Medieval Christians were obsessed with the Song of Songs. No book of the Bible received such intensely devoted attention in commentary and preaching. Bernard of Clairvaux preached eighty-six homilies on the Song and died just as he was getting started on chapter 3. The Song has a much-diminished place in the modern Christian imagination. The time is far past to reverse that trend, but it is worth reversing only if the Song is recovered as allegory.
Christians today often read the Song as lusty celebration of sex. Some try to wipe away the prudish poetry to peep at the sex acts of Solomon and his Shulammite. Such an approach simply projects contemporary obsessions into an ancient text. It assumes that we already know what real sex is. We have outgrown romance and now know that sex is no more than a clash of bodies and an exchange of fluids. There is no magic, no mystery, only friction, only technique. Reading the Song as disguised pornography reinforces and sacralizes the sexual confusions of our age.
Even as an erotic poem, the Song has much to teach. Robert Alter observes that in much of the world’s erotic literature, “the body in the act of love often seems to displace the rest of the world.” By contrast in the Song, “the world is constantly embraced in the very process of imagining the body. The natural landscape, the cycle of the seasons, the beauty of the animal and floral realm, the profusion of goods afforded through trade, the inventive skill of the artisan, the grandeur of cities, are all joyfully affirmed as love is affirmed.” Solomon is no courtly lover who abandons the world and all to chase after his bride. When he turns from the world, he rediscovers his world in her. That insight alone is enough to justify the Song’s inclusion in the wisdom literature.
But the poem itself invites us deeper. The verse that everyone recognizes as the Song’s theme (8:6) gives the poem a cosmic scope. Love’s strength is comparable to relentless forces of decay and destruction—death (Hebrew, mot) and Sheol. Love is no ordinary fire, but a flash from the very “flame of Yah.” “Mot” is the name of a Canaanite deity, so the conflict of Love and Death is a war of gods. The placement of this verse is a rhetorical tour de force. Near the end of a poem that might be read as nothing more than a love poem, the poet drops in the short form of the name of Israel’s God. It is not even a separate word, but a suffix to the word “flame.” With a subtle gesture, the poet encourages us to re-read the entire poem, now aware that love burns as divine fire.
When we do, we find Yah everywhere. Edmee Kingsmill has made the extraordinary discovery that the Song contains a coded reference to YHWH. The poem uses the phrase “my beloved” (Hebrew, dodi) twenty-six times, which is the numerical value (gematria) of the name YHWH. That lends an invigorating liturgical layer to expressions like “How handsome you are, my Beloved, and so pleasant! . . . The beams of our houses are cedars, our rafters, cypresses” (1:16-17). The passion is the passion of the devoted soul longing for the courts of his Lord.
Recovering the Song as allegory does not mean that we ignore the erotic surface of the poem. Rather, everything takes on (at least) a double sense, as the poem shifts swiftly from register to register, and swiftly back. The love like wine (1:2) is the intoxicating desire of sexual attraction, also the disorienting love of a God who invites his beloved into the “house of wine” (2:4). Wine is a fitting trope for the one love because it is a fitting trope for the other. Forests, orchards, and gardens are figures of the temple, YHWH’s “trysting place” with Israel, and the sensual delights of love-making echo the sensory pleasures of worship. The lover’s enthrallment to his beloved is the Lord’s enthralled fascination for his people, black but beautiful.
The Song helps us relearn what nearly every civilization before ours already knew: Sex is allegory, and as allegory it is metaphysics and theology and cosmology. For Christians, sexual difference and union is a type of Christ and the church: How could an erotic poem (and in the Bible!) be anything but allegory? From the Song we relearn that poetic metaphor does not add meaning to what is itself mere chemistry and physics. Nor is erotic poetry a euphemistic cover for Victorian embarrassment. Poetry elucidates the human truth of human sexuality, and it seems uniquely capable of doing so. Only as allegory does the Song have anything to teach us about sex. Only as allegory can the Song play its central role in healing our sexual imaginations.
Peter J. Leithart is pastor of Trinity Reformed Church in Moscow, Idaho, and Senior Fellow of Theology and Literature at New St. Andrews College. His most recent book is Athanasius (Baker Academic).
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Comments:
There is nothing immoral about sexual love in marriage, and that is exactly what the Song celebrates, sexual...erotic...drive-you-crazy...love...as sung at a marriage feast.
Do you have any other examples - Tim - of places where 'kinah' is used, where it is obviously a synonym for love? In this case, it is not clear to me that it is *not* such a synonym, but neither does it strike me as obvious that it *is* one. In short: do we have any reason for taking 'kinah' here to be a kind of synonym for 'love', other than the mere fact that there is a parallelism in he verse? After all, the verse *also* makes perfect sense if 'kinah' is understood as jealousy in the modern sense: love is as powerful as death, and jealousy is as tormenting/frsutarting as Sheol...
"Fundamentally, “love” is a single reality, but with different dimensions; at different times, one or other dimension may emerge more clearly. Yet when the two dimensions are totally cut off from one another, the result is a caricature or at least an impoverished form of love. And we have also seen, synthetically, that biblical faith does not set up a parallel universe, or one opposed to that primordial human phenomenon which is love, but rather accepts the whole man; it intervenes in his search for love in order to purify it and to reveal new dimensions of it. " - Deus Caritas Est
I think says it much better.
Thus if the English word ‘jealousy’ could have had those senses in the past (with remnants even today), then so too, obviously, could the Hebrew. (In don’t mean to imply that there need have been any parallel between English and Hebrew usage – but it does make such a transition all the more plausible if it has happened on other languages too). All this is mean to add to Tim’s claim that the ‘jealousy’ in the verse could be a form of, or aspect of, love: eager solicitousness or zealous devotion.
It is interesting, though, that when God is called 'jealous' - it is often tinged with something fearsome and violent (e.g. 'A jealous and vengeful God'). And this does seem closer to our modern notion of jealousy. So I wonder whether 'jealousy', even if it may be related to what we think of as love, might not be completely devoid of a dark side, the 'negative' that is part of our own concept...
Anyway - sorry about this. These musings are probably not very relevant to the actual article...
Apart from a liturgical cult of the saints and a Marian typology of the Church, it is hard to make sense of the back and forth in the Song. The relationship between God and His Bride is seen as one of mutual praise, as any erotic relationship must be. The fine and noble deeds of the other is continually invoked, the beauty of the other is extolled, etc. If a Christian does not, then, regularly involve him or herself in a liturgy wherein God is heard praising the beauty and excellence of His Bride, then God does not seem much like Solomon and the Church does not seem much like the Shulamite. Rather, the Shulamite praises Solomon for his excellence and Solomon forgives the Shulamite for her filth and tells her she will someday do something beautiful, but has not yet done much worth praising. She is still full of ugliness. Someday she will be clean. Not particularly erotic.
A liturgical cult of the saints and Marian typology of the Church, however, opens up the Song. When the Church sings the praises of Mary, She is mystically One with Christ, speaking on behalf of Christ towards His Bride. Marian devotion especially reveals the deep relationship between Christ and Church revealed in the Song; the union between the two is so deep that the Church can speak the praises of the Bride in Christ's stead. The Church is glorious now, praiseworthy now.
I did not say that sex is a contemporary obsession. What obsesses us is a specific, reductive pornographic interest in the sheer physical act, without any acknowledgement that more is at stake. I thought it was evident in the opening paragraphs that I was criticizing this reductive view of sex. Yes, the erotic CAN lead us astray, when it becomes a selfish pursuit of gratification. Need it? Of course not.
I happily affirm that love is one act with two complexly interwoven dimensions. That's what my article said. That's what it means to call the Song an allegory.
I agree with Nicholas that "surface" was a poor word choice. Eroticism is the poem, but it is an eroticism that unfolds in many directions.
I believe you miss Leithart's point when you write, "... while I agree with the overall theme his intro is wrong. We can see the "’clash and friction of bodies’ because we aren't just immaterial spirits. Its ok to see _both_ and ..."
Leithart is not setting up a duality between body and spirit that is in opposition. He writes of the "clash and friction" of bodies, and I assume he is referencing the curse that came upon man and woman in Adam, a curse where man would dominate woman, and he would toil in the fields of a nature that fell into futility in relation to man. Jesus undoes that curse, so that man and woman can now become one harmonious flesh where there is no clash and friction that was the result of the Fall. In other words, Leithart is referencing the true possibility of man and woman enjoying physical union in spirit without a war of the sexes, especially in the bedroom.
While I don't consider myself well versed in the latter, perhaps someone better informed than me can attempt it. Can the two produce any offspring? My gut feeling is they can, but am at a loss to describe exactly who such children might be like.
I lived inside John Paul II's Theology of the Body for some time but hardly can remember most of what he taught, but my sense is that he wrote about an element of the properly guided sexual unitive act in Christ (sexual relatedness that embraces the procreative end) as having a meaning independent of analogy, which of course makes it a mystery. But I could be wrong about this.
This in no way impedes an appreciation of Leithart’s fine essay. Especially directing us to and discussing the heart of the poem:
Place me like a seal over your heart,
like a seal on your arm;
for love is as strong as death,
its jealousy unyielding as the grave.
It burns like blazing fire,
like a mighty flame.
Analogy, yes, but a poetry that somehow involves us in the flesh itself in what it analogously represents: a poetic expression that affirms the procreative union of man and woman as domestic church as a great good in and of itself, and the possibility that that union can be fully experienced in our lives, and leading us to the grandest union of all that marriage points to, the Parousia where all vision is beatific, beyond poetic.
I also believe that romance is flawed because concupiscence is caught up in it, but that it can lead us to union and the delight of Our Lord in sexual consummation, becoming one flesh.
That sums up for me how the sex liberationists put the best possible positive spin on sexual exploitation: exploit with equality. And why the only answer to the dilemma is in Christ where man and woman no longer attempt to possess and use each other, but unify into one flesh by focusing on the ultimate participation in God's Creation, birthing a child into the world, and why the ultimate act in opposition to God's Creation is killing a baby, for every human person is the peak of Creation. And this is why abortion rights is the ultimate rallying point for sex liberationists: it is the ultimate expression of how they view freedom, freedom from God’s will to fulfill their own at the highest level, the peak of Creation, the ultimate battleground, which always culminates in death.
The play closes with the woman saying "Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a roe or to a young hart upon the mountains of spices."
Which one is she speaking to? Solomon or the Shepherd?
This is left open-ended… an everyman/everywoman story :
“supply your own ending”
