Death and the Afterlife is in some ways an extension of Maria Doerfler’s previous book Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity (2019), her deeply insightful study of ecclesiastical responses to the deaths of children. There she focused on the models late antique preachers drew from biblical narratives to present templates for responding to parental grief in the face of such loss.
In Death and the Afterlife in Syriac Christianity: Creating Social Identity and Emotional Communities, Doerfler takes us to a related but differently articulated set of materials, embedded within the mechanics and techniques of funerary ritual. In the hymn collection loosely titled the “Necrosima” by modern scholars, she considers the resources offered through the standardized, anonymous, ritual handbook material of funeral hymns. Here, we are not audience to the skill of the preacher but rather turn to the basic ritual tools available to guide people, families, and communities through the process of burying and mourning their dead. The categories covered include: deaths of mothers, children, husbands; the wealthy; poor strangers; church leaders; women and men of the “lesser” church orders, notably the Sons and Daughters of the Covenant; and civic communities in conditions of mass catastrophe (plague and earthquakes).
Doerfler eschews focus on the brilliance of famed Syriac poets such as Ephrem or Narsai or Jacob of Sarug, instead examining the humbler fare intended for religious gatherings in circumstances of death. These are not without echoes of the greater poets, whose themes and phrasing were often preserved in excerpts and snippets within generalized liturgical texts. But liturgical manuals were prepared and edited for widespread use, and they were used over centuries. They were, in fact, what the vast majority of people would have heard, sung, and looked to for meaning-making.
By the very nature of their content, these hymns offer precious entry into the familiar discourses by which people (ordinary or not) navigated their lives – and their deaths. They fill out the portraits described in equally generic terms in chronicles and hagiographies for important funerals or occasions of tragedy. Processions, it seems, could be organized, replete with song, in a flash. Ritual habits as much as verbal formulae are important here to understand the dynamics as well as the acceptable boundaries of communal grief. If we are to draw close to daily life in local communities, to non-elites as well as learned intellectuals, here are the words that were available to them, meaningful to them, used with and by them, over centuries.
The hymns Doerfler lays before us seem to float above time, unanchored. Three temporal orientations run through the book. First are the contingencies and whims of pre-twentieth century scholarly interests (or lack thereof ). Doerfler’s book, in fact, contains a book-within-a-book: for the Necrosima, as we have them, are the work of the great eighteenth-century scholar Joseph Simeon Assemani (and his assistants) in his monumental Bibliotheca Orientalis (1719), his effort to introduce western scholars to eastern Christian, especially Syriac, texts. His edition is based on two manuscripts – one ninth-century and one twelfth-century – scooped from the Monastery of St. Mary in Nitria on behalf of the growing libraries of the Vatican and of Europe. Assemani took at face value the ancient ascription of these hymns to “Ephrem the Syrian,” including them among the copious materials comprising Ephrem’s literary output, with titles and subtitles not necessarily in the original manuscripts nor accurately reflecting their contents. By the early twentieth century, these hymns were judged to be erroneously ascribed to Ephrem. They have since languished ostracized in that misty netherworld of “anonymous” and “inauthentic” texts.
The story of the modern transmission and devaluing of these hymns frames Doerfler’s book as a whole and threads through its various discussions. It is a constant reminder of the fragility of the historical record, a fragility that, in turn, magnifies the precarity of late antiquity itself, the second temporal focus.
Doerfler does not allow us to ignore the vast differences between the ancient world and our own, yet there is a third temporality in this book, namely, the destabilizing fragilities of our own time. Especially for the poor strangers – the dislocated, the migrant, and the homeless – and for the occasions of disaster, plague, and war, Doerfler draws on experiences of our present world and the scholarship that addresses the different responses to these circumstances or events. The parallels are edifying. Through attention to these different temporalities, Doerfler manages to render the Necrosima revelatory of specific times and places at the same time that they are universal. There are real reasons why verses from the fourth or fifth centuries continue to appear in funeral services of the present for Syriac and Byzantine churches.
From such fragile, nameless, faceless evidence, and from such interwoven strands of time, Doerfler’s primary historiographical goal is to grasp the emotional qualities – and indeed, the emotional complexity – of relationships within ancient communities. The love between mothers and daughters; the shared obligations and joys of those who served together in their ministries: from such as these, Doerfler draws out cherished yet ordinary relationships with astute observation and sensitivity. Gently, compassionately, at times starkly, the hymns of the Necrosima guided their singers and listeners through the ravages of loss. They named, enacted, and personified stages of grief; they bound the grieving together.
Among the most haunting of Doerfler’s perceptive portraits, shared song is celebrated as a simple yet profound joy. In verses that sound the first-person thoughts of both the living and the dead, these hymns recall the pleasures of singing together with one’s dear ones, whether families or fellow choir members. It is the loss of that joy that is lamented in the funeral hymn. But it is also with hope of exalted song yet to come that these hymns offered their comfort.
In recent years, Syriac Christianity has been increasingly brought to bear on our understanding of Christian history, and rightly so. Its evidence is distinctive; its literature powerfully moving. Maria Doerfler is a lucid guide, accessible to the newcomer yet instructive for the Syriacist. This is a splendid, insightful book, one to learn from long after its first read.
