Ephraim of Smolensk
Our Venerable Father Ephraim the Wonderworker, disciple of Saint Abramius of Smolensk
Venerable · d. 13th century, at Smolensk
Commemorated 21 August — Kept with his teacher Abramius of Smolensk
Ephraim was the disciple of Abramius of Smolensk, and he is remembered for one act: he wrote his teacher's Life. That book — composed in the thirteenth century, within living memory of the events, by a man who had been present for many of them — is among the finest works of hagiography produced in Rus' before the Mongol conquest, and is the sole substantial source for one of the most remarkable religious careers of the period. It is also, incidentally, the best surviving evidence for what education and book-learning actually amounted to in the remote north-west of the Russian lands in that age. Of Ephraim's own life almost nothing is transmitted. He is commemorated with his teacher on August 21, and the proper service composed for the day names the two together.
The disciple
What is known of Ephraim is what he lets slip about himself in writing about another man. He was a monk under Abramius — at the monastery of the Placing of the Robe of the Theotokos outside Smolensk, where Abramius was archimandrite, or possibly earlier, at the Holy Cross monastery in the city — and he was close enough to his teacher to record the turns of his speech, the manner of his teaching, and the details of the process brought against him. Neither his birth, his family, his tonsure, the date of his repose nor the place of his burial has come down. The Russian calendars call him wonderworker, but no miracle of his own is transmitted.
The Life of Abramius
His book is the whole of his legacy and it deserves an account of its own.
The Life of St Abramius of Smolensk belongs to the small class of Russian vitae written by an eyewitness for a local cultus, before the conventions of the later Muscovite hagiography had hardened. Its distinguishing quality is candour. It gives Abramius's enemies — the abbot who expelled him, the clergy of the town, the crowd that shouted for his drowning — their words; it records that the bishop Ignatius imposed the interdict and then publicly reversed it; it admits that the brotherhood of the new monastery never rose above seventeen and explains why. Its author writes as a man setting down what he saw and what he was told by those who saw, and he says so.
Out of that habit comes the book's secondary value, which modern scholarship has prized as highly as its subject: because Ephraim wanted to explain what made his teacher formidable, he described what Abramius read and how he came by it — the copying of manuscripts, the Slavonic fathers, the years of study, the painted icons of the Judgement used as texts for preaching. There is no other source of comparable richness for the literary culture of a provincial Russian principality on the eve of the Mongol invasion.
Feast and commemoration
August 21 (church date; New Calendar civil August 21, Old Calendar civil September 3), within the afterfeast of the Dormition, kept in Russian usage only, always together with Abramius, whose day it primarily is. He is named also in the Synaxis of the Saints of Smolensk.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O Father, that which was made after the image of God was preserved unimpaired; for taking up the Cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou hast taught us to despise the flesh, which passeth away, and to care for the soul, which is immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Ephraim, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Ephraim is shown, when he is shown at all, as the second and younger figure in the double-founder icons of Smolensk: a monk in dark mantle and koukoulion, brown-bearded, standing beside or slightly behind his teacher and inclining towards him, with the hands raised in prayer or holding a scroll. Where the two are painted with the attributes of their respective callings, Abramius holds the cross of the schema and Ephraim a book — the Life he wrote — which is his only distinguishing attribute and is not always given him. No pre-1900 icon of Ephraim alone has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- Which Ephraim. The name is among the commonest in the Russian calendar and this one is among the least documented of its bearers. He is not Ephraim of Pereyaslavl, the eleventh-century metropolitan; not Ephraim of Perekom (†1492), the founder on Lake Ilmen; not Ephraim of Serbia, the patriarch; not Ephraim of Antioch; and not the great Syrian.
- Dates. None are transmitted. He is placed in the thirteenth century because his teacher died after 1224 and because the service commemorating them both was in use by the later thirteenth century; nothing narrower can be defended, and the Life itself cannot be dated more closely than to the decades after Abramius's death.