Jacob of Sarug

MOR Jacob of Sarug, the Malphono

Jacob of Sarug is a proficient and natural poet of great genius who is unrivaled and unequaled. An unrestrained writer and one of the princes of language, Jacob wrote with eloquence and creativeness. He was more of a poet than a writer. His poems attained wide popularity and spread everywhere. His poetry finds its way directly to the heart and amuses those who listen to it. One never reads any of his poems without becoming infatuated by it. Jacob's poetry contains masterpieces and beauties which astound the mind and arrest the heart. It is also characterized by immaculate style and perspicuity, exquisite themes, masterful expression and firm and clear form. Jacob was a prolific poet who composed lengthy poems, some of which contain two thousand, three thousand, or more lines of poetry. Besides his composing introductory verses and magnificent endings, he is at home with poetry. The more he penetrates his poetical theme, the more he enriches it with eloquence and beauty and the more he creates new terms, delicate expressions and brilliant techniques, which drive away boredom and alert the reader that he is opposite a mighty ocean full of literary pearls and uncommon objects.

In his memre on exhortation and renunciation of world pleasures and repentance; the readers will find that before finishing reading, that their heart has renounced earthly things and that it has become filled with the love of piety and devotion. How excellent he was in fathoming the diseases of the soul and in their proper treatment and how smooth is his style if it met attentive hearts and meek souls. Thus, his tongue was a spring of wisdom and he himself was one of the chosen of God and the most famous of the saints of his time, the age of faith, heroism and orthodox religious principles. May God bless an age which produced distinguished men like Philoxenus of Mabug, Paul of Callinicus, John of Telia, Zacharaiah of Mitylene, John Bar Aphtonia, Severus of Antioch and their like—unequaled authorities who are seldom found in any age. Therefore, the church has done an excellent thing by naming him the "doctor" par excellence as well as the "Qithoro of the Holy Spirit," the "Harp of the Orthodox Church," and the "Crown of the doctors, their ornament and their pride."

Mor Jacob was born at the village of Qawartum on the Euphrates, but he is also said to have been born at Hawra in the district of the city of Sarug in 551. He graduated from the School of Edessa, where he had acquired a great share of the sciences of philology, philosophy and theology. He became a monk and an ascetic. When he was twenty years old he extemporized his famous ode, The Chariot of Ezekiel, in the presence of five bishops who had suggested it to him at the church of Batnan-Sarug (according to another weak source, at the church of Nisibin) (1). The bishops admired his poetical talent and licensed him, trusting that God has distinguished him with His favor.

He was ordained a presbyter and then granted the rank of a periodeutes for the city of Hawra, after which he journeyed through the lands of the Euphrates and inner Syria, carrying out his task properly. He was well received, loved and trusted by hundreds, nay, thousands of monks for his piety, honesty and knowledge. At the end of his life he was made a bishop of the diocese of Batnan-Sarug in 519 and administered his diocese most appropriately for one year and eleven months. He died on November 29, 521, being seventy years of age. He is commemorated by the church. A long time later, some of his remains were removed to a private shrine in the city of Diyarbakir.

Certain men studied under Malphono Jacob and benefited from him. Of these is his secretary Habib of Edessa and an ascetic named Daniel. According to Bar Hebraeus seventy copyists were assigned to write down his poems, which had been collected and totaled seven hundred seventy poems, first of which was The Chariot of Ezekiel and the last, Golgotha, left unfinished because of his death. All of these poems are composed in the do decasyllabic meter which he invented and which came to be known in his name as the Sarugite meter. These memre (poems) covered commentaries on the most important subjects of the Old and New Testaments. They also treated subjects such as faith, virtue, penance, resurrection, graces for meals, the dead, praise of the Virgin, the prophets, the apostles, and the martyrs. He made specific mention of the Saints Peter, Paul, Thomas, Thaddeus, John the Baptist, Guriyya, Shamuna and Habib, Sergius and Bacchus, the people of the cave, George, the martyrs of Sebaste, Ephraim and Simon the Stylite. In the mornings and evenings, the Syrian church chants a group of his choicest memre in praise of the Lord of the Universe, thus perpetuating the memory of their author.

Our libraries at the Za'faran, Jerusalem (St. Mark), Mardin as well as the libraries of the Vatican and London, British Museum, contain more than four hundred of these memre most of which are written on parchment. And if you realize that the monk Paul Bedjan published two hundred memre in five thick volumes, you would estimate that their total number comprises nineteen volumes. Seventy-seven of these memre had been selected and added to the collection of the homilies for the whole year in a manuscript which I found at Basibrina, which is different from familiar collections. We have also read madroshos by him in the meter "God who ascended on Mount Sinai," (of which the first is on the saints) and two sughithos on penitence. Some copies ascribed to him a philosophical, alphabetically arranged sughitho of twenty-two lines in the melody of "Lord make me drink from thy spring," which, according to Mingana, belonged to Jacob of Edessa. He also composed songs on the pestilences of locusts which befell the country in the spring of the year 500.

Sources: 

• Patriarch Ignatius Aphram I Barsoum (2003), The Scattered Pearls, A History of Syriac Literature and Sciences, Translated and Edited by Matti Moosa, New Jersey