Speaking of Aphraates’ theology, F. Gavin wrote:
In Syriac Christianity, from the fourth century on, there appears with more or less consistency and in much the same outline a curious teaching as to the state of the dead. As the earliest examples of the sort that is available in Syriac authors is Aphraates, the 'Persian sage,' I shall quote him first. 'The Spirit is absent from all born of the body until they come to the regeneration of baptism. For they are endowed with the soulish spirit (from) the first birth,--which (spirit) is created in man, and is immortal, as it is written, 'Man became a living soul" (Gen. 2.7, cf. I Cor. 15.45). But in the second birth--that is, of Baptism--they receive the Holy Spirit, a particle of the Godhead, and it is immortal. When men die in the soulish spirit is buried with the body and the power of sensation is taken from it. The Heavenly Spirit which they have received goes back to its own nature, to the presence of Christ. Both these facts the Apostle teaches, for he says: "The body is buried soulish, and rises spiritual" (I Cor. 15.44). The Spirit returns to the presence of Christ, its nature, for the Apostle says: "When we are absent from the body we are present with the Lord" (II Cor. 5.7). Christ's Spirit which the spiritual have received, goes back to the Lord's presence; the soulish spirit is buried in its own nature, and is deprived of sensation.' (293.2-24, Parisot's edition.) While Aphraates teaches also that the body and soul may be 'deprived of sensation,' yet he means by this 'that in this sleep men do not know good from evil' (397.17). He uses in the same passage three words referring to 'sleep,' and this is the clue to the meaning of his other statement that the good rest with a good conscience and sleep well, waking alert and refreshed at the Resurrection, while those who have done evil in their lives are restive and unquiet, for they are uneasy with the sense of foreboding and doom impending. He illustrates this by the story of the likeness of two servants, one of them is expecting punishment, and the other praise from his lord, in the morning (396.16-35; 397.1-14). This is perhaps the clearest statement of the doctrine of the 'sleep of the soul,' and Aph. claims it for an article of the Faith (397.15). (F. Gavin, "The Sleep of the Soul in the Early Syriac Church," in Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 40 [1920]:103-20, here, pp. 103, 104)
Elsewhere, on Ephraim the Syrian and his theology mirroring that of Aphraates, Gavin noted that:
Some reputed texts from St. Ephraem Syrus (373) who wrote in the same language as Aph. and with whom there are many fundamental likenesses in thought and expression (Sermo de Domino Nostro, and Hom. XXIII of Aph.), would seem to indicate that he, too, held to a tripartite division of man, and to the doctrine of death being a 'sleep,' in which there is the same kind of semiconscious knowledge of what is passing, as in the case of an habitual 'light sleeper.' 'The lesson of the dead is with us. Though they sleep, yet they teach us, their garments alone are destroyed,--the body which diseases bring to an end,--while the soul preserved in life, as it is now, (is) without corruption' ('Necrosima,' Op. Omnia, Rom. Ed., 3, p. 225, D). 'The souls of the departed are alive and endowed with reason, laid up in Paradise for the Creator, while their bodies are stored up in the earth as a pledge to be restored one day.' The whole figure of death and sleep is brought out in the following: 'Just as in the eventide laborers rest, so do they rest for a time in death, until like sleepers waked from their sleep in the tomb, they (shall) don glory.’ (Ibid., 104, emphasis in bold added))
In other words, for Syrian Christians who understood the dead to be “sleeping,” they did not view it as “soul sleep” as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, or the more extreme position held by the likes of the Christadelphians (who hold to soul death) was not unconsciousness. Instead, for Syrian Christians and others, while the dead lacked “externally directed consciousness” they still retained “internally directed consciousness.”
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