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October 1, 2003

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine, your anointing oils are fragrant, your name is perfume poured out. …

How beautiful are you, my love, how very beautiful. … Your hair is like a flock of goats moving down the slopes of Gilead … your lips are like a crimson thread and your mouth is lovely. … Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle."

The words are not from a cheesy romance novel but from the Old Testament, specifically(Song of Songs 1:1-2 ; 4:1, 3 , 5.) If these words are not familiar, it is because Song of Songs is one of the books contemporary Christians rarely read or study. Few pastors preach from the Song. The erotic language is off-putting and the metaphors ("Your hair is like a flock of goats") strange. What moral insight can lie within a text that is so explicitly sexual? How can a book that celebrates sex but never explicitly mentions God edify the Christian?

The early Christians found the Song just as odd and its sexual language just as problematic as we do. But they took its very strangeness as an invitation to seek out a deep and hidden spiritual message. They could find meaning within its shocking imagery because they made use of allegory.

Not surprisingly, the man with whom the allegorical method is most famously associated, Origen of Alexandria, led the search for the Song's hidden meaning. Since every part of Scripture is inspired, reasoned Origen, every detail must have meaning. Where details, passages, or even (as in this case) entire books seem obscure or disturbing, one must read allegorically.

In Origen's commentary on the Song of Songs, he begins by explaining the literal sense of the Song. It is a "marriage-song" that Solomon composed as a drama. The bride and bridegroom sing to each other words of love, and at times they sing to their friends who accompany them to the wedding.

But Solomon uses the erotic language of romantic love between man and woman to describe something deeper. The book is really expressing what it means for the Christian to love God with her whole heart and soul and mind and strength. The bride is the church or the soul of an individual "burning with heavenly love" for the Word of God, symbolized by the bridegroom.

The problem of the Song's sensual language, Origen says, lies not with the Song, but with the reader. He believed that only those Christians who have purified themselves by turning from the pleasures of the flesh and the world can recognize the spiritual sense of Scripture. Solomon's Song, with its carnal but symbolic language, is not milk providing nourishment for children in the faith, rather it is "strong meat for the perfect."

The immature cannot understand the Song because they are still too fleshly, "not knowing how to hear love's language in purity and with chaste ears." They are concerned with the things of the material world, which they know through their senses, rather than the invisible realm of ideas, which only the intellect trained in philosophy can apprehend. Therefore, they are never able to get beyond the sensual language in its literal meaning to behold the hidden spiritual sense.

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