FESTIVE LOVE
A sermon by Rev. Douglas Olds
Don’t look for someone to complete you, look instead for someone you can love completely.
[Here is the sole lectionary
selection from the Song of Songs in the Reformed Christian church
calendar. I invite you to sometime spend
20 minutes to read the full text of the Song of Songs:]
[Song of Songs 2.8-13]
8 Listen! My beloved!
Look! Here he comes, leaping across the
mountains,
bounding over the hills.
9 My beloved is like a gazelle or a young
stag.
Look! There he stands behind our wall,
gazing through the windows,
peering through the lattice.
10 My beloved spoke and said to me,
“Arise, my darling,
my beautiful one, come with me.
11 See! The winter is past;
the rains are over and gone.
12 Flowers appear on the earth;
the season of singing has come,
the cooing of doves
is heard in our land.
13 The fig tree forms its early fruit;
the blossoming vines spread their
fragrance.
Arise, come, my darling;
my beautiful one, come with me.”
The Song of
Songs (also known as the Song of Solomon) has been a curiosity to Biblical
readers for millennia. There is no
direct mention of God (save 8.6), and its unabashed sexuality and forward
female voice was elided by the ancient ascetics and later churchmen. In order to downplay the physicality and
bring forward theology, premodern commentators have primarily read the Song as
allegory. That is, the Song of Songs is
read as a love poem between Israel’s God and his people, or later, Christ’s
love for his church.
Allegory
interprets the physical images of the poem as representing a non-empirical--non-tangible-- reality of the Soul or Heaven. Pope
Gregory the Great (d. 604) applied allegory to his interpretation of the Song
of Songs “as a certain machine” to elevate the soul to God, finding God where
no mention of God exists. In 590, he noted his non-theological bias against
human sexuality in the Song when he decreed that married couples who mixed
pleasure with procreation “transgressed the law.” Roland Murphy in The Anchor Bible Dictionary
notes,
[The]
traditional interpretation of the Song in the Christian community was motivated
by certain ascetic and spiritual views that prevented a proper understanding of
the literal historical sense. Yet the Song became one of the most popular books
in the Middle Ages, when it was accorded more “commentaries” than any other OT
book. In the 12th century alone, there were some thirty commentaries written on
the [Song]. Outstanding among these is the work of Bernard of Clairvaux: Eighty-six sermons delivered over a period of
eighteen years, 1135–1153…Bernard had the knack of recognizing the experience
of love which is in the Song. He called it “the book of experience” (Sermon 3,
1), and for him the greatest experience is love: “Love is alone sufficient by
itself; it pleases by itself, and for its own sake. It is itself a merit, and
itself its own recompense. It seeks neither cause, nor consequences, beyond
itself. It is its own fruit, its own object and usefulness. I love, because I
love; I love, that I may love” (Sermon 83, 4).
As contrasted
with an allegorical reading, modern interpreters have tended to recover the
Song’s historical sense. It is read now
as a literal poem of sexual expression and longing. My friend Annette Schellenberg at San
Francisco Theological Seminary has proposed that the Song of Songs was a
performed drama at ancient Jewish festivals.
Modern commentators differ as to the structure of the poems making up
the Song of Songs: who is speaking when and to whom.
However, this
literal historical and dramatic approach helps us recover the dialogue of a man
and woman with mutual physical desire. In
this recovered historical reading, we may note the Garden metaphors and images,
so that God, even if unnamed, might be approving of this mutuality and physical
desire for egalitarian closeness that harkens back to the creation of Eden and
the male and female Adam and Eve. Unlike
in the rest of the Old Testament where sexuality is linked with the need for
posterity and procreation, in both the pre-fall Eden and in the Song of Songs,
physical closeness and mutuality between the sexes is idealized.
The woman’s love is not something to be taken
nor even earned—it is given freely, mutually.
It is a message for our current age of taking advantage or
commercializing love for sex.
The Song of
Songs may indeed be the drama of physical flourishing and mutuality of an
idealized community—a lush primeval Garden outfitted by the Creator for the
freely chosen enjoyment of its denizens.
If Prof. Schellenberg is correct that this drama was acted out in
festivals, it might be seen as a reenactment of this innocent and childlike
delight in the Creation where sex is unencumbered by violence, manipulation and
one-sidedness. This innocent and
childlike delight in the creation might very well honor the Creator, so we
might arrive at a more historical than allegorical theology, a theology that
appreciates sexuality as a gift rather than a temptation to sin.
What is the
nature of the love relationship in the Song of Songs? As Murphy noted, ascetic and flesh-denying practices of both
Jews and Christians could not endorse the open expression of sexual metaphors,
freely given, such as the Song involves.
And yet as Bernard so compellingly noted, God is love and thus clearly
community endorsed love is to be discerned in this text canonized by religious
communities even as sex- and flesh-denying as the Dead Sea Scrolls
fellowship at Qumran. If the historical
is to be preferred to the allegorical (as I think it must), how do we find God
in the normative expression of physical love found in the Song of Songs?
Hugh of St.
Victor (c. 1096–1141), who was an older contemporary of Bernard of Clairvaux,
asks that very question in his treatise, “Of the Nature of Love.” He claims, “There are, then, two streams that
issue from the fount of love, cupidity and charity… [L]ove [is] a single movement of the heart, is of its
nature one and single, yet is divided in its act. When it moves inordinately
that is, whither it should not it is called cupidity; but, when it is rightly
ordered, it is termed charity.” Hugh is making a claim that there is a rightly
ordered love act and a wrongly ordered love act. He is reading the Latin Bible’s uses of the
words caritas [Greek: agapē ] and eros. He
is distinguishing the two.
Classical
scholars I’ve spoken with tend to deny a distinction between agapē and eros, and
I believe that in the pagan literature there might be little distinction. Socrates in Plato’s Symposium has it that
erotic love aids the soul’s ascent toward immortality, and it might be argued
by them that Christian love does the same. Yet the Platonic eros fulfills the self’s
desire.
In the moral
literature of the Old and New Testaments, the writers are wholly concerned with
the practicalities of love of neighbor regardless of the self's desire. When Christian writers speak of eros I
believe they are calling us to acknowledge the excellence or baseness of our
love of things and qualities, especially whether it is focused on the self or
on others. Hugh has it that love
directed where it should not is cupidity/eros. Love that is other directed, that does unto
others what we would have them do for us, is charity/ agapē.
Jesus in the
Gospel John 13.34 commands his followers: ἀγαπᾶτε ἀλλήλους, Love Others. There is not a sense of desire for qualities
or things outside of mere otherness, and this is rather a servant-love. Charity.
Returning to the
Song of Songs, I believe that erotic desire is clearly in view. But that erotic desire is not a modern
eroticism. There are three aspects to
the erotic love of the Song of Songs.
First, it is mutual. Second, it
is other-directed. Relatedly, it is not
narcissistic, which is self-directed and concerned with fulfilling the self's
objectives. Thus I believe the Song's
desire is distinct from Platonic eros.
The Song’s desire is a way station in the development of an ethic of
agapē. The love in the Song of Song’s is
not what Hugh would call cupidity, a desire for what should not be desired, but
rather the desire is for the primeval God-given qualities of the desired
lover. The metaphors of creation and of
peaceful and harmonious communal life in the Garden thus locate the desire in
God’s peace and wholeness. Reading the
Song of Songs has us meditate on the lovers’ desire for noble qualities in the
other, and not on some base qualities or characteristics.
Note, too, there
is no sense of that modern affliction, narcissism, in view of the Song of
Songs. At one point, the lover
notes the object of her affection
likewise desires her. But she shows no
inordinate thrill at this prospect, other than idealizing the mutuality of
desire, clearly a divine norm for love.
So much of
modern erotic desire fulfills the narcissist’s craving. Christopher Lasch in his book The Culture of
Narcissism notes that the decline of the 19th C family was associated with
disintegration of personality and the desire for constant admiration and
commercial demand. The movie Jerry
Maguire had the line, “you complete me.”
The erotic desire is on personal fulfillment, akin to the pagan and
Platonic ideal of eros. “You complete me” is not in view in the Song of Songs. Seeing
myself in the lover's eyes is not in view of the Song of Songs. Concerned with
commerce and market relationships of supply and demand, the modern narcissist
commercializes sex and derives self-worth from the superordinate wage which
supposedly measures social esteem and market demand. The social Darwinist as Don Juan does
likewise, deriving self-esteem from money and from a bevy of lovers admiring
his sexual "fitness."
The Song of
Songs does not have such commercial or market aspects to sexuality. The woman is not given in marriage by her
parents, but freely chooses her beloved. We indeed encounter an ancient’s
understanding of what erotic love is inside a Garden of beauty and sufficiency
(which is not to say glut or hoard). And in that
ideal Garden space, love is other directed and mutual. This is a world in which marriage's highest
values are loyalty and care taking, not personal fulfillment or the self's
happiness. Such a love mirrors the
divine love, the ideal desire for what is beautiful, elegant, and good. Until
we reach that state, Jesus gives us a servant’s task: ἀγαπᾶτε ἀλλήλους, Love Others. Don’t desire
your self's physical beauty or attempt to find fulfillment in the other’s
desire for you or your work product, but serve others as the Kingdom of God is
being made anew in your virtues.
The Love desire
in view in the Song of Songs thus might be seen as the highest form of human
love, a correction to the pagan sexual desire. It is the love shown by the
woman who poured pure nard on Jesus’ feet, unconcerned with its scarcity,
unconcerned with its interpretation by onlookers. It is a lavish and sensual act readied by virtuous servant-love. It brings harmony and solidarity to the family, neighborhood, and nation.
The Bible has a deep ethic to make love and not war.
The Bible has a deep ethic to make love and not war.
The Bible is telling us in the Song that when lovers are happy, the community flourishes in the guidance of its God.
Don’t look for someone to complete you, look instead for someone you can love completely. This is the kind of love in view in the Song of Songs and for the adored in Psalm 45. May we all be privileged to glimpse this festive, selfless love from our lover. And may we all have the grace to convey it to our lover as well. AMEN.
