A Mirror Held Up to Mystery: Eros, Sex, Censorship, and the Song of Solomon

A Mirror Held Up to Mystery: Eros, Sex, Censorship, and the Song of Solomon April 28, 2016

Franz_Pforr_-_Shulamit_and_Mary_-_WGA17402
Maria und Sulamith (cropped close-up), 1811, Franz Pforr (public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

Sex. It’s what the Song of Solomon is about. But ancient Christian readers were prudes and couldn’t handle that, so they allegorized it and made it mean all kinds of spiritual things it doesn’t in fact mean, and hundreds of years went by before the text could be recovered by us progressive moderns so liberated and uninhibited and full of the true glory and beauty of sex.

If you’re anything like most modern readers, this is probably your impression of the Biblical book called Song of Solomon. And like most caricatures, it isn’t true – and it’s not even entertainingly or edifyingly untrue, as every good creative mythopoeic lie ought to be. No, it’s the baldly uninteresting dream of a certain kind of pop-Freudian theory – bored of mere sex ourselves, we can’t even imagine something beyond it, but must cling to jealousy and denigration of past approaches. As long as the Medievals – those past benighted interpreters – can be shown to have been worse than us basking in our libidos, we have a shot, a chance at meaning, something beyond the vanity. We are happy, we tell ourselves, and don’t we have proof of it because they in the past were so unhappy, so repressed…


To be clear, I don’t want to pretend that particular sexual hangups, prudishness, and repression weren’t part of the set of factors influencing traditional interpretation of the Song of Solomon. Just as they are now, they were, and will continue to be. But one of the excellent points that Denys Turner makes in his Eros and Allegory is that this can hardly be the primary, or even, from a theological perspective, the most important explanation of the tradition. After all, if it were only prudishness involved, it would make more sense to practice silence rather than extensive commentary.

Put another way, if Medievals were simply uncomfortable with the sexual element of the book, why not gloss it briefly and quickly and move on to the more ostensibly edifying bits of the Bible? But they didn’t. The Song of Solomon is one of the books most commented upon in Medieval tradition – and as such it is a conundrum, a riddle. In an age so – allegedly – prudish, what could bring about a tradition far more extensive than is explicable in terms of repressed celibate monks giggling shamefacedly over Biblical booby jokes and erotica?

The answer is complicated, and one that involves nuanced navigation of various theologies and philosophies – and it is one I shall not undertake here, but which you should all go out and explore as articulated in the aforementioned study by Turner. What I am interested in doing here, though, is bringing to attention alongside some of my co-bloggers the problems with a certain kind of modern romanticism regarding sex and sexuality. Mary Pezzulo over at Steel Magnificat points out how a particular kind of romanticism regarding married sex combines with silences in Christian culture to set young Christians up for frustration, particularly by not dealing with some of the more unromantic realities of sex. Rebecca Bratten Weiss at Suspended In Her Jar looks at the way modern culture is so nuts about sex – and particularly sex detached not only from the rest of life but even from the rest of the erotic – that it has rendered sex the most yawn-worthy of subjects and even marred our ability to appreciate old literature. And in a deeply painful post, Anne Carpenter at The Rule and the Raven discusses the way many of the unreflectively rosy discussions occurring around the recent release of Amoris Laetitia are in fact deeply painful and alienating for those like her who have been sexually abused and therefore only know sex as trauma and violence. If the initial movement to recover the goodness of sex – whether in 60’s culture or pop-TOB culture – was perhaps necessary on some occasions for honest discussion and the overcoming of prudishness, it has turned into precisely the opposite of what was intended, an imperative-to-fabulous-sex with no room for discussion of reality. It has left Pezzulo frustrated, Weiss bored, and Carpenter feeling alienated from the very ecclesial mother that ought to be one of the first respondents amidst sexual violence and crisis. And it has also, as is my purpose to explain here, robbed us of the Song of Solomon, and this by making normative a “sophisticated” interpretation that in fact censors the book. To see this, it will be helpful to consider Weiss’s discussion of such interpretations of John Donne:

It is amusing, in a way, when the sexual (not so) revolutionaries reading John Donne as talking about nothing but sex, and imagining themselves sophisticated. Yes, John Donne is talking about sex. You have to get at that in order to read his poems well, but you also have to get that he’s talking about religion, Platonism, alchemy, astronomy, the yearning for knowledge, the yearning for connection, the fear of death.

Here, Weiss makes a distinction between mere sex – the grape-cluster titty jokes so many of your pubescent male Christian friends used to like to cull from the Song of Solomon – and that other thing, the real thing, the erotic. We think we’re so progressive and so clever and so edgy to be pushing the envelope with our unabashed discussion of sex in erotic poetry such as the Song and that by Donne – and what we really are is intolerably boring. Where the magic really happens is not in the sex, but when certain imprecisions – difficulties – failures – open up that analogical space in the imagination too big to be filled by mere sex. Erotic poetry will properly leave us gasping rather than fulfilled – chasms of meaning and vortices of purpose will yawn on every side; we will be made dizzy; the experience is hardly pastel and is certainly awful in all senses of the word.

But more often than not we are quite happy to trade these abysses of significance – abysses with space for the wisdom of people like Carpenter, Pezzulo, and Weiss – for interpretations that trade on a mere glorified mechanical scratching of a sexual or sentimentally romantic itch. And this is problematic, for the text of the Song is not one of fulfillment or consummation, and most certainly not one of triteness,  but rather one that opens outward in longing, a longing that encompasses everything – the cosmos itself is, in the words of the text, “sick of love.”

Yes, perhaps at times the Medieval allegorical tradition goes too far and on occasion for the wrong reasons – and yet what the Medievals had was worth far more than what we have gained in returning to a strictly “literal” (whatever is meant by that ambiguous signifier) interpretation informed by a modern fixation with sex. “Ho, ho,” we say, “the benighted Medievals have used their damnable ingenuity to create modesty covers of the skeins and threads of meaning with which they censor the text – and we the geniuses have uncovered it.” And all we moderns have left after the stripping of our altars is uninteresting sex romanticized (whether in secular or Christian circles) to a point of unreality – and we have lost everything else, for we have abandoned the cloth as well.

In our modern interpretation of the Song, the act is left barren, stripped of the philosophical, typological, and theological mis en scene of the piece, a bare feverish chase lacking the means to make itself interesting or complicated. Seeking to disentangle the romance and sex from its organic entanglement in the theological tradition, interpreters in fact destroy it, forgetting that even something as seemingly simple and basic as lust can only be interesting in relation to the worlds of love that are its guarantor – romanticism cannot exist without the salt of reality.

The way to navigate the literal sexuality of the Song of Solomon in relation to the broader theological meaning is of course a complicated matter, and one that is too large to undertake in this brief post. But in the meantime, let us not give up hope concerning the text and our lives. We are not confined to a scansion that seeks to see how they stack up against the most recent issue of Playboy or the most cutting edge play-by-play guidebook on hot sex for holy couples. Reality and God and our lives are more complicated than that, and hardly compartmentalized in the ways we might like them to be, and what we find in the Song of Solomon is precisely what the best of the Medievals found there before us: a mirror held up to mystery.


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