THE SONG OF SONGS AND THE FASHIONING OF IDENTITY IN EARLY LATIN CHRISTIANITY KARL SHUVE, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA (KARL.SHUVE@VIRGINIA.EDU) To be published in the Oxford Early Christian Studies Series, Oxford University Press, Spring 2016. This file includes the preface, table of contents, and Introduction. 1 PREFACE As scholars from a variety of disciplines have become increasingly interested in the history of the Bible’s interpretation, the Song of Songs has become a lightning rod of controversy. Traditions of wholly allegorizing the poem, which stretch nearly unbroken from Late Antiquity to the nineteenth century, have come in for vehement criticism and passionate defense. For some scholars, these traditions reflect a fear of sexual desire so allencompassing it required theologians to bury the raw eroticism of the Song under a mountain of spiritual commentaries, from beneath which modern interpreters are still trying to free it. For others, these traditions reveal a theological sensitivity to the erotic dimensions of the divine-human relationship and an exegetical creativity that many contemporary Christians have tragically lost. This charged debate, however, has obscured the fact that the majority of scholars are working from a similar premise: namely, that the theological significance of the Song was as opaque to early and medieval Christian readers as it is to modern ones and that their exegetical activities were meant to explain that the text does not really signify what it seems to signify (which must, of course, be human love). The present study challenges this premise and offers an alternative account of why the Song of Songs became a central text in Western Christianity, exploring the origins of the interpretive tradition. I examine the nearly one thousand citations of and allusions to the Song in the writings of Latin Christian theologians of the third and fourth centuries—which include letters, homilies, and theological tracts penned by luminaries such as Cyprian, Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine—and I present the striking conclusion that the Song’s earliest Latin readers treated the text as an explanans, not an explanandum. That is, the Song did not pose a hermeneutical problem, but it was often employed to solve theological ones. In particular, the Song became bound up with the fashioning of ecclesial and ascetic identities, and this study seeks to trace out the trajectories of interpretation as they developed in the Western Christian communities of the later Roman Empire and were thereby transmitted to medieval Europe. 2 Table of Contents Introduction Part One: The Song of Songs in North Africa and Spain 1. ‘A Garden Enclosed, A Fountain Sealed’: The Church as Closed Community in Cyprian and the Donatists 2. ‘As a Lily Among the Thorns’: The Church as Mixed Community in Pacian, Tyconius, and Augustine 3. ‘The Church is the Flesh of Christ’: The Tractatus de Epithalamio of Gregory of Elivra Part Two: The Song of Songs in Italy 4. ‘Like the Holy Church, Unsullied by Intercourse’: Ambrose, Virgins, and the Song 5. ‘For Souls Know Not Covenants of Wedlock’: Ascetic Ideology and Mystical Theology in Ambrose’s Later Works 6. ‘This Book Contains the Mysteries of Virginity’: Jerome and the Making of Ascetic Community Epilogue: Towards Medieval Exegesis 3 ABBREVIATIONS 1. Periodicals and Series Abbreviations of the names of periodicals and series have been adapted from Patrick H. Alexander, John F. Kutsko, James D. Ernest, Shirley A. Decker‐Lucke, and David L. Petersen (eds.), The SBL Handbook of Style for Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Early Christian Studies (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1999); supplemented by Siegfried Schwertner (ed.), Internationales Abkürzungsverzeichnis für Theologie und Grenzgebiete (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1974). • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • AB Anchor Bible ACW Ancient Christian Writers CH Church History CCCM Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Medievalis CCSL Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum CS Cistercian Studies CSCO Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium C.Th. Codex Theodosianus, in T. Mommsen and P. M. Meyer (eds.), Theodosiani libri XVI cum constitutionibus Sirmondianis (Berlin, 1905) CWS Classics of Western Spirituality FC Fathers of the Church JAAR Journal of the American Academy of Religion JECS Journal of Early Christian Studies JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History JMEMS Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies JTS Journal of Theological Studies LCC Library of Christian Classics LCL Loeb Classical Library NECN New England Classical Journal NPNF1 Nicene and Post‐Nicene Fathers, Series 1 NPNF2 Nicene and Post‐Nicene Fathers, Series 2 OECS Oxford Early Christian Studies OECT Oxford Early Christian Texts PG Patrologia Graeca PMLA Proceedings of the Modern Language Association PL Patrologia Latina PLRE A. H. M. Jones, J. R. Martindale, and J. Morris (eds.), The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980–92) RBen Revue Bénédictine REAug Revue des études augustiniennes RHE Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique SAEMO Sancti Ambrosii Episcopi Mediolanensis Opera SC Sources chrétiennes STAC Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum StPatr Studia Patristica 4 • • • • TTH Translated Texts for Historians VC Vigiliae Christianae WSA The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century ZKTh Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie 2. Ancient Sources Abbreviations of the titles of Latin patristic sources have been adapted from Albert Blaise and Henri Chirat (eds.), Dictionnaire Latin–Français des auteurs chrétiens (Turnout: Brepols, 1954); titles of Greek patristic texts from G. W. H. Lampe (ed.) A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961). Full publication information is not given for editions that have appeared in the most common series: CSEL, CCSL, CSCO, PG, PL, and SC. Aldhelm of Malmesbury Virg. De virginitate (CCSL 133). Ambrose of Milan Ep. Epistulae (CSEL 82/1‐3) Exh. virg. Exhortatio virginitatis, in F. Gori (ed.), Verginità e vedovanza ii (SAEMO 14/2; Milan and Rome, 1989) Inst. De institutione virginis, in F. Gori (ed.), Verginità e vedovanza ii (SAEMO 14/2; Milan and Rome, 1989) Is. De Isaac vel anima (CSEL 32) Luc. Expositio evangelii secundum Lucam (CCSL 14) Myst. De mysteriis (SC 25bis) Off. De officiis ministrorum, in Ivor Davidson (ed.), Ambrose: De officiis i (OECS; Oxford, 2001) Psal. 118 Expositio Psalmi CXVIII (CSEL 62) Sacr. De sacramentis (SC 25bis) Virg. De virginibus, in F. Gori (ed.), Verginità e vedovanza i (SAEMO 14/1; Milan and Rome, 1989) Virgin. De virginitate, in F. Gori (ed.), Verginità e vedovanza ii (SAEMO 14/2; Milan and Rome, 1989) Apponius Cant. Commentarius in Canticum Canticorum (SC 421) Athanasius Ep. virg. Epistula ad virgines (CSCO 150) Vit. Ant. Vita Antonii (SC 400) Augustine of Hippo 5 Bapt. De baptismo contra Donatistas (CSEL 51) Brev. coll. Don. Breviculus collationis cum Donatistis (CSEL 53) C. Jul. op. imp. Contra Julianum opus imperfectum (PL 45) Civ. De civitate dei (CSEL 40) Conf. Confessiones (BA 13–14) Ep. Epistulae (CSEL 34, 44, 57, 58, 88) Ep. ad Cath. Epistula ad Catholicos (CSEL 52) Faust. Contra Faustum Manichaeum (CSEL 25.1) Gen. litt. De Genesi ad litteram (CSEL 28.1) Gen. Man. De Genesi contra Manichaeos (PL 34) Jul. Contra Julianum (PL 44) Nupt. De nuptiis et concupiscentia (CSEL 42) Parm. Contra epistulam Parmeniani (CSEL 51) Petil. Contra litteras Petiliani (CSEL 52) Psal. Enarrationes in psalmos (CCSL 38-40) Retract. Retractationes (CCSL 57) Simpl. De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum (CCSL 44) Tract. Ev. Io. In evangelium Iohannis tractatus (CCSL 36) Unic. bapt. (CSEL 53) Basil of Caesarea Ep. Epistulae, in Yves Courtonne (ed.), Saint Basile: Lettres, 3 vols. (Paris: ‘Les Belles Lettres’, 1957–66) Bede Cant. Commentarius in Canticum Canticorum (CCSL 199B) Cyprian Ad Quir. Ad Quirinum testimonia adversus Iudaeos (CCSL 3) Dom. orat. De Dominica oration (CCSL 3A) Ep. Epistulae (CCSL 3B-C) Unit. eccl. De catholicae ecclesiae unitate (CCSL 3) Cyril of Jerusalem Catech. Catecheses illuminandorum Eusebius of Caesarea Hist. eccl. Historia ecclesiastica (SC 31) Faustinus and Marcellinus Lib. Libellus precum ad imperatores (SC 504) 6 Gennadius Vir. De viris illustribus (PL 58). Gregory of Elvira Fid. orth. De fide orthodoxa contra Arianos (CCSL 69) Tract. in Cant. Tractatus de epithalamio in Cantica Canticorum, in Eva Schulz-Flügel (ed.), Gregorius Eliberritanus: Epithalamium sive Explanatio in Canticis Canticorum (Freiburg, 1994). Tract. Orig. Tractatus XX Origenis de libris S. S. Scripturarum (CCSL 69) Gregory of Nyssa Virg. De virginitate (SC119) Hilary of Poitiers Frg. Fragmenta (= Collectanea antiariana Parisina) (CSEL 65) Trin. De Trinitate (CCSL 72A) Jerome Ep. Epistulae (CSEL 54–6) Helv. Adversus Helvidium de Mariae virginitate perpetua (PL 23) Jov. Adversus Jovinianum libri ii (PL 23) Ruf. Adversus Rufinum libri iii (SC 303) Vir. ill. De viris illustribus (PL 23) Vit. Paul. Vita Pauli John Cassian Conl. Conlationes (CSEL 13) John Chrysostom Hom. in Eph. Homilia in Eph (PG 62) Julian of Eclanum Cant. Commentarius in Canticum Canticorum (apud. Bede, Cant.) (CCSL 88) Optatus of Milevis Contra Parmenianum Donatistam (SC 412) Origen 7 Comm. in Cant. Commentarius in Canticum Canticorum (SC 375; Greek fragments from PG 13) Hom. in Cant. Homiliae in Canticum Canticorum ( Hom. in Ezech. Homiliae in Ezechielem (SC 423) Pacian of Barcelona Bapt. Sermo de baptismo (SC 410) Ep. Epistulae (SC 410) Paen. De paenitentibus (SC 410) Contr. tract. Nov. Contra Tractatus Novatianorum (SC 410). Paschasius Radbertus Cogitis me Epistola Beati Hieronymi ad Paulam et Eustochium de Assumptione Sanctae Mariae Virginis (CCCM 56C) Plato Sym. Symposium (LCL 166) Phaedo Phaedo (LCL 36) Plotinus Enn. Enneads (LCL 440-445, 468) Proba Laud. Chr. Cento Virgilianus de laudibus Christi in Elizabeth A. Clark and Diana F. Hatch, The Golden Bough, The Oaken Cross: The Virgilian Cento of Faltonia Betitia Proba (Chico, Ca.: Scholars Press, 1981) Pontius Vit. Cyp. Vita Cypriani (PL 3) Tertullian Bapt. De baptismo (CSEL 20) Cult. fem. De cultu feminarum (CSEL 70) Tyconius Apoc. Commentarius in Apocalypsin, in Francesco Lo Bue (ed.), The Turin Fragments of Tyconius’ Commentary on Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). 8 Lib. reg. Liber regularum (SC 488) Victorinus of Poetovio Apoc. Commentarii in Apocalypsin Ioannis (SC 423) 9 INTRODUCTION ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth’. On this note of ardent desire begins the Song of Songs, an unusual biblical book that is redolent with erotic imagery and devoid of references to God or the people of Israel.1 What is perhaps even more unexpected than the presence of this love poem in the pages of the Jewish Scriptures is the popularity that it came to achieve in the Christian tradition, especially in the medieval Western church. It has been cogently argued that the Song, which was the subject of nearly one hundred Latin commentaries and homilies from the sixth to fifteenth centuries, was one of the most popular and influential books of the Bible in Europe during the Middle Ages.2 How did this come to be? This question has been asked many times before. I shall have more to say about the various answers that scholars have given later in this introduction, but for the moment I wish to call attention to the degree to which the Alexandrian theologian Origen (c. 185-254) is held to be the pivotal figure—the fons et origo of the entire tradition. To take but one prominent example, Ann Matter, in her magisterial and influential volume on medieval exegesis of the Song, argues that the ‘essential framework of medieval Latin commentary on the Song of Songs developed in the rarified intellectual atmosphere of Alexandria’.3 Indeed, she devotes an entire chapter to Origen’s interpretation of the poem, which she charmingly titles ‘Hidden Origins’.4 It might seem paradoxical that the only figure in a book on Western medieval Christianity to be the subject of an entire chapter is an Eastern theologian who taught in the third century, but this only speaks to the strength of Matter’s conviction that Origen’s ‘allegorical, multivocal’ mode of exegesis—in particular, his claim that the Song’s bride can be understood as both the corporate church and the individual soul—thoroughly conditioned all subsequent interpretation.5 10 If, however, early Greek exegesis features prominently in her account, late antique Latin authors are nearly invisible. Ambrose, Jerome, Rufinus, and Gregory of Elvira appear briefly to explain how Origen’s interpretation of the Song was transmitted to the West, through the translations of Jerome and Rufinus and the homilies of Ambrose and Gregory.6 The particular nuances of their own readings of this erotic love poem go largely unexplored, and no attempts are made to identify sources other than the works of the great Alexandrian which they might have employed. The history of early Latin interpretation of the Song is thereby largely reduced to a history of the transmission of Origen’s thought. Matter’s thesis has occasioned no controversy, and I have singled out her book simply because it is the most cogent and persuasive analysis of the development of Song exegesis in print. Few make the case as clearly as she does, but accounts of Western interpretation of the Song tend to begin with Origen and mostly, if not entirely, ignore the Latin theologians of Late Antiquity.7 Historians of late ancient Christianity have largely conceded this irrelevance of the Latin ‘Fathers’: there are monographs on Origen’s and Gregory of Nyssa’s interpretations of the Song, but none on any of their Western counterparts.8 A few articles have appeared here and there—most notably, a brilliant piece by Elizabeth Clark that highlights very significant differences between Origen and later Latin interpreters.9 But her insights have generated little interest in the intervening decades.10 This book tells the story of the Song’s surprising rise to prominence in the West differently. Rather than begin with Origen and then pivot to the early medieval interpreters, I focus instead on the use of the Song by the earliest Latin Christian writers, giving an account of how this love poem came to be embedded in the theological consciousness of the Western Church in the third and fourth centuries of the Common Era. The informed reader may not unreasonably object that since there is only one extant Latin commentary from 11 before the fifth century, which was composed by the rather obscure bishop Gregory of Elvira, we cannot truly speak of a flowering of Latin Song exegesis until the post-imperial age of Gregory the Great, Bede, and Alcuin. I shall argue, however, that if we limit our view to commentaries and do not study the hundreds of citations of and allusions to the poem in the works of some of the most influential early Latin theologians—Cyprian, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine foremost among them—we miss the important role that this text played in theological discourse during the formative years of Western Christianity. The narrative set forth in this book does not only challenge traditional views on when the Song of Songs became a significant text in the Latin tradition; more fundamentally, it offers a new account of how the Song achieved its prominence. My argument, in nuce, is this: for early Latin Christians, the Song was an explanans, not an explanandum. Or, to use an analogy that Daniel Boyarin popularised in describing rabbinic interpretation of the Song, it was a key, not a lock.11 Its presence in the canon did not pose, as much modern scholarship asserts, a hermeneutical problem, which needed extensive commentary in order to be resolved.12 Rather, Latin readers took for granted that the figures of the bridegroom and bride were metonyms for God and God’s people: the general relevance of the Song for the Christian life was clear, even if the specific details of each verse were not. Bishops and theologians used the poem to illuminate complex problems of identity posed by differences in liturgical practice, doctrinal definition, and attitudes towards the body and sexuality. It was part of the public discourse of the Latin churches and served as a tool in the service of selfdefinition, which was later bequeathed to the theologians of medieval Europe. Origen’s interpretation of the Song of Songs will, therefore, receive less sustained treatment than is usual in studies of the Latin exegetical tradition. Although his influence can hardly be denied, it is not as ubiquitous as it is often made out to be. Cyprian of Carthage 12 certainly did not have access to his Commentary or Homilies, and likely neither did the Donatists or Augustine; Gregory of Elvira’s knowledge of Origen was indirect;13 and although Ambrose and Jerome certainly knew Origen directly, they were deeply influenced by other Greek interpreters as well, particularly Athanasius, who held the episcopal chair in Alexandria for much of the fourth century. This is not to say that Origen’s exegesis is insignificant, but in order to construct a narrative that gives early Latin theologians their due in shaping the Western interpretive tradition, I will discuss his influence only in those places where it is crucial for understanding the texts in question. 1. ESOTERICISM AND EROS: THE SHAPE OF MODERN SCHOLARSHIP ON THE INTERPRETIVE TRADITION The history of the Song’s interpretation has not wanted for scholarly attention in recent years. Indeed, what could be a more compelling project than explaining the popularity of a text about carnal love among a group of men who rejected the sexual impulse as a mark of humanity’s fallenness, especially when that text has become essentially ‘decanonized’ for a large number of contemporary Christians?14 This question has exercised the minds of some of the great biblical scholars, historians, and theologians of the past decades. My claim that nearly all of them have missed the formative influence of early Latin Christians requires careful explanation, lest it appear that either I am uncharitably dismissing their fine work or foolishly building a mountain out of a molehill. The problem, I submit, is that modern scholars persist in framing the question precisely as I did in the paragraph above. We see early and medieval Christian interest in the Song as embodying a paradox: celibate men embraced an erotic text, and, to make it all the more interesting, they cast themselves as the female lead to do so! But the question seems 13 never to be asked whether the paradox is real or illusory—whether the Song would have sounded as carnal to late antique Christian ears as it does to our own. This may sound like an odd line of inquiry to propose, but David Dawson has persuasively argued that the ‘plain’ sense of Scripture (or, indeed, of any text) is not a transcendent and fixed level of meaning, but is instead a construct that is ‘culturally expected and automatically recognized by readers’.15 What would early Latin readers have expected of and recognized in the Song? Sexuality and spirituality were far more closely entwined in the discourse of early Christianity than they are in modern Christianity, which could have opened up genuine interpretive possibilities that seem largely implausible from our vantage point. This way of framing the problem is evident, however, primarily in Anglophone scholarship. The earliest comprehensive studies of the Song’s interpretation in the Western tradition were produced in Germany. The earliest, Friedrich Ohly’s Hohelied-Studien: Grundzüge einer Geschicte der Hoheliedauslegung des Abendlandes bis um 1200, does not attempt a narrative that explains the rising popularity of the Song in the West. 16 Ohly initially undertook the project as background research in preparation for an edition of the twelfthcentury St. Trudperter Hohelied, so it lacks the ideological motives that will inform a number of later studies.17 Indeed, Ohly includes analyses of several Latin patristic authors, but since his work reads more like an encyclopedia with a sequence of loosely connected entries, it is difficult to discern their significance for later commentators.18 Following closely on from Ohly’s work was another encyclopedic tome, by Helmut Riedlinger.19 He sought to provide an analysis of ecclesiological exegesis of the Song in the West to supplement Ohly’s ‘literary (literarischen)’ study and some articles on ‘ascetic-mystical’ elements by Dom Leclercq.20 In particular, he was interested in exploring how medieval Song commentaries presented the ‘spotlessness (Makellosigkeit)’ of the church.21 Riedlinger’s work, like Ohly’s, betrays no sense 14 that the allegorical tradition compromises the modern historical-critical endeavor: one will simply be disappointed in one’s study of medieval interpretation if one relies on the ‘exegetical ideals of the modern age’.22 In Germany, medieval historians were the first to devote their attention to the reception history of the Song. In Britain and North America, it was Hebrew philologists. Unlike Ohly and Riedlinger, these scholars of the Bible had no pretensions of offering an objective and balanced account of patristic and medieval exegesis; they were not interested in the tradition. Instead their goal was to free the Song from what they perceived to be centuries of oppressive allegorization and to recover its ‘literal’ meaning for the first time. Their language is often marked by a strong conviction of what the Song is really, plainly about, which they contrast with the wishful thinking of pre-modern interpreters. The influential British Old Testament scholar Harold Rowley, who was active in the middle of the twentieth century, asserts, ‘The view I adopt finds in it nothing but what it appears to be, lovers’ songs, expressing their delight in one another…All other views find in the Song what they bring to it’.23 Rowley’s view on the transparency of the Song’s plain sense was developed in stronger terms by biblical scholar-turned literary theorist William Phipps: ‘It is one of the pranks of history that a poem so obviously about hungry passion has caused so much perplexity and has provoked such a plethora of bizarre interpretations’.24 According to Phipps, these bizarre interpretations arise from the ‘acute embarrassment of having to explain a book that seemed to praise passionate sexual activity, which was generally perceived to be the root of much evil’.25 But this embarrassment did not lead to aversion of the text. In fact, quite the opposite occurred, and Christians wrote scores of commentaries to show ‘how the dishonorable libidinous drives could be pommelled and sublimated’.26 15 Phipps’ brief article decisively influenced subsequent scholarship. His claims were adopted by Marvin Pope in his widely-read Anchor Bible commentary, in which he argued that the Song, ‘which at first blush tended to appeal to the pernicious pruriency of men…had to be interpreted in a way that would eliminate the evil impulse and transform and spiritualize carnal desire into a praise of virginity and celibacy and sexless passion’.27 Once again we find an appeal to the clear meaning of the Song, which early Christians needed to transform in order to rid it of its evil connotations. Indeed, Phipps’ account was so enduring that Harold Bloom reprinted it fourteen years later in a volume he edited on literary approaches to the Song.28 Although ‘post-structuralist’ theory could have provided a critique of these positivist attempts to recover the original, authorially-intended meaning of the Song, the work of critics such as Foucault and Jameson on commentary served in many cases to reinforce these polemical portraits. In his celebrated 1970 lecture ‘The Order of Discourse’, Foucault describes commentary as a procedure for controlling discourse, which is internal to the discourse itself. Although the existence of commentary ‘allows the (endless) construction of new discourses’ from a single primary text, its ‘only role’ is to exorcise ‘the chance element of discourse by giving it its due; it allows us to say something other than the text itself, but on condition that it is this text itself which is said, and in a sense completed’.29 Commentary exploits the endless horizon of possible meanings by simultaneously allowing the text to say something other than itself and restricting the text so that it says nothing more than the commentator desires. In a roughly contemporary essay entitled ‘Metacommentary’, Jameson treats the subject in a more historicizing manner. The need for interpretation, he avers, springs from ‘the desperate attempt of the society in question to assimilate monuments of other times and places, whose original impulses were quite foreign to them and which 16 require a kind of rewriting’.30 For both theorists, the line between primary text and commentary is blurred, and the latter is depicted as a creative exercise in its own right, which is tasked with disciplining the former. What phenomenon could be more readily explained by these accounts than the tradition of Song commentary? What biblical text was more open to a multiplicity of meanings, and yet stood in need of being so thoroughly restricted? Stephen Moore gives us a striking example in his queer reading of the interpretive tradition.31 Unlike Phipps and Pope, he is interested not in recovering the ‘original’ meaning of the Song, but rather in presenting the irony that sexually-repressed commentators who sought to avoid the lures of heterosexual desire actually flung themselves into a gender-bending homosexual tryst. If these theologians were to save the poem—were to rewrite it in a way intelligible to contemporaries—they needed to identify the bridegroom with God, which required them to take on the female role of bride: the image of celibate men (textually) dressing themselves up in women’s garb and longing to lock lips with the male Christ was too much for Moore to pass up. One hesitates to take such a playful account too seriously, but it is instructive to note how profoundly Moore’s assumptions are informed by Phipps. He still presumes the existence of a stable, self-evident plain sense in the Song, which Christians consciously and deliberately subverted: ‘[F]or ancient and medieval Christian commentators, the Song simply could not be what it seemed to be…The allegorical interpretation of the Song sprang from disinclination, discomfort and downright disgust on the part of pious male exegetes’.32 But Moore does not tell us how he knows these were the reactions the Song elicited amongst its early Christian readers. Even Elizabeth Clark, who is such an insightful and sensitive reader of early Christian interpretation of the Song, 33 envisions the Fathers struggling mightily to reconcile 17 the plainly sexual meaning of the Song with their ascetic values.34 Invoking Foucault, she asserts that the ‘sexual dimensions of the Song of Songs in particular demanded a “resaying”’.35 She then references Dawson, and concludes that ‘the “work” allegory must first perform is to “domesticate” the text’.36 Although her analysis accords with Dawson’s view of allegory as cultural resistance,37 it does not take into account his observations about the contingency of the plain sense, by projecting into the ancient world the modern assumption that the subject of the Song is plainly the theme of human passion. There are, of course, those who strongly resist this narrative of domestication, repression, and sublimation. Patricia Cox Miller turns Phipps’ argument on its head and refutes the notion that Origen sought to de-eroticize the Song at all.38 She argues that the Alexandrian’s identification of the words (logoi) of Scripture with the Word (logos) of God allowed him to conceptualize the text of the Song as ‘the erotic “body” of God’, which seduces the reader. On her account, ‘Language…is actively erotic’.39 Ann Matter, however, takes issue with Cox Miller for inappropriately eliding the distinction between words and bodies, even as she rejects Phipps’ reductionist approach: ‘To reject or ignore the difference between these aspects of human desire and linguistic self-expression is to turn a deaf ear to the many manifestations of bliss which drew Origen and his followers to this particular biblical text’.40 For Matter, eros resonated with early and medieval interpreters in manifold ways. But it is not primarily ‘the problem of sexuality’41 that drew interest in the text. Borrowing the language of Northrop Frye, she refers to the Song of Songs as a code, which medieval theologians never tired of attempting to crack. In particular, they, like Origen, were disconcerted by the lack of a coherent narrative in the Song, and the objective of their commentaries was ‘to turn the text into a narrative plot’.42 This is an interesting counterpoint 18 to Frances Young’s theory that allegory in an Origenist (rather than ‘Antiochene’) mode, which she terms ‘symbolic’, fragmented the narrative of Scripture by treating individual words and phrases as isolated units of meaning.43 In the case of the Song, the opposite seems to be true. The medieval preoccupation with the Song is, for Matter, most coherently explained with reference to the same kind of literary concerns that drive modern scholarly interest in the text. Denys Turner, the eminent scholar of mysticism, vindicates medieval exegetes using a different strategy, which shifts the emphasis from the form of the text to its content. In answer to the question, ‘Why the Song?’, he asserts that the dialectics of eros—the interplay of absence and presence, longing and fulfillment—were central to the monastic experience of the divine. Monks would have found the bride’s anticipation of the bridegroom’s coming and her fleeting experiences of delight when she finally, although temporarily, laid hold of him to reflect the rhythms not only of their spiritual lives, but of the whole course of human history.44 He is interested in showing how a medieval monastic culture that was shaped by the ‘neo-Platonic model of love as eros’ would have received the Song of Songs as the biblical source of that model: ‘What the pseudo-Denys found in Plato and Proclus, the monk found in the Song of Songs’.45 For monks committed to producing a properly biblical theology, the Song became a vehicle for treating themes that the schoolmen discerned in the philosophical tradition. However, both Matter and Turner also reproduce some of the most problematic premises of the accounts they are seeking to critique. Matter focuses on the impenetrability of the Song as a primary reason for its popularity among medieval Christians. It was the impulse for narrative coherence—to transform the Song into a story—that generated such a depth of engagement. There can be no doubt that the Song’s allusive language and clearly 19 non-narrative structure exercised the intellects of medieval commentators as few other biblical books could do, but Matter risks reinforcing Phipps’ claim that the interpretive tradition emerged from a desire to subsume a recalcitrant other into an intelligible Christian framework, by treating it as an esoteric text beyond the experience of the ordinary Christian. Even as she resists the reductionism of sublimated desire, she affirms the premise that the Song was inherently problematic, a text desperately seeking explanation. This is a particularly problematic conclusion given that the evidence provided by the earliest Latin readers points in the opposite direction: Cyprian, Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome frequently quoted verses from the Song without any concern for elucidating the broader narrative structure. Turner’s focus on eros leads him to accept the boundaries staked out by critics much more readily than Matter, even though she does identify ‘the problem of sexuality’ as a driving force in medieval interpretation. Like Phipps and Moore, Turner sees Christian engagement with the Song in very personal terms, as bound up entirely with the dialectics of eros. To ask, ‘Why the Song?’, is also implicitly to ask, ‘Why Eros?’. As obvious as this equation may seem, it is far more problematic than Turner allows, for it pulls him thoroughly in the direction of individualized, ecstatic mystical experience, which is abstracted from the particularities of the contexts in which the Song was read. He has difficulty in grounding the Song in specific moments in the history of the church. Rather, the Song seems always to hover above the fray, its importance attributable to a generalized ‘theology of history’ that is ‘structured on the interplay of overlapping moments of ‘now’ and ‘not yet’”.46 This emphasis on the ecstasies of eros does not allow Turner to consider other reasons that early and medieval Christians might have been drawn to this love poem. In a recent book on holiness in biblical, rabbinic Jewish, and Syriac Christian sources, Naomi 20 Koltun-Fromm makes a convincing methodological link between sexuality and the drawing of communal boundaries.47 She argues that the ‘focus on sexuality also proves to be an indispensable tool for constructing community identity. Sexual practices come to the fore in this endeavor of boundary building because they can be easily defined and monitored’.48 This is related to Mary Douglas’ claim in her influential book Purity and Danger that concerns for bodily boundaries mirror concerns for cultural and social boundaries: ‘The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins’.49 Moreover, she asserts, ‘We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolize its specially vulnerable points’.50 She gives the example of Hindu caste system, in which a child’s social status is determined by the mother. Female purity is closely guarded because women serve as ‘the gates of entry to the caste’.51 Douglas continues to argue that ‘females are correctly seen as, literally, the entry by which pure content may be adulterated’.52 The female body can serve as a map of social order.53 By imagining the church as a female lover, Latin theologians could conceptualize their anxieties about their communities being defiled by the impurities of heresy and sin. This interpretive lens—rather than the lens of eros—renders far more intelligible the use of the Song by Cyprian and the Donatists to restrict the sacrament of baptism to the ‘true’ church alone,54 by Gregory of Elvira to warn against the infiltration of Christological heresy,55 and by Ambrose of Milan and Jerome of Stridon to praise the integritas of consecrated virgins.56 It also makes far more sense of the plethora of Carolingian commentaries on the Song that use the poem to, in the words of Hannah Matis, ‘attack the orthodoxy of their opponents and to label them as outsiders threatening the purity and integrity of the body of the Bride’.57 Concerns for purity—not the tensile interplay between presence and absence—are central to the exegesis of these men, which led them to privilege 21 images such as the lily among the thorns (2:1), the enclosed garden (4:12), and the pure dove (6:8). It was by no means a stretch for early Christians to depict the church as the Song’s bride. As an abstract noun, ecclesia is gendered feminine in Latin—as ekklesia is in Greek— and as early as the Corinthian correspondence we see Christian writers using nuptial imagery to refer to the church (cf. 2 Cor 11:2). This identification was buttressed by an even older trope, one primarily evident in the prophetic tradition, of describing the people of Israel— and sometimes the city of Jerusalem—as God’s (frequently wayward) spouse.58 In the light of these texts, a scriptural book that spoke of the courtship of two lovers may not have been as recalcitrant to theological discourse as we moderns suppose it would have been. 59 Indeed, the allusiveness of the text was likely among its chief virtues to ancient Christian readers, even though the scholarly tendency, as we have seen, has been to depict this as a hindrance. Since the poem is not obviously rooted in a particular moment of history, it is eminently malleable and portable. The value of the Song was that it provided a fund of potent images, unmoored from specific dogmatic, ethical, and cultic claims, which could deployed in a myriad of circumstances.60 2. THE ARGUMENT AND SCOPE OF THE BOOK In the present volume, I seek to frame the problem of the Song’s popularity in a way that does not reproduce the problematic assumptions embodied in much modern scholarship. Rather than presuming that early Christians shared our presuppositions about the ‘plain’ meaning of the Song and then asking how they reconciled it with an ascetic agenda, I examine how patterns of citation and allusion can help us to understand what were the ‘automatically recognized’ meaning(s) of the Song in the Christian communities of the 22 Western Roman Empire and how these meanings were subsequently contested, changed, and subverted in response to cultural and theological conflict. In so doing, I hope not only to contribute to our understanding of the development of the Song’s interpretation in the West, but, more broadly, to provide a different perspective on how texts from the Jewish Scriptures that spoke of sexuality and marriage might have influenced the process of Christian self-definition.61 My central claim is that the Song of Songs became an increasingly important resource for Latin patristic writers in their articulation of Christian identity. I follow Judith Lieu in defining ‘identity’ generally as something that is socially constructed, which ‘involves ideas of boundedness, of sameness and difference, of continuity, perhaps of a degree of homogeneity, and of recognition by self and others’.62 In this process of self-definition, the Song was used in particular to describe what the boundaries of the church and of the self are like. Where are they to be constructed? Are they porous or are they solid? To what degree do they need to be protected? What happens if and when they are transgressed? The Song, therefore, tended to be invoked during times of dispute and controversy, when it was particularly pressing to determine the nature of the boundaries—or, to borrow another popular metaphor, the frontiers—between competing groups.63 As I noted above, Mary Douglas’s account of the social and cultural significance of female bodies can help us to understand why the Song, from which Christians drew their description of the church (and the soul) as the female lover of Christ, would have been used so frequently to negotiate the edges of identity. Since the interpretation of the Song was so bound up with particular controversies, it developed in different ways throughout the Western provinces. I argue that we can discern 23 two broad interpretive trajectories that emerged in distinct geographical regions, and I have divided the book into two parts to represent these different traditions. In Part One, I examine the earliest interpretive trajectory in the Latin West, which was almost entirely ecclesiological in nature and was evident primarily in North Africa and Spain. A controversy arose in North Africa in the middle of the third century over baptismal practice: could those deemed ‘heretics’ or ‘schismatics’ efficaciously perform baptism, or was the sacrament the exclusive property of the church? Verses from the Song became crucial battlegrounds as Christians struggled to answer this question, even though all interpreters understood the poem to refer to Christ and his church. Growing out from this debate, the Song began to be used more broadly to inscribe the boundaries of the Christian community and to define the nature of the community within. My broader aim in the first part is to demonstrate the ubiquity of the ecclesiological interpretation of the Song in the West in Late Antiquity. This was not something that had to be argued for, but was accepted without problem by many early Latin witnesses. In Chapter One, I give an account of Cyprian of Carthage’s use of the Song to defend the practice of rebaptism and the ‘Donatist’64 appropriation of his exegetical logic nearly a century later. It was in this context that Cyprian, in a series of letters to North African bishops and a revision of his treatise De catholicae ecclesiae unitate, used particular images from the Song—the ‘garden enclosed and sealed font’ of Song 4:12 and the ‘dove’ of Song 6:8—to draw firm boundaries around the church in order to demonstrate the need for those baptized outside his communion to undergo the rite a second time. Following a thorough analysis of the letters, I take up the Donatist appropriation of Cyprian’s scriptural reasoning. Since most Donatist writings are no longer extant—with the key exception of Tyconius, who is treated in the second chapter—I rely on the accounts of their theology by their ‘catholic’ 24 opponents, such as Optatus of Milevis and Augustine, who often preserve substantial elements of the treatises that they are critiquing. Chapter Two analyses attempts to resist these rigorist portraits of the church, which rely heavily on the concepts of purity and exclusivity, by re-interpreting the key proof texts and adducing other texts from the Song that highlight admixture in the church. The three authors who will be treated in this chapter are Pacian of Barcelona, Tyconius, and Augustine. Unlike Cyprian and the ‘mainline’ Donatists, both Pacian and Tyconius use the Song to stress the diversity of the ecclesial community. Pacian makes accommodation for believers of very different merits, drawing on horticultural imagery in the Song to present a case for unity grounded in the church’s fecundity and diversity. Tyconius uses Song 1:5 and 1:7 to identify the church as a mixed body, which contains both ‘good’ and ‘evil’ elements. It is only Augustine, however, who takes on Cyprian’s account of the church’s sealed boundaries on the basis of these accounts of the church as diverse or mixed. He correctly realized that the identification of the bride as his own ‘catholic’ communion could not allow for the presence of sinners in its midst—and there was no question that there were sinners in the midst. For Augustine, the dove and the garden are eschatological images, describing the church as she will be at the eschaton. He much preferred the image of the lily among the thorns for describing the church as it sojourns in the saeculum. In Chapter Three, I examine the early Latin commentary tradition. I begin with a brief reconstruction of the now-lost commentaries of Victorinus of Poetovio and Reticius of Autun, and then turn to the five-book Tractatus de Epithalamio of Gregory of Elvira, an incomplete series of homilies that he likely preached in the early 350s and revised several years later. Although the Tractatus is predominantly ecclesiological, Gregory does also occasionally give Christological readings of the Song. Over the course of the five books of 25 the Tractatus, Gregory uses the poem to plot a general history of the church from its apostolic origins to the final judgment. His account draws very firm boundary-lines between the true church of the pure, on the one hand, and the impious congregations of the Jews and the heretics, on the other, using the figures of the virgin and the adulterous woman to represent these two groups. The focus of Part Two is the interpretive trajectory that arose in Italy in the late fourth century, in which the same concern for marking boundaries is evident, but the focus is placed heavily on the individual, and, in particular, the consecrated virgin, with whom the Bride is identified.65 This use of the Song was inextricably bound up with the ‘culture wars’ of the late fourth century—evident particularly in the conservative cities of Italy such as Rome and Milan—in which there was a vigorous debate regarding the appropriateness of a merit-based hierarchy that privileged the sexually continent. Although many of us in the modern period would expect the Song to have been a weapon wielded by those who wished to argue for the inherent goodness of marriage and sexuality, it was pro-ascetic writers such as Ambrose and Jerome who made the most sustained use of the text. It could be argued that they did so pre-emptively to drain the poem of its sexual energy, but we must recall that they were dependent on an exegetical tradition that used the Song to depict the church metaphorically as a female body, which was sealed off so that it could be protected from pollution. Ambrose and Jerome have rather different aims in their use of the Song, however. In Chapters Four and Five, I explore the role of virgins in Ambrose’s thought and the implications of this for his interpretation of the poem. For Ambrose, virgins are significant because they are signifiers of the divine economy: their physical integritas reveals the spiritual integritas of holy souls and the purity of the invisible church. The Song, I argue, was so 26 important for him because the polyvalence of the figure of the Bride allowed him to negotiate between these three aspects of his theological vision. This is a considerable step forward in the ascetic theology of the West. Cyprian used a metaphorical body to map the boundaries of the church—and, even then, he focused on the images of the garden and font, which are only elliptically sexual; his account of female virginity in the De habitu virginum does not impinge much upon ecclesiology. Ambrose, by contrast, uses the literal bodies of female virgins to work out his picture of the church as pure and sealed off from corruption, in a way that is rendered fully intelligible by Mary Douglas’s insights. As she succinctly remarks in Natural Symbols, ‘bodily control is an expression of social control’.66 In an ecclesial setting divided by ‘Homoians’ and ‘Nicenes’ and in a cultural setting where, at least among the aristocracy, there was not always a clear distinction between ‘pagan’ and Christian values— that is, in a city where Christian identity was up for definition in many crucial ways— Ambrose sought to control the process of communal definition by controlling the bodies of virgins. Ambrose never wrote a commentary on the Song, but he quoted it often in his writings, focusing in particular on images of enclosure and separation. In his earliest writings, such as the De virginibus, he applies the Song exclusively to the bodies of virgins, but in more mature works such as the De Isaac, he applies the Song to the soul and the church, although he describes both using language that he had earlier applied specifically to consecrated virgins. We also see near the end of his career a striking application of the Song to the Virgin Mary—an exegetical move that will not gain traction until the Middle Ages, but which reflects the degree to which the Song’s bride has become for Ambrose an embodied woman. Although it is usually presumed that Origen exercised the most decisive influence on Ambrose’s interpretation of the Song, I argue that his approach to the poem was shaped 27 even more profoundly by the ascetic corpus of Athanasius, not only in the early years of his episcopacy, but throughout his career. Chapter Six takes up the writings of Jerome, who, unlike Ambrose, used virgins to contest the clerical establishment, with the Song being frequently employed in letters addressed to aristocratic ascetic women and men sympathetic to his cause. He was resident in Rome, under the patronage of Damasus of Rome, during the years 382-385 and there forged relationships with a number of highborn women, notably Marcella, Paula, and Eustochium. These women, he asserted, were saved and sanctified through their chastity, wed to and desired by Christ, and stood as a source of spiritual authority in Rome apart from the established clergy, whom he condemns as greedy and prideful. Like Ambrose, one of the central aspects of Jerome’s ascetic theology is the need for the virgin to remain enclosed and separated from consort with others, and he uses the Song in the articulation of this account. His Libellus de virginitate servanda (or Letter 22 to Eustochium) is the locus classicus of this account, but it is evident in a number of letters to virgins (e.g., Letters 65, 107 and 130). This chapter will also consider Jerome’s engagement with Jovinian, who stirred up controversy in Rome in the early 390s by denying that virgins merited a privileged status in the church. Jovinian, it seems, used the Song to demonstrate the goodness of marriage, but as I shall argue, this defense was rooted in an ecclesiological reading of the poem and does not constitute a ‘literal’ interpretation as we would understand it. As a result of this critique, Jerome was pressed for the first—and only—time in his career to defend his practice of reading the Song ascetically. It is, indeed, notable that neither Ambrose nor Jerome felt compelled to justify their ascetic interpretations of the poem, even though this seems to have been an innovation of the late fourth century. The reason for this, I shall demonstrate, is that this mode of reading 28 the Song was rooted in the earlier ecclesiological tradition, presuming an established identification of the Bride with the church. This is clearly drawn out in the first book of Ambrose’s earliest work On Virgins, in which he makes a direct link between virgins and the church: ‘You are like holy Church, which is unsullied by intercourse, fruitful in bearing, a virgin in chastity and a mother in offspring’.67 Before identifying the consecrated virgin with the Song’s Bride, he presents her as an embodiment of the church, thereby laying the ground for his audience to accept the validity of this identification. It is difficult to establish precisely what Ambrose and Jerome knew of the earlier tradition. Ambrose certainly knew Cyprian’s De habitu virginum, but there is no clear evidence regarding the dossier of rebaptism letters.68 Jerome refers to the works of Cyprian as ‘more conspicuous than the sun’,69 which makes the hypothesis that his letters were widely circulated not an unreasonable assumption. For his part, Jerome certainly knew the commentaries of Victorinus of Poetovio and Reticius of Autun—and perhaps that of Gregory of Elvira, as well.70 In any event, the fact that both Ambrose and Jerome can introduce these ascetic readings without needing to offer any justification suggests that they could presume a widespread familiarity amongst their readers and hearers with the ecclesiological interpretation of the poem. This latter interpretive trajectory would come to shape the exegesis of the Song in the Middle Ages. By transposing the dominant ecclesiological reading into a more ascetic key and by embodying the bride in the person of the female virgin, Ambrose and Jerome ensured that the interpretation of the text would flourish in a context where a formal profession of chastity was a necessary prerequisite of holiness and in which the idealized (or demonized) female body functioned as a signifier for the human condition. We cannot, therefore, speak of a medieval tradition of Song commentary in isolation from the traditions of Late Antiquity. The question, ‘Why the Song?’, can be answered satisfactorily neither by a 29 generalized reference to the importance of eros in the medieval world nor by an appeal to the inscrutability of the poem. Rather, if we are to explain why the Song became an important text in Western Christianity, we must understand the extent to which the poem was imbricated in the battles that were fought in the third and fourth centuries over the nature of Christian identity, both corporate and individual. Given the constraints of space, it will not be possible to give a thorough account of the early medieval afterlives of these controversies.71 In the epilogue, however, I will focus on the early fifth century Italian bishop Julian of Eclanum, whose commentary on the Song—known, apparently, under the title De amore—argued for the essential goodness of human nature and the unfallen character of sexual desire, in direct reaction to the earlier debates concerning marriage and sexuality witnessed by the writings of Ambrose and Jerome.72 The De amore is no longer extant, but it was known to the Venerable Bede, whose early eighth century Commentary on the Song of Songs, in turn a major source for the Glossa Ordinaria, attempts directly to refute its premises. Julian provides us with one striking and concrete example of the connection between late antique and medieval exegesis of the Song. But it was not simply by the direct transmission of texts that late antique interpretive traditions lived on. It was in dialogue with the Song that Ambrose and Jerome helped to shape the defining contours of medieval spirituality, particularly the emphasis on sexual renunciation. Although we have long been disposed to think that the privileging of chastity was a defining feature of early Christianity, David Hunter has now exhaustively demonstrated that not only was this not the consensus opinion, it may have been the minority opinion in the West, at least among Christians of the upper classes.73 It was only because of the crusading efforts of theologians such as Ambrose and Jerome—and, to a lesser extent, Augustine—that virginity won the day as the highest of the virtues. Since they 30 relied so heavily on the Song in articulating a link between holiness and complete sexual renunciation, their interpretations cannot be passed over as simply derived from Origen and largely irrelevant to the development of medieval exegesis.74 In what follows, I will show the increasingly central role that the Song of Songs occupied in the public life of the Western churches. First, we turn to the writings of Cyprian of Carthage, the unlikely father of Latin exegesis of the Song. 1 Ellen F. Davis, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000), 231, remarks, ‘There is in the whole book not a single overt reference to God, to prayer, or to any aspect of Israel’s religious practice or tradition.’ 2 Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 6: ‘[T]he Song of Songs was the most frequently interpreted book of medieval Christianity’. 3 Matter, Voice, 20. 4 Matter, Voice, 20-48. 5 Matter, Voice, 31. 6 The following is the coverage given to Latin patristic writers in Matter, Voice: Ambrose (25- 6); Jerome (24-7); Rufinus (26); Gregory of Elvira (26; 87-90). Although it could be argued that Ambrose and Jerome do not merit coverage since Matter’s focus is the genre of Song commentary and neither of them wrote formal commentaries on the text, she does state that their writings give a ‘clear example of the thematic evolution of the genre in the centuries immediately following Origen’ (26). They are bridge figures between Origen and the medieval interpreters. 31 7 For example, Ann Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 4, repeats the premise: ‘Origen’s identification of the Bride with the church or soul remained the basis for all subsequent interpretation (allegoresis) of the Song’s veiled meaning (allegoria)’. Her own analysis moves directly from Origen to the twelfth century commentators. German scholarship fares somewhat better on this point. Both Friedrich Ohly, Hohelied-Studien: Grundzüge einer Geschichte der Hoheliedauslegung des Abendlandes bis um 1200 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner-Verlag, 1958), 13-50 and Helmut Riedlinger, Die Makellosigkeit der Kirche in den Lateinischen Hoheliedkommentaren des Mittelalters (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1958), 42-61, treat Latin patristic exegetes in some detail, but without offering a clear explanation of their importance for the later tradition. 8 J. Christopher King, Origen on the Song of Songs as the Spirit of Scripture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Martin Laird, Gregory of Nyssa and the Grasp of Faith: Union, Knowledge and Presence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 9 Elizabeth Clark, ‘Uses of the Song of Songs: Origen and the Later Latin Fathers’, in Ascetic Piety and Women’s Faith: Essays on Late Ancient Christianity (Studies in Women and Religion 20; Lewiston/Queenston: The Edwin Mellon Press, 1986), 386-427. Other fine short studies include Patricia Cox Miller, ‘The Blazing Body: Ascetic Desire in Jerome’s Letter to Eustochium’, JECS 1/1 (1993), 21-45; and David G. Hunter, ‘The Virgin, the Bride and the Church: Reading Psalm 45 in Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine’, CH 69/2 (2000), 281-303. 10 The only attempt to give a broad account of Latin patristic interpretation of the Song since Clark is an unpublished doctoral dissertation by Nathalie Henry, The Song of Songs and Virginity: The Study of a Paradox in Early Christian Literature (PhD Dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1999). There is some truly excellent scholarship in the dissertation, including an important chapter on liturgical uses of the Song in the early Middle Ages, which makes use 32 of unedited manuscripts (‘The Song of Songs and the Liturgy of the Velatio’). But a conceptual flaw underlies the work. The author is simply too enamored of the allegedly paradoxical nature of patristic exegesis of the Song, and she asserts that at the heart of all Latin interpretation (as well as the interpretation of Origen) lie ascetic concerns. But for Cyprian, Augustine, and Gregory of Elvira, this contention is demonstrably false. It is only with Ambrose and Jerome that such ascetic concerns emerge. And yet, ironically, she devotes only a half chapter to Ambrose and Jerome, who should be the centerpiece of her study. 11 Daniel Boyarin, ‘The Song of Songs, Lock or Key: The Holy Song as a Mashal’, in Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 105-16. Boyarin makes the significant observation that the Rabbis placed the Song in the category of ‘light sayings—proverbs and not enigmas’ (107). 12 The opening lines of Ann Astell’s monograph on medieval exegesis of the Song embody this assumption well: ‘The Song of Songs posed two interrelated problems for the Fathers of the early church, both of which were articulated and addressed in Origen’s voluminous third-century commentary. The first problem arises from what the Song leaves unstated; the second from what it actually says’ (Song of Songs, 1). 13 For a refutation of the argument that Gregory of Elvira had direct knowledge of Origen, see my article ‘Origen and the Tractatus de Epithalamio of Gregory of Elvira’, StPatr 50 (2011), 189-203. 14 I borrow the concept of the ‘decanonization’ of the Song from David M. Carr, ‘The Song of Songs as a Microcosm of the Canonization and Decanonization Process’, in A. van der Kooij and Karel van der Toorn (eds.), Canonization and Decanonization (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 33 173-89. By this, Carr means (to be simplistic) that the Song no longer occupies a meaningful place in Christian theological discourse. 15 David Dawson, Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 8. The whole passage is methodologically rich and worth quoting at length: ‘Consequently, although the “literal sense” has often been thought of as an inherent quality of a literary text that gives it a specific and invariant character…the phrase is simply an honorific title given to a kind of meaning that is culturally expected and automatically recognized by readers. It is the “normal”, “commonsensical” meaning, the product of a conventional, customary reading. The “literal sense” thus stems from a community’s generally unself-conscious decision to adopt and promote a certain kind of meaning, rather than from its recognition of a text’s inherent and self-evident sense’ (7-8). 16 The work was originally completed in 1943 as a Habilitationsschrift for the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Berlin. 17 Ohly, Hohelied-Studien, 2. He never completed the edition, and it was published posthumously: Das St. Trudperter Hohelied. Eine Lehre der liebenden Gotteserkenntnis (ed. Friedrich Ohly, with Nicola Kleine; Frankfurt am Main, 1998). 18 Ohly, Hohelied-Studien, 13-63. 19 Riedlinger, Die Makellosigkeit der Kirche. 20 Riedlinger, Die Makellosigkeit der Kirche, 4. 21 Riedlinger, Die Makellosigkeit der Kirche, 2. 22 Riedlinger, Die Makellosigkeit der Kirche, 1. 23 Harold Rowley, ‘The Interpretation of the Song of Songs’, in The Servant of the Lord and Other Essays on the Old Testament (London: Lutterworth Press, 1952), 232. 24 William Phipps, ‘The Plight of the Song of Songs’, JAAR 42/1 (1974), 82. 34 25 Phipps, ‘Plight’, 86. 26 Phipps, ‘Plight’, 87. 27 Marvin Pope, ‘Introduction’, in Song of Songs: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 7C; Garden City, NYC: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1977), 114. 28 Harold Bloom (ed.), The Song of Songs (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988), 5-24. 29 Michel Foucault, ‘The Order of Discourse’, in Robert Young (ed.) and Ian McLeod (trans.), Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 57-8. 30 Frederick Jameson, ‘Metacommentary’, PMLA 86/1 (1971), 10. 31 Stephen D. Moore, ‘The Song of Songs in the History of Sexuality’, Church History 69/2 (2000), 328-49. 32 Moore, ‘History of Sexuality’, 332. 33 Her essay ‘Uses of the Song of Songs’, broke new ground by highlighting both a previously unforeseen emphasis in Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs and the independence of much Latin patristic exegesis of the Song from Origen’s influence. She argues that although most of the focus on Origen’s Commentary rests on the ‘transportable motif of the soul’s relation with Christ’ (386), the dominant theme in the text is ‘the union of Jew and Gentile in the Christian Church’ (390). She also points out that the heavy concentration on ‘ascetic interpretation’ by many Latin Fathers is not paralleled in Origen, whose ‘hermeneutic here is not governed by ascetic concerns’ (401). 34 Elizabeth Clark, ‘Origen, the Jews, and the Song of Songs: Allegory and Polemic in Christian Antiquity’, in Anselm C. Hagedorn (ed.), Perspectives on the Song of Songs/Perspektiven der Hoheliedauslegung (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), 274-93. 35 Clark, ‘Allegory and Polemic’, 276. 35 36 Clark, ‘Allegory and Polemic’, 277. 37 Dawson, Allegorical Readers, 10. 38 Patricia Cox Miller, ‘“Pleasure of the Text, Text of Pleasure”: Eros and Language in Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs’, JAAR 54/2 (1986), 241-53. She never names Phipps, but her choice to publish her article in the same journal in which Phipps’ scathing critique appeared suggests that she is directly responding to him. 39 Cox Miller, ‘Eros and Language’, 242. 40 Matter, Voice, 33. 41 Matter, Voice, 33. 42 Matter, Voice, 52-8. 43 Frances M. Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 184: ‘Origen was happy to decode symbols without worrying about textual or narrative coherence, and the symbols were tokens’. 44 Denys Turner, Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs (CS 156; Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1995), 38-43, 85-9. 45 Turner, Eros and Allegory, 74. 46 Turner, Eros and Allegory, 85. 47 Naomi Koltun-Fromm, Hermeneutics of Holiness: Ancient Jewish and Christian Notions of Sexuality and Religious Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. 15-17. 48 Koltun-Fromm, Hermeneutics of Holiness, 15. 49 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (New York: Routledge, 2002), 150. 50 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 150. 51 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 155. 52 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 156. 36 53 Mary Douglas is certainly not alone in expounding the relationship between the body and society. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 95-6, asserts that ‘a consensus of sorts has emerged granting the body a critical place in the social construction of reality…It appears we are now reappropriating the image of the body: no longer the mere physical instrument of the mind, it now denotes a more complex and irreducible phenomenon, namely, the social person’. 54 See chapter one. 55 See chapter three. 56 See chapters four through six. 57 Hannah Matis, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem: Early Medieval Commentary on the Song of Songs and the Carolingian Reform’ (PhD Dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2013), 181. Matis’s fine dissertation is the first book-length analysis of the Carolingian tradition of Song commentary. 58 See, e.g., Is 49:18; 61:5, 10; 62:4; Jer 2:1-3, 3:1-5; Ez 16, 23; Hos 1-3. See Julie Galambush, Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel: The City as Yahweh’s Wife (Atlanta: SBL Press, 1992) and a number of the essays collected in Marti and Risto Uro (eds.), Sacred Marriages: The DivineHuman Metaphor from Sumer to Early Christianity (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008). 59 For the development of the nuptial theme in the second century and its relevance to the interpretation of the Song, see Karl Shuve, ‘Irenaeus’ Contribution to Early Christian Interpretation of the Song of Songs’, in Paul Foster and Sara Parvis (eds.), Irenaeus and His Traditions (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), 81-9. The use of the Platonic notion of eros to characterize the power that bears the soul aloft to the divine (cf. Symposium 210E-212A), however, does not begin to influence Christian spirituality until much later, making its first substantial appearance in Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs and receiving its most 37 robust articulation by Pseudo-Dionysius, whose account (unlike Origen’s) is in no way concerned with the Song of Songs (cf. Turner, Eros and Allegory, esp. 47-70). For those working explicitly from a Christian perspective, see, e.g., David M. Carr, The Erotic Word: Sexuality, Spirituality, and the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 91-151; Davis, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs; Robert Jensen, Song of Songs (Louisville: John Knox Press, 2005); Edmée Kingsmill, The Song of Songs and the Eros of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Carey Ellen Walsh, Religion, the Erotic, and the Song of Songs (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000). 60 Kingsmill, The Song of Songs and the Eros of God, has highlighted the striking number of biblical intertexts in the Song. 61 Elizabeth Clark’s Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) has shaped a generation of scholarship on this subject. In the book, she presents a remarkable array of ‘interpretive devices’ that were ‘employed to create ascetic meaning’ (11). Her work turns on the thesis that the ‘distinctive feature of their ascetic program was to intensify the “hardness” of the Bible’s “hard” sayings and fortify the “softer” ones through intertextual and other readings’ (10-11). To be sure, the Bible—the New Testament as well as the Old—contains hundreds of verses that quite explicitly advocate for marriage and reproduction, and which would thus be ‘recalcitrant’ to asceticallyminded Christians, for whom celibacy clearly trumped even a well-ordered sexuality. Christians certainly needed exegetical strategies to create a coherent whole out of an amalgam of books written across a span of hundreds of years. But it is not always clear that late ancient Christians would have shared our assumptions about what some of those ‘softer’ sayings were. Koltun-Fromm, Hermeneutics of Holiness, 11-12, has similar reservations about 38 the strength of Clark’s claims that ascetic concerns had to be read back into, and cleverly forced onto, the text of the Hebrew Bible. 62 Judith Lieu, Christian Identity in the Jewish and Graeco-Roman World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 12-13. My account is particularly influenced by the work of sociologist Richard Jenkins, who argues for an anti-essentialist account of ‘identity’, which takes ‘similarity and difference’ to be the ‘dynamic principles of identification…at the heart of the human world’ (Social Identity, 3rd edition [New York: Routledge, 2008], 17-18). 63 Much scholarship on the social aspects of early Christianity focuses on the construction and negotiation of boundaries, often under the influence of Fredrik Barth’s 1969 introductory essay for the volume Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, reprinted in F. Barth, Process and Form in Social Life: Selected Essays of Fredrik Barth, Volume One (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 198-227. See, esp., Judith Lieu, Christian Identity; Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Isabella Sandwell, Religious Identity in Late Antiquity: Greeks, Jews and Christians in Antioch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Andrew Jacobs, Christ Circumcised: A Study in Early Christian History and Difference (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) develops an account of the boundaries of religious identity that draws from psychoanalytic, rather than socioanthropological, theory. He argues that the construction of boundaries is not simply a means of separating oneself (or one’s group) from the other; it is, rather, both ‘a simultaneous distinction from and appropriation of that other’ (10). 64 Brent Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 5-6, has offered a compelling critique of the use of the term ‘Donatist’ to describe the rigorist party in Africa that was born in the Great Persecution of 303. It is problematic because this was the label foisted upon them by their 39 opponents, and Shaw prefers to describe them as ‘a dissident or dissenting party,’ which matches their own self-perception. Although I am sympathetic to the critique, the term ‘Donatist’ remains in broad use in scholarship on early Christian North Africa, and for the sake of clarity I retain it in the monograph. 65 Although the English word ‘virgin’ can be equally applied to males and females, in the book I follow the original Latin meaning of virgo (‘maiden’; cf. puella) and restrict its use to females only. The reason is that Ambrose and Jerome were concerned with female virgins. 66 Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970), 70. 67 Virg. 1.6.31 (Gori 14/I, 132; ET Boniface Ramsey, Ambrose, 81). 68 For his knowledge of the De habitu virginum, see Yves-Marie Duval, ‘L’originalité du De virginibus dans le movement ascétique occidental: Ambroise, Cyprien, Athanase’, in Ambroise de Milan: XVIe Centenaire de son election épiscopale (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1974), 21-9. 69 Jerome, Vir. ill. 67. 70 Victorinus (Vir. ill. 74); Reticius (Vir. ill. 82). Gregory’s case is less clear, since Jerome only refers in general to certain tractatus, and does not name the books of the bible on which he commented (Vir. ill. 105). 71 The reader may note the absence from this study of Apponius, who composed the Expositio in Canticum Canticorum, perhaps the first complete commentary on the Song extant in Latin. Since he was almost certainly active in northern Italy and influenced by Ambrose, this could be taken as a significant omission, especially because some scholars have recently dated the Expositio to the first decade of the fifth century (see the discussion in Mark Elliott, The Song of Songs and Christology in the Early Church [STAC 7; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000], 40-50). I simply do not find the argument—which largely rests on the omission of Pelagius 40 from a list of heretics—to be compelling, and I have judged that the work cannot be reliably assigned to the time period covered in this book (my skepticism on this point is fully shared by Rossana Guglielmetti, Giusto d’Urgell: Explanatio in Cantica Canticorum [Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2011], xxix-xxx). Full justice cannot be done to such a complex work in the short span of an epilogue, and so I leave it to a later occasion (or to other scholars) to articulate Apponius’ role in the development of the Latin interpretive tradition. Even if Apponius should be conclusively identified as a younger contemporary of Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine in future scholarship, my reading of the Expositio does not suggest that it would undermine any of the central claims of the book; if anything, given the use of the text by Bede (Comm. In Cant. 3.23), it would further illuminate the ties between the late antique and early medieval periods. But every book must have its limitations. 72 I am particularly grateful to Celia Chazelle for pressing me to include Julian in this study, since the fragments of his work are the lone representatives of a suppressed mode of interpretation. 73 David G. Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity: The Jovinianist Controversy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). See also Kate Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996), and John Curran, Pagan City and Christian Capital: Rome in the Fourth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 74 I am not alone in attempting to plot developments in the history of the Song’s interpretation with reference to changes in culture, theology, and liturgy. Two works stand out in this regard. Rachel Fulton’s From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 195-470, intricately traces how developments in devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary in the eleventh and twelfth 41 centuries, coupled with a need to explain the presence of lessons from the Song at the feast of the Assumption, paved the way for an explosion of ‘Mariological’ interpretations of the Song. My study is also influenced by the early modern historian Elizabeth Clarke’s recent book Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Clarke is interested in discerning how the Song was used to work out various ideas of the church’s ‘identity and constitution’ and how, in that process of identity formation, it ‘accumulated a number of interpretations with specific theological and political significance’ (4). Her study parallels my own in her insistence that the Song occupied a prominent role in the public discourse of the seventeenth century English churches. I have learned much from both of these works and am in their authors’ debt. 42