Figural Reading of Scripture
In an earlier post, I heartily recommended Paul Griffiths’ new translation and commentary of The Song of Songs. Griffiths rejuvenates the venerable tradition, begun with Origen among Christian thinkers, of reading the Song not merely literally, but figurally, that is as celebrating God’s passionate love for Israel/Church. But within this approach, the individual Christian is also addressed, as beloved member of Christ’s body.
In his introductory comments Griffiths states this forthrightly:
I write to you directly, in the second person, identifying what I tentatively take to be the import of the part of the Song under discussion for the ordering of your loves — loves, that is, of yourself, of the Lord, of other people, and of the world and what is in it. Every scriptural text, just because it is a scriptural text, has something of profound importance to say to each of those who read it. You and I are therefore present in it as implicit interlocutors in a way that is not true of any other text. The text confronts us, you and me, demands something from us, and will reconfigure our thought and speech and appetite to the extent that our particular sins and their concomitant damage do not prevent it from doing so.
The beloved’s passion in the Song, her desire and her anguish at separation from her lover, will, if you let it, become yours, and in becoming yours, reform your loves — not by replicating hers, but by conforming yours to hers (the difference is very important): the text wants that of you, solicits it from you, precisely because it is a scriptural text. A theological reading of the Song ought to take account of this essential presence of the reader in the text, and to the extent that I am capable of doing so, my theological reading does. This text wants to seduce you: it is, in part, my task to return its kiss in such a way as to make it easier for it to have you and for you to be had by it.
I am of two minds on commentaries that draw analogies to Christ and the Church or God’s love of Israel. On the one hand it captures an important intimate relationship, by analogy that God has with his people. However, on the other hand I can’t help but detect some embarrassment on the unabashed eroticism of the text that is found in Scripture. On its face, it describes, in fact, what occurs in bodily, sexual love and indeed this is something to celebrate.
Maybe, the truth is much simpler. God wanted the text in there to signify exactly what is says. Sexual desire is a good. Don’t be afraid.
I am old enough to realize that the kind of romanticism described in the text is fleeting but the existence of it is like fire. It can be destructive or warm. It can burn out of control but maybe that is necessary so that the forest can grow again.
As we know, the allegorization of the Song of Songs has produced a chaos of conflicting, fanciful interpretations. Bonhoeffer says that the true Christological reading of the Song is the literal one.
I found a review article by Robert Louis Wilken illuminating. It appeared a few years back in “First Things.”
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/01/christian-figural-reading-and-the-fashioning-of-identity-14
His last sentences are: “If Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, the prophecies about the Messianic age had already been fulfilled, and it was the task of the earliest Christians to discover what the scriptural promises meant in light of this new fact. Paradoxically, the spiritual sense was the historical sense.”
Yes Father. However, could not the spiritual sense be connected even deeper to the literal sense in that, in the fulfillment of the Messianic age, sexual relationships takes on even greater depth, meaning, desire and pleasure than prior to the Messianic age. The act of sex itself is sacramental.
Yet, rarely have we read (as far as I know), the earlier Fathers speak like this. Both Paul and Augustine had some difficulty in this area and seemed to opt for the chastity and celibacy as the preferred path. Yet the Song of Songs doesn’t really support that interpretation. Consequently, the solution seems to be to separate the obvious, plain meaning of the text from the “true” spiritual sense.
But what if the true spiritual sense, is in fact, the literal sense. That means that bodily, sensual pleasure is an access door to the divine.
I think it is disturbing that people are presenting a revival of allegorical interpretation as a badge of Catholic identity, in a sectarian way, though Dei Verbum makes no reference to this venerable tradition as far as I know, and though leading RC exegetes such as Joseph Fitzmyer assure us that it is to be admired but not imitated. When we send students off on the wild goose chase for allegorical meaning we waste precious time and energy they could devote to proper scriptural study.
Wilken says nothing about the anti-Jewish rhetoric of Origen, who tells us again and again that the carnal Jews were blind to the meaning of their own Scriptures, a nasty train of thought taken further by Eusebius of Caesarea. “Origen thought more deeply about the relation of Christianity to the Jewish Scriptures than have modern thinkers and as a consequence is an untapped intellectual resource for contemporary Christian thought. ” This ignores the fact that modern thinkers have questioned the imperialistic absorption of the Jewish Scriptures in Christian theology (with the aid of a Platonic schema of types and shadows v. reality) and challenged Origen’s blind spots. ” it was the task of the earliest Christians to discover what the scriptural promises meant in light of this new fact. Paradoxically, the spiritual sense was the historical sense” — true, but even the New Testament way of attempting this is only a sketch or pointer. A Christian hermeneutic of the Jewish Scriptures is a vastly different task today, and those who grope after allegory or even typology are not pointing in the right direction for accomplishing this task.