Eros Deleted

Protestants agreed with Catholics that the Song elaborates a nuptial analogy to the church’s relation to Christ, but Scheper finds a significant difference between Protestants and Catholics when they explain why that analogy is apt in the first place.  Protestants, consistent with the emphasis on legal categories for justification and with a quasi-legal understanding of covenant, tend to revert to legal, domestic, and moral concerns, while medievals elaborate on passions and senses:

Protestants and Catholics agree “that the nuptial metaphor is uniquely suited to expressing the highest mystery of all (as Paul calls it in Ephesians), the love between God and His people, and that therefore the human language of the Song is dramatically appropriate. But precisely wherein consists that peculiar aptness of the nuptial metaphor? On this there is surprisingly little elaboration in the Protestant commentaries, but what there is mostly develops the aptness of the nuptial metaphor in terms of the moral, domestic virtues of Christian marriage: faithfulness, tenderness, affection, mutual consent, the holding of things in common, the headship of the husband. In other words, as Sibbes says explicitly, the metaphor is based on the nature of the marriage contract. Dove elaborates on the analogy between the marriage rite and the history of redemption (God giving away His Son; the Last Supper as a wedding banquet; the procreation of spiritual fruit). Beyond this, there is some reference to the passionate nature of love and to the one-flesh union of marriage as a symbol of union with God. But generally, when the sexual aspect of the union tends to surface, the commentators avert their eyes and allude to the dangers of lewd interpretation . . . .

“Thus, Homes says, ‘away, say we, with all carnal thoughts, whiles we have heavenly things presented us under the notion of Kisses, Lips, Breasts, Navel, Belly, Thighs, Leggs. Our minds must be above our selves, altogether minding heavenly meanings.’ And on Canticles v.4 (‘My beloved put his hand in the hole and my bowels were moved for him’), the Assembly Annotations exclaims, ‘to an impure fancy this verse is more apt to foment lewd and base lusts, than to present holy and divine notions. . . . It is shameful to mention what foul ugly rottenness some have belched here and how they have neglected that pure and Christian sense that is clear in the words.”

Medieval commentators offer similar cautions, but Scheper says that, in contrast to Protestants, the whole tradition of Song commentary “identifies sexual union itself as the foremost aspect of the spiritual marriage metaphor-in its total self-abandon, its intensity, its immoderation and irrationality, and above all its union of two separate beings, the one flesh union that is the supreme type of the one spirit union between ourselves and Christ.”  He illustrates with a selection from Bernard’s homilies, in which he is commenting on Song 5:4, the same passages whose literal sense is dismissed as “lewd” and “rotten” in the Assembly Annotations:

“when love, especially divine love, is so strong and ardent that it cannot any longer be contained within the soul, it pays no attention to the order, or the sequence, or the correctness of the words through which it pours itself out . . . . Hence it is that the Spouse, burning with an incredible ardour of divine love, in her anxiety to obtain some kind of outlet for the intense heat which consumes her, does not consider what she speaks or how she speaks. Under the constraining influence of charity, she belches forth rather than utters whatever rises to her lips. And is it any wonder that she should eructate who is so full and so inebriated with the wine of holy love?”  Far from condemning the bride’s “inebriation” with the wine of God’s love, Bernard celebrates it.  This is precisely where human love becomes an image of divine.

And, again from Bernard: “O love, so precipitate, so violent, so ardent, so impetuous, suffering the mind to entertain no thought but of thyself, content with thyself alone! Thou disturbest all order, disregardest all usage, ignorest all measure. Thou dost triumph over in thyself and reduce to captivity whatever appears to belong to fittingness, to reason, to decorum, to prudence or counsel.”

Reading this, it is hard to avoid the sense that Protestant interpretation returned to a Greek suspicion of desire, and worked hard to bring desire under the control of rationality, order, measure, prudence.