This paradox is already rooted in Scripture. When Solomon dedi- cated the first temple, on seeing the cloud enter the Holy of Holies, he said ‘YHWH has said he will dwell in thick darkness (1 Kgs 8:12). Second Isaiah says ‘Truly you are a self-hiding God, O God of Israel, Saviour’(Is 45:15). Yet both testaments testify that God has made himself both known and accessible. He revealed his Name (the very condition of access to a person) to Moses (Ex 3:14), and the Deuteronomic theology affirmed that God had ‘made his Name dwell in the temple’(1 Kgs 8:27–30), meaning that He would be accessible to all who came to pray there. After its destruction, Jeremiah promised to the exiles ‘You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart’(Jer 29:12–13).
The early Church interpreted all the theophanies in the Old Testament, whether ascribed to YHWH or to angels, as anticipatory revelations of Christ. In the Incarnation, of course, theophany is total and concrete: ‘the Word became flesh’. Jesus is God visible, tangible, audible and communicating mutually with his human creatures. But since he withdrew from the reach of our senses, faith and prayer again face God's hiddenness, which constantly tests us, sometimes to a point near to despair; and yet faithful prayer leads to a deepening conviction of God's reality and even nearness.
In all this, theology has tried to help. The dialectic of the apophatic and the cataphatic ways developed from Origen through Gregory of Nyssa to the Pseudo-Dionysius and beyond. Less well known in the west, but no less important in that chain, is St Ephrem the Syrian (c. 306–373). Some twenty-five years older than Gregory, he taught and preached not so very far from him, but in Syriac. He was the chief teacher, both of Bible and of doctrine, in the Christian schools first of Nisibis and then of Edessa. His exegetical and apologetic works are in prose, but he often preached in metrical couplets, while for popular teaching he preferred a catchier medium, songs in vivid poetry which he accompanied on the harp, with refrains for his hearers to join in.
In the fourth century the Christians in Syria and Mesopotamia were a prey to powerful attacks on authentic apostolic tradition: by Marcion from the second century, Manichaeism from the third, and Arianism in the fourth, not to mention the home-grown semi- Christian gnosticism of Bardaisan. Ephrem combated all these, some in prose but more by his teaching songs (madrashe in Syriac). In his last ten years, spent in Edessa, he was preoccupied by Arianism, especially in its later and theologically more sophisticated form; this is the main target of his last collection of 87 songs, usually referred to as the ‘Hymns on [the] Faith’, and it was this challenge which led him to develop his dialectical theology of God, hidden and revealed.Footnote 1
Ephrem saw the neo-Arians as not merely perverting orthodox faith in the Trinity and the divinity of Christ, but as suffering from basic errors of thinking about spiritual realities. In modern terms we can say he charges them with rationalistic and univocal thinking about God and human nature, and a too literal, even fundamentalist way of arguing from Scripture. His accusations, however, are expressed especially by means of a rich vocabulary of hubris, presumption, inquisitiveness and trespassing beyond proper limits.
Ephrem does not reject the technical terms developed by Athanasius and adopted in the Nicene creed, but he regards even orthodox theologizing, if restricted to such terms, as sterile and even dangerous. He prefers by far the way of symbolic language used analogously, both (one suspects) because he is a poet, but also because he realizes that all human words applied to God are drawn from and limited by this-worldly experience. Limited, because between creatures and the Creator there is ‘a great gulf’, an infinite ontological chasm 
which cannot be crossed (physically or mentally) from this side by the will or choice of any creature. Even the spiritual orders of angels are on the creaturely side of this chasm. Only one person has ever bridged it – indeed, is the bridge over it: Christ the incarnate Word. At the end of an acrostic on the name Jesus, which in Syriac, as in Hebrew, begins with yod, Ephrem sings:
Ephrem attacks the Arians for imagining that finite human minds can leap the chasm and mentally grasp and control the nature of God and the interrelations in the Trinity. His answer is to accept the chasm and humbly acknowledge that God's nature is beyond our reach; yet he does not give up the possibility of speaking about God, the nature of Christ and the mystery of the Trinity. God has in fact bridged the chasm in a different way; not merely by the personal incarnation of the Son, but by making himself and his ways intelligible to human minds. Ephrem sees this as an ‘incarnation in language’ parallel to the personal incarnation. (This was to become a major theme for the Antiochene theologian St John Chrysostom in the next generation.)Footnote 2
Syriac tradition calls this the way of ‘Names’. The second-century Valentinian Gospel of Philip says ‘The Truth brought forth names in the world for our sakes, since it is not possible to learn it without names’. ‘Judas Thomas’ in his third-century Acts, says in a prayer ‘For our sake You were named with names’. Ephrem expands this idea of ‘Names’ as means of access to God in many of his teaching songs. Inconveniently for us, his use of the one word ‘name’ covers a wide range of senses, according to context. Besides the ordinary English personal sense, we need to translate the Syriac shemā variously by ‘term’, ‘title’, ‘predicate’, ‘epithet’ or perhaps even more words. The only distinction Ephrem makes is between ‘proper names’(shemāhē 
att?thē) and ‘borrowed names’(shemahe sh’?lē). The former are intrinsically predicable of God, but include both metaphysical transcendentals and terms such as ‘Creator’, ‘Almighty’ or ‘Holy One’, while ‘borrowed names’ include metaphors, analogues, scriptural figures and symbols that Ephrem finds in created nature. He insists that ‘father’ and ‘son’ applied to God are not metaphors but ‘proper names’.
The very inclusiveness of meaning in Ephrem's imprecise use of ‘names’ is what makes it easy for him to use the term, and many applications of it, both to God and to humankind and other this-worldly realities, in speaking of God's self-humbling and ‘condescension’, analogous to the Incarnation, in submitting to description by words and images developed by his finite human creatures. God has made this bridge across the infinite chasm, but it can be trodden only by the humble, never by the presumptuous such as the Arians. We must always affirm the absolute transcendence of God, but as we know God through Christ, so can we also know him through his incarnation in language.
Ephrem frequently uses a pair of complementary terms formed from the Syriac verbs k’sā, ‘to veil or hide’ and g’lā, ‘to unveil or reveal’. The passive participles kasyā, ‘hidden’ and galyā, ‘revealed’ or ‘manifest’, can also be used as nouns, Kasya for the Hidden God and Galyā for all that is visible. But the terms are more complex, for the kasyā God is galyā in Christ, while apparently clear and obvious things, on deeper inspection, reveal mysteries still kasyatha, ‘hidden’ to our understanding. These ‘mysteries’ lead us back to God; they are the traces and the signatures of the hidden Creator. ‘Mystery’(Syriac raz, borrowed by earlier Aramaic from Persian) first denoted secret counsels of a king shared only with his confidants; already in Daniel it refers to God's secret plans and purposes. St Paul develops this, especially in Romans. Musterion was borrowed from Greek secret cults and baptized into Christian use for the sacraments, but a broader sense of raz and musterion continued as terms for typological interpretations of Scripture and for symbols or parables drawn by Christian imagination from almost anything in the created world.
Ephrem is tireless in inventing and using every kind of types and symbols, and this method is his weapon against the Arian claims to encapsulate God by rational analysis. I have suggested elsewhere that his method curiously foreshadows that of Paul Ricoeur,Footnote 3 but Ephrem could never have reduced it to a philosophy of language, if only because philosophy and rhetoric were kept quite distinct in ancient education. I have proposed a scheme to contrast Ephrem's position over against the Arians:Footnote 4
Some Texts
