It seems that I was not alone in raising a few pointed objections to the Greek/Western-Semitic dichotomy that Micah Hayes set up in his article, The Early Syriac Poets and Cognitive Science. Mr. D. Ian Dalrymple correctly notes in his letter to The New Pantagruel:

But the language of paradox in worship and doctrine is far from absent among the Orthodox. Mr Hayes attempts to anticipate the criticism by suggesting:

Some may think that this statement overlooks the similarity of the Greek apophatic tradition, in which God can only be defined negatively ( e.g. uncreated, invisible, etc.), and to speak positively of God (e.g. as being wise, or existing) ultimately leads to idolatry. A negative definition, however, is still a definition and is different from the metaphoric, Semitic tradition.

But even if one accepts this (rash, in my opinion) brushing aside of apophaticism, one need only walk into an Orthodox celebration of Divine Liturgy to feast oneself on a liturgy and hymnography replete with the theological language of metaphor and paradox. Definition of God, properly speaking, is simply not on the menu.

Certainly, there are other elements (some native Greek, and others through western influence) within the Orthodox tradition. But the Semitic inheritance is far from absent and was never forgotten in the Orthodox Church. After all, St. Ephrem (along with St. Isaac the Syrian and others) is one of our most honored holy fathers and we still sing his hymns to this day.

An important point of contact between the Syrian and Greek worlds in the development of particularly paradoxical Greek hymnography is the work of St. Romanos the Melode of the mid-sixth century, who is believed to have been working in the tradition and style of earlier Syriac poets even as he was composing hymns in Greek for a Greek-speaking audience. The strong emphasis on paradox, allegory and mystical theology, while always present to some degree in all early patristic writings (as the reality of the Incarnation must induce a sense of paradox–“O new commingling! O strange conjunction!”), is the common legacy of all heirs of the “Alexandrian” exegetical tradition in particular. In this same vein, I had earlier written on the paradoxical elements in Orthodox exegesis, saying:

The traditional fourfold interpretation of Scripture (literal, moral/tropological, typological, allegorical) familiar to early medieval Latin Fathers and their successors was the product of a catholic and ecclesial view of exegesis that sought to incorporate and encompass as many valid and mutually reinforcing meanings in Scripture as possible. The victories of the churches of Alexandria, Rome and Constantinople respectively at the Third, Fourth and Fifth Ecumenical Councils went a long way in keeping the most basic, often least instructive, literal, “carnal” sense of the Word represented stereotypically by the Antiochene tradition from impoverishing the religious imagination of the Church.

The more basic problems with the contrast between the Hellenic and the Semitic forms of Christianity are the sources of this unworkable idea. Let us recall first what Mr. Hayes said on this point:

The poetry of Ephrem the Syrian and other early Syriac poets reveal unusual views of the relationship between body and soul, and their unhellenized aversion to defining God led them to embrace a “theology of paradox” largely through metaphor.

First, it owes its genesis to the tremendous efforts of Syriac scholars over the past century, admirable in themselves, to restore a proper historical appreciation for the importance of the early Syriac Fathers and other Syrian Christian writers in late antique Christianity, which has of some necessity required scholars of Syriac and Syrian Christianity to attempt to find deficiencies in the Greek tradition that the Syriac-speaking Christians fill and so provide the complement or at least to draw sharp distinctions between Greek and Syrian expressions of Christianity to explain the collapse of Christian unity during late antiquity. Connected to this is the general, ecumenically-minded drive to rehabilitate all and sundry theologians who either wrote in Syriac or whose works principally survive in Syriac (because they were considered to be heretics of one sort or another in Byzantine Orthodoxy), which has reached such absurd depths as articles defending the Orthodoxy of Nestorios (modern Nestorian scholars seem to understand that this is both an anachronistic and lost cause and have turned to interpreting how the Nestorian controversy evolved rather than going to bat for the old heresiarch).

Second, this contrast derives from an unsustainable essentialism of the Hellenic and the Semitic that supposes the existence of impassable barriers and mutually incomprehensible mental structures that determine the different evolutions of Christianity in the two cultural “zones.” I react particularly badly to this sort of division, as similar divisions have tended to trap studies of Christology in the box of cultural determinism (Syriac-speakers think about Christ one way, Greek-speakers another way, which makes the differences between them simply linguistic and therefore reduces the differences to insignificance, etc.) and, in the less careful interpretations in the past, in the anachronistic absurdities of imaginary ethnolinguistic nationalist movements disguised as Christological dissent (this latter idea has, thankfully, largely been buried and forgotten by specialists, but continues to make the rounds as new generations read the old stand-by general histories that repeat these falsehoods).

Some of the greatest exponents of paradoxical expressions of Orthodoxy, such as St. Gregory Nazianzenos and St. Cyril of Alexandria (to whom we owe the critical defense of the ultimate paradoxical title Theotokos, which most of the Syrian bishops either opposed or were more reluctant to embrace), were raised and moulded in the Greek language and the classical rhetorical traditions of the Greeks, but had also imbibed the common inheritance of the Faith so much that if there were some generalisation that one might make about Greek vs. Syrian ways of handling definition, contradiction and paradox these Fathers nonetheless transcended it in the catholicity of the Truth.

Furthermore, they were working within a genuinely ecumenical milieu where men, almost regardless of language, expressed themselves in the idiom of the Logos Incarnate. Without dismissing the significance of language for shaping concepts and the understanding of concepts, proposing a Hellenic-Semitic dichotomy in the expression of Christian thought makes no more sense than a Hellenic-Slavic dichotomy in the later Orthodox world.