The Undivided Light: The Holy Trinity (Post 7 of 7)

Praying the Trinity, Doxology, Qurbana, and the Life of Worship

There is a phrase that the Malankara Orthodox faithful say so often in the course of a single liturgy that it is easy to stop hearing it. It appears at the end of psalms, at the transitions between sections of the Qurbana, at the close of the daily offices of the Shehimo, woven into the fabric of almost every act of communal prayer the tradition has ever produced. It is perhaps the oldest continuously used sentence in the Christian Church. And if you have been following this series from the beginning, you will recognise immediately that it is not merely a closing formula. It is a complete Trinitarian confession, compressed into a single breath.

Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto the ages of ages.

Six posts have brought us to this one. We began at Pentecost, watching the Trinity act in history. We sat with the Father as Source Without Origin, with the Son as eternally begotten, with the Spirit as the living breath of the divine love. We worked through the grammar of Syriac Trinitarian theology, the vocabulary of kyano, qnoma, and parsopa. And last week we looked at theosis, the participation in the undivided life of God that is the goal of everything the Trinity has done in history. All of that was, in a sense, preparation for this final post, because all of it was, from the beginning, in service of this: learning to pray.

Here is the thing about that sentence. It is not just a nice way to finish a prayer. It is not filler, the liturgical equivalent of signing off an email. It is, in the space of a single breath, a complete confession of the Trinity. Every word in it is doing theological work. And if you have been following this series from the beginning, you will recognise that what those words are saying is everything we have been studying for the past six weeks.

This final post is about that sentence and about what it means to pray it honestly, to understand it fully, and to live it daily. It is about doxology, which is the word the tradition uses for giving glory to God. It is about the Qurbana as a Trinitarian act. It is about the Shehimo as a daily school of Trinitarian prayer. And it is about what it actually looks like, in ordinary life, to be a Trinitarian person.

Four fathers guide this final post: Ephrem the Syrian, Jacob of Serugh, Cyril of Alexandria, and Severus of Antioch. We have met all four before in this series, and it feels right that they should be the ones to bring it home.

What Doxology Actually Means

The word doxology comes from the Greek “doxa,” meaning glory, and “logos,” meaning word or account. A doxology is a word of glory, an utterance that gives glory to God. But the tradition means something more precise and more interesting by it than simply a compliment directed toward the divine.

In the patristic tradition, giving glory to God is not understood primarily as a human act of appreciation, a kind of theological thank you note sent upward to a deserving recipient. It is not like leaving a five-star review or telling someone they did a great job. In the tradition, giving glory to God means something much more interesting and much more personal than that.

It is understood as the human person participating, by grace, in the movement of glory that already circulates within the Trinity itself. Within the Trinity itself, the Father, Son, and Spirit are in a continuous movement of love and self-giving toward one another. The Father glorifies the Son. The Son glorifies the Father. The Spirit glorifies both. This mutual glorification is not a series of compliments exchanged between three beings who are pleased with one another. It is the very life of the Trinity, the eternal movement of self-giving love in which each person pours out toward the others the fullness of the divine life they share.

When we say the doxology, “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit,” we are not standing outside that movement and applauding it from a safe distance. We are being pulled into it. Our voice joins the praise that has been circulating within the Trinity from before the world was made. The glory returns to the Father through the Son and in the Spirit, and the human voice that speaks or sings the doxology is carried along in that return, drawn into the circulation of divine love that has always been the inner life of the Trinity and that Pentecost opened to include the creature.

This is why the doxology is not merely a liturgical convention or a pious habit. It is an act of participation in the life of God. Every time the faithful say “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit,” they are enacting, in the briefest possible form, the entire theology this series has been working through: confessing the three persons by name, acknowledging the unity of the one divine life they share, and placing themselves within the movement of praise that flows from the Son through the Spirit to the Father and from the Father through the Son in the Spirit back to the worshipping community.

If that sounds too grand for a sentence we say without thinking between psalms, that is precisely the point. The Fathers wanted the most profound theological truth to be the most familiar sound on the lips of the faithful, so familiar that it would slowly, over years of repetition, work its way from the mouth into the heart.

Ephrem the Syrian: The Doxology of Creation

Ephrem the Syrian, whose beautiful poetry has accompanied this entire series, had an extraordinary way of looking at the created world. He saw praise everywhere.

Ephrem understood doxology as something far wider than what happens in a church on a Sunday morning. For Ephrem, the entire created order is in a state of continuous, if largely unconscious, praise of the Trinity. The sun rises and gives light, and in giving light, it reflects, however dimly, the eternal light of the Son who is Light from Light. The rain falls and nourishes the earth, and in that nourishing, it echoes the Spirit who gives life. The seasons turn, each one offering what it has to the life of the world, and in turning, they participate in the great liturgy of creation that Ephrem believes God set in motion precisely so that the world would be, from its very beginning, a place of worship.¹

Ephrem develops this most fully in his Hymns on the Nativity, where he meditates on the fact that when the Son of God was born in Bethlehem, the entire created order responded. The star gave its light. The animals shared their shelter. The angels sang their gloria. The shepherds came from their fields. The wise men came from their distant country. For Ephrem, this gathering of the whole creation around the newborn Son is the most concentrated doxological moment in history before Pentecost: every element of the created order giving what it has to the One who made it, and in giving, being drawn into the praise that is the life of the Trinity.²

This might sound a little abstract, so here is a more concrete way to think about it. Imagine that you gave someone a gift, say a guitar. The most natural and fitting response to that gift is for the person to play it. The guitar is praised, in a sense, when it is played well, when it is used for the purpose it was made for. Ephrem sees the whole of creation like this: made by God, and most fully itself when it is doing what it was made to do, which is to reflect back to God the life and beauty it has received.

Now here is where human beings come in, and here is where Ephrem says something that might change how you think about worship. The sun and the rain and the seasons give glory to God because they cannot do otherwise: it is simply what they are and what they do. The human person gives glory to God by choice, by will, by a conscious act of love and gratitude. This is what makes human doxology uniquely significant in Ephrem’s theology. The human person is the only part of creation capable of knowing what it is doing when it praises God, the only part capable of understanding, however partially, who it is praising and why. And this conscious, knowing, loving participation in the praise of the Trinity is precisely what distinguishes the liturgy of the Church from the liturgy of creation.³

There is a passage in Ephrem’s Hymns on Faith that has stayed with me throughout the writing of this series and that seems exactly the right note on which to begin this final post. Ephrem writes that the human tongue was made for doxology in the same way that the eye was made for light and the ear was made for sound. The capacity to give glory to God is not an optional extra added onto human nature. It is what human nature is fundamentally for, the function for which it was designed, the activity in which it finds its fullest and most natural expression. When the faithful gather for the Qurbana and sing the doxology, they are not performing a religious duty. They are being, more fully than at almost any other moment, what they were created to be.⁴

Ephrem also reflects on the connection between doxology and theosis in a way that brings the previous post and this one into direct conversation. He argues that the more deeply a person is drawn into the life of God, the more naturally and spontaneously they give glory to God, not as a discipline maintained by effort but as the overflow of a heart that has been filled with the divine love. Theosis and doxology are not separate movements of the Christian life. Theosis is the process by which the human person is progressively filled with the divine life. Doxology is what that filling sounds like from the outside. A person being drawn into the Trinity will inevitably begin to sound, in their worship, more and more like the Trinity itself: giving, praising, self-emptying, returning.⁵

Jacob of Serugh: Worship as the Return of Creation to its Source

Jacob of Serugh, the fifth and sixth-century Syriac bishop and poet whose voice has accompanied this series from the first post, brings to the theology of worship an image that is perhaps the most comprehensive in the Syriac tradition. For Jacob, all genuine worship is a movement of return: the creature moving back toward the Creator, the river flowing back toward its source, the light finding its way home to the sun from which it came.

Think of a river. It starts at a source, flows out across the land, and eventually finds its way back to the sea. For Jacob, the whole of creation is like that river. It came from God, the source of all things, and all genuine worship is the movement of creation finding its way home.

Jacob develops this in his memre on the great feasts of the liturgical year, each of which he reads as a moment in which the return of creation to God is made visible and real in the life of the gathered community. The Nativity is the moment when God comes out to meet the creation that has wandered away. Pentecost is the moment when the creation is given the power to return. And the Eucharist, celebrated week after week, is the ongoing enactment of that return: the creation, in the form of bread and wine offered by human hands, given back to God, and God, in the form of the body and blood of the eternal Son, given back to the creation. The offering and the gift move in opposite directions simultaneously, and where they meet is the altar.⁶

But here is what Jacob says about the gathered community that I want you to sit with, especially if you are a young person who has sometimes wondered whether it is really necessary to come to church rather than just praying at home.

Jacob says that the gathered community of the faithful, all those people in the pews on a Sunday morning, is itself a theological reality. The Trinity is not a solitary God. He notes that the Trinity is itself a community, the Father, Son, and Spirit in the inseparable communion of the one divine life. When the Church gathers, it becomes, in created form, a reflection of that uncreated communion. The community at prayer is, for Jacob, a living icon of the Trinity: three persons in one God, many persons in one body, the many made one by the one Spirit who dwells in all..⁷

This is a point worth pausing over for those who have sometimes wondered whether it is really necessary to attend the Qurbana rather than simply praying at home. Not because God cannot hear your private prayers, He absolutely can and does. Jacob’s answer, implicit throughout his memre on worship, is that the gathered community is not merely a convenience or a tradition. It is a theological necessity. The Trinity is not a solitary God. The Trinity is a communion. Because the God we are praying to is, in His own inner life, a community. And the worship that reflects the Trinity must itself be communal, must itself be a gathering of the many into one, must itself enact in human form the koinonia, the shared life, that is the inner reality of the God being worshipped.

The gathered parish on a Sunday morning is not just a group of people who share a religious preference. It is, at its deepest level, a living icon of the Trinity. And when you choose not to come, something genuinely is missing, not just for you, but from the icon.

Cyril of Alexandria: Worshipping in Spirit and in Truth

Cyril of Alexandria, who has been present at almost every significant turn in this series, brings to the theology of Trinitarian worship his characteristic precision and his deep rootedness in the Gospel of John. There is a conversation in the Gospel of John that most people read and think they understand, but which Cyril of Alexandria unpacks into something far richer than it first appears.

The text that anchors his reflection on worship is one of the most theologically rich exchanges in the entire New Testament: the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, and specifically Jesus’s statement that the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth.

Most people read “in spirit and in truth” as meaning sincerely, or from the heart, as if Jesus is simply asking for genuine rather than merely outward religion. And that is true as far as it goes. But Cyril of Alexandria, reading this in his Commentary on John, says it means something more specific and more Trinitarian than that.⁸

“In spirit,” for Cyril, means in the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, who alone makes genuine worship possible. Human beings cannot, by their own spiritual capacity or moral effort, offer worship adequate to the God they are addressing. The worship that reaches God is worship carried by the Spirit, worship that the Spirit initiates within the human heart and carries to the Father through the Son. The Spirit is not simply the emotional warmth that accompanies prayer. The Spirit is the person of the Trinity in whom and through whom all genuine prayer is offered.

“In truth,” for Cyril, means in the Son, the eternal Truth, the Word who is the Father’s own self-expression and who is himself the truth about God made available to human understanding and human prayer. To worship in truth is to worship through the Son, to address the Father in the name and through the person of the one who alone knows the Father as the Father knows him. This is why the prayers of the Church consistently end with the phrase “through Jesus Christ our Lord.” It is not a liturgical habit. It is a theological claim: that the only way from the creature to the Creator is through the one who is himself both.

No human prayer reaches the Father except through the Son, not because the Father is inaccessible or unwilling, but because the Son is the only way from the creature to the Creator, the bridge whose two ends rest in the divine and the human simultaneously.⁹

Cyril puts the two together: worship in spirit and in truth is worship offered through the Son and in the Holy Spirit, to the Father who is the source and goal of all worship. This is, once again, the Trinitarian structure of prayer that has been running through every post in this series. But Cyril’s reading of John 4 gives it a Gospel warrant, rooting it not in the later theological reflection of the Councils but in the words of Jesus himself at a well in Samaria, spoken to a woman who was not expecting a theology lesson and received instead the most concentrated account of Trinitarian worship.¹⁰

Cyril also connects this Trinitarian account of worship to the Eucharist in a way that is directly relevant to everything Severus of Antioch will say in the next section. He argues that the Eucharist is the fullest expression of worship in spirit and in truth precisely because in the Eucharist, all three persons of the Trinity are present and active simultaneously. The Son is present in the body and blood offered on the altar. The Spirit is present in the epiclesis, descending to make the offering holy and the reception life-giving. The Father is present as the one to whom the entire Anaphora is addressed and toward whom the entire liturgical movement is directed. The Eucharist is not merely one form of Trinitarian worship among several. It is the form in which Trinitarian worship is most completely itself.¹¹

Severus of Antioch: the Anaphora as the Fullest Expression of Trinitarian Theology

Severus of Antioch is the fourth father in this post, and he is perhaps the most immediately relevant for anyone who attends the Malankara Qurbana regularly. Severus was not only a theologian. He was a preacher, a pastor, and a man who presided at the liturgy hundreds of times. When he writes about the Qurbana, he writes from the inside, from the altar itself, and his reflections on what is happening during the service are some of the most illuminating in the entire patristic tradition.

The Anaphora of the West Syriac tradition, which is the liturgical heritage of both the Syriac Orthodox Church and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church, is one of the oldest continuously used Eucharistic prayers in Christianity. Its basic structure goes back to the earliest centuries of the Syrian church, and its theological shape reflects the Trinitarian and Christological convictions of the Syriac tradition that this entire series has been exploring. Severus knew this prayer with the intimacy of someone who had presided at it hundreds of times, and his homilies on the liturgy reveal a man who had thought deeply about every phrase and found in each one a depth of Trinitarian theology that could sustain a lifetime of reflection.¹²

Let us walk through it simply. The Anaphora is addressed to the Father. Everything in it is directed toward the Father, the source of all things, the one to whom all worship ultimately returns. This is not accidental. It reflects the theology of the Father as Source Without Origin that we explored in the second post of this series.

Within that address to the Father, the Anaphora moves through the story of the Son: His Incarnation, His life, His death, His resurrection, His ascension, and His promised return. The priest recounts what the Son has done, and the community listens and participates. The bread and wine on the altar are the memorial the Son himself commanded: “Do this in remembrance of me.”

Then comes the epiclesis, which we looked at in detail in the fourth post on the Holy Spirit. The priest asks the Father to send the Spirit upon the gifts, to make them holy, to transform them into the body and blood of Christ, and to make their reception the gift of divine life to those who receive them. The Spirit descends. The gifts are made holy. The Trinitarian structure of salvation, the Father sending, the Son giving, the Spirit completing, is enacted in real time on the altar in front of you.¹³

Severus also says something about the congregation’s participation that I find genuinely moving and that I want to share with younger readers especially. He says that the Amen the community says at the end of the great prayer of thanksgiving is one of the most significant theological statements they will make all week. When the congregation says Amen to the Anaphora, they are not just indicating that they were listening or that they agree in a general way. They are ratifying a Trinitarian confession. They are adding their voice to the praise that the priest has articulated on their behalf. They are saying, in one syllable: yes, this is who God is, this is what God has done, and I am here, in this building, with these people, at this altar, to receive it.

The next time you are at the Qurbana, try to hear that Amen with fresh ears. It is not a polite response. It is, Severus says, an act of Trinitarian faith.¹⁴

The Shehimo: a Trinitarian Life in Daily Prayer

The Qurbana is once a week. But the Trinitarian life of the Qurbana is meant to fill the entire week, and the Shehimo, the daily prayer book of the Malankara Orthodox tradition, is the instrument through which that happens.

Every office of the Shehimo begins with an invocation of the Trinity. The opening prayer, “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal,” addressed in the tradition to the three persons of the Trinity, sets the frame within which everything that follows takes place. Before you have read a single psalm or prayed a single petition, we have already named the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and placed the hours ahead within their presence.

The daily cycle of the Shehimo also carries the weekly theological themes we mentioned in the third post: Sunday for the Resurrection, Wednesday for the Cross, Friday for the Passion. Praying through a full week of the Shehimo is, in miniature, following the shape of the entire Gospel, which is the shape of the Trinity’s action in history.

For younger readers who may be just beginning to use the Shehimo, or who have been using it for years without perhaps understanding its structure, here is the simplest possible account of what you are doing when you open it each morning.

You are not just reading prayers. You are stepping into a Trinitarian rhythm of attention and praise that the Syriac Church has been maintaining, day after day, for centuries. The words on the page are not new. They have been shaped by the same tradition that gave us Ephrem and Jacob and Severus. And they are designed to do something very specific over time: to form you, through daily repetition, into someone who instinctively addresses the Father, prays through the Son, and listens for the Spirit, not because you have memorised a theological formula but because you have been shaped by a practice that embeds that formula in your bones.

Ephrem said that the tongue was made for doxology in the same way that the eye was made for light. The Shehimo is the daily practice of giving the tongue what it was made for.

Living as Trinitarian People

We are almost at the end of this series now, and it seems right, in this final post, to step back from the patristic sources and the liturgical analysis and ask the most personal question the series has raised: what does it actually look like, in the ordinary textures of daily life, to live as a Trinitarian people?

The tradition’s answer, mediated through the four fathers this post has drawn on, is not primarily a list of practices or a spiritual programme. It is a reorientation of the entire person toward a reality that is already there, already present, already acting, and that simply needs to be recognised, named, and consciously received.

First of all, living as a Trinitarian person means, praying to a God who is not solitary. This changes prayer more than almost anything else can. If God were a solitary absolute, prayer would be the human person addressing a single divine consciousness, hoping to be heard. But the God we pray to is a communion of three persons, each genuinely distinct, each genuinely to be addressed, each genuinely present to the one who prays. When we address the Father, we are not going through an operator to reach the main line. We are speaking directly to the first person of the eternal Trinity, the source of all things, who has been turned toward us in love since before the world was made. When we pray in the name of the Son, we are placing ourselves within the relationship of love that the Son has with the Father, asking to be heard in the hearing that the Father gives the Son eternally. When we ask the Spirit to come, we are asking the One who is already within us to make His presence felt and His work effective. Trinitarian prayer is not more complicated than ordinary prayer. It is simply more aware of what ordinary prayer has always been.

Second, living as a Trinitarian person means, understanding the community of the Church as more than a group of people who share a religion. JAs Jacob of Serugh says, the gathered community of the faithful is a living icon of the Trinity: many persons, one body, made one by the one Spirit who dwells in all. The person sitting next to you in the Qurbana is not simply a fellow churchgoer. They are a member of the community in whom the Trinity dwells, a person in whom the same Spirit is at work, being drawn by the same Spirit toward the same Son toward the same Father. We are connected to them by something deeper than culture or tradition or family. We are connected by the God who is Himself a community. It is, at its deepest level, a participation in the communion that is the inner life of God. This does not make human community easy or conflict-free. The Fathers were not naive about the difficulties of communal life. But it does mean that the community of the Church is always more than it appears, and its brokenness is always a wound in something genuinely holy.

And lastly, living as a Trinitarian person means, receiving the Qurbana with the awareness of what is actually happening. Not simply attending a service. Not simply fulfilling a weekly religious obligation. But coming to the altar knowing that the exchange Ephrem described, He gave us divinity, we gave him humanity, is about to take place again in your hands and on your lips. The God who is a communion of three persons giving themselves completely to one another is giving Himself to us, in the bread broken and the cup poured out, asking to be received and to make His home within you. And we are giving ourselves to Him, in the small and incomplete and imperfect gift of our attendance and our faith and our open hands, and He is receiving that gift with the same completeness with which the Father receives the Son. This is what the Qurbana is. This is what we are entering when the priest says “Holy things for the holy.” And this is why, as Severus of Antioch insists, the Amen the community says at the end of the Anaphora is among the most significant theological statements they will make all week.

What this series has tried to do

Seven posts and several months ago, this series began with a simple observation: that the Trinity tends to sit at the edges of our Christian life rather than at the centre of it. We confess it in the Creed. We enact it in the sign of the cross. But we have perhaps not always understood why it matters, what it means, or what difference it makes to pray, week after week, to a God who is three and one.

What this series has tried to do, through the voices of Ephrem the Syrian, Cyril of Alexandria, Athanasius of Alexandria, Jacob of Serugh, and Severus of Antioch, is show that the Trinity is not a theological puzzle to be solved but a life to be entered. The Father is not an abstract principle but the source of all love, turned toward us before time began. The Son is not a historical figure at a comfortable distance but the eternal Word who has taken our nature into himself and now gives himself to us week after week at the altar of the Qurbana. The Spirit is not a vague religious feeling but the third person of the Trinity, dwelling within us, praying within us, drawing us progressively deeper into the divine life that Pentecost opened to us.

And the doxology with which this post began is not a liturgical formality. It is the human voice, caught up in the movement of the Trinity’s own self-giving love, returning to the Father through the Son and in the Spirit, carrying with it everything the believer is and has and hopes for, and being received with the completeness and the tenderness with which the Father receives all things that come to him through the Son he loves.

Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto the ages of ages.

That is the whole of it. That is what this series has been circling, from the first post to this one. Not a doctrine to be memorised but a life to be received. Not a formula to be recited but a communion to be entered. Not a God to be understood from the outside but a Trinity to be known from within, Sunday by Sunday and morning by morning, at the altar and at the opened Shehimo and in the small, daily, uncelebrated acts of prayer by which a person is slowly, over a lifetime, drawn into the undivided light.

A prayer to close the series

It seems right, at the end of seven posts, to close not with a summary or a conclusion but with the same gesture that every post in this series has ended with: a prayer, addressed to the Trinity whose life we have been trying, inadequately and gratefully, to describe.

Father, you are the source of all things, hidden and yet closer to us than our own breath. You willed, before time began, that we should share in the life you share with your Son and your Spirit, and you have been working that will in us through everything the Church has given us: the scriptures, the sacraments, the community of prayer, and the beauty of the liturgy.
Son, you became human so that we might become divine. You took our nature into yourself and carried it through death into the glory of the Father. You meet us at the altar of the Qurbana, week after week, giving yourself into our hands with a generosity that our hands were not made to hold and yet have been given to hold.
Holy Spirit, you dwell within us as the gift of Pentecost, praying in us when our words fail, drawing us deeper than we know how to go on our own, completing in us what the Father willed and the Son accomplished.
Glory to you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

This is the final post in The Undivided Light: The Holy Trinity, a Wednesday summer study series on the Holy Trinity in Oriental Orthodox tradition. The series began at Pentecost and has covered seven posts over seven weeks: the revelation of Pentecost as Trinitarian disclosure, the Father as Source Without Origin, the eternal Son begotten not made, the Holy Spirit as the Living Breath, the grammar of Syriac Trinitarian theology, the Trinity and theosis, and finally doxology, Qurbana, and the life of worship. All seven posts remain available on the blog for anyone who would like to read or reread the series in full.

This series has been an observational study, the reflections of someone sitting with these texts and trying to share what he is finding along the way. It has been offered in humility, not as finished scholarship. There are places where a more learned reader will see further than the author has managed to see, and corrections offered in a spirit of charity are always welcome. What sustained this series through seven weeks was not the writer’s own steadiness but the prayers of those who read it and remembered. If you prayed for the completion of this series, I am more grateful than these words can say. The study is now complete. The life it points toward is only beginning.

Jobin

References:

Kathleen E. McVey (trans.), “Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns,” Classics of Western Spirituality, Hymns on the Nativity, for Ephrem’s theology of the created order’s doxological response to the Incarnation. ↩︎
Edmund Beck (ed. and trans.), “Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Nativitate,” Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium. The Hymns on the Nativity are the primary source for Ephrem’s theology of creation’s doxological response to the Incarnation. For an accessible English translation with commentary, see Kathleen E. McVey (trans.), “Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns,” Classics of Western Spirituality. ↩︎
Sebastian Brock, “The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem the Syrian,” Chapter 2, “The World as Sacrament,” on Ephrem’s understanding of the created order as a continuous liturgy of praise and the specific role of human consciousness in that liturgy. ↩︎
Edmund Beck (ed. and trans.), “Des Heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Fide,” Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium. For discussion of Ephrem’s theology of the tongue as created for doxology, see Sidney Griffith, “Faith Adoring the Mystery: Reading the Bible with St. Ephraem the Syrian,” The Pere Marquette Lecture in Theology (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1997). ↩︎
Sebastian Brock, “The Harp of the Spirit: Eighteen Poems of Saint Ephrem,” on the connection between theosis and doxology in Ephrem’s spiritual theology. ↩︎
Thomas Kollamparampil, “Jacob of Serugh: Select Festal Homilies”, the memra on Pentecost and the memra on the Eucharist, for Jacob’s theology of worship as the return of creation to its source. ↩︎
Robert Murray, “Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition,” Chapter 6, “The Church as the Body of the New Creation”. ↩︎
David R. Maxwell, “Cyril of Alexandria: Commentary on John”. ↩︎
Norman Russell, “Cyril of Alexandria,” The Early Church Fathers series, Chapter 5, “The Theology of Worship,” on Cyril’s Trinitarian account of prayer and worship and its grounding in the Johannine texts. ↩︎
John A. McGuckin, “Saint Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy”for the broader Johannine framework within which Cyril’s theology of worship is situated. ↩︎
Daniel A. Keating, “The Appropriation of Divine Life in Cyril of Alexandria”, Chapter 5, “The Eucharist and the Gift of Divine Life,” on Cyril’s understanding of the Eucharist as the fullest expression of Trinitarian worship and the primary locus of theosis. ↩︎
Pauline Allen and C. T. R. Hayward, “Severus of Antioch,” The Early Church Fathers series, Chapter 3, “Preacher and Liturgist,” on Severus’s liturgical theology and his understanding of the Anaphora as a Trinitarian act. ↩︎
Fr. Baby Varghese, “West Syrian Liturgical Theology”, Chapter 4, “The Anaphora as Theological Act”. ↩︎
Iain R. Torrance, “Christology after Chalcedon: Severus of Antioch and Sergius the Monophysite”, “The Community at Prayer”. ↩︎

The Undivided Light: The Holy Trinity (Post 7 of 7)