us a form of Christian thought that is just as vibrant (if not more so) than
the more philosophical approach familiar in both East and West. In this
respect, Aphrahat’s portrait of Christ is indicative of the special place that
the Demonstrations occupies not only in the history of Syriac
Christianity but also in the Christian tradition as a whole. (Ibid., 62)
