Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Adam Lehto on the Christology in in the Demonstrations of Aphrahat (Aphraates)

  

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)