Biblical Love Poetry ( . . . and God)

Biblical Love Poetry (. . . and God) Tod Linafelt Using George Bataille’s reflections on desire, death, and God as the basis for considering the love poetry of the Song of Songs as a manifestation of the commingling of separate realms and separate bodies in the service of a longed-for continuity helps us to see that such a commingling is never far from the domain of violence and that such continuity of being is never far from death. But the biblical book itself helps us to see something that is missing from Bataille’s analysis—that is, a more complex understanding of the implications of desire for the divine. What if, contra Bataille, God were not “by definition” immune to risk? What if the divine were not understood to be perfection but, rather, bound as well to the vicissitudes of desire, with all the anguish and ecstasy that it implies? The Song of Song’s lyrical presentation of Eros, carried over as it is into the tradition of allegorical interpretation, may, in fact, have rather profound implications for how we talk about God. I F, AS THE POET Wallace Stevens has written, “not to have is the beginning of desire,” then “to have” would be its end. If Eros ensues from separation, lack, or a felt absence, then union, plenitude, and presence represent its telos. This is, of course, a telos (or “end”) in both senses of that word: telos as the goal or objective, that which is sought; and telos as cessation or termination, the quitting of seeking. Desire begins when one is torn out of contentment, and it reaches its end with a return to that contentment. Eros exists, then, only as a denial of its beginning and as a deferral of its end. Tod Linafelt is an associate professor of biblical studies in the Theology Department at Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057. Earlier versions of this article were delivered as a lecture at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University and as a paper at the 2000 meeting of the Society for Literature and Religion at the University of Nijmegen. I am grateful for feedback from members of both audiences, as well as from an anonymous reader for JAAR. Journal of the American Academy of Religion June 2002, Vol. 70, No. 2, pp. 323–345. © 2002 The American Academy of Religion 324 Journal of the American Academy of Religion Yet how long can its beginning be gainsaid and its end cheated? Desire is as precarious as it is overwhelming. Recognizing the threat that contentment harbors for desire, the French philosopher Georges Bataille has written that “happiness is the most demanding test of all for lovers” (1997: 95). And though one may learn this seeming truism by watching any soap opera—where as soon as any lovers seem happy we know they are doomed—Bataille has explored its implications and paradoxes in a striking way. He writes: “Compared to the person I love, the universe seems poor and empty. This universe isn’t ‘risked’ since it’s not ‘perishable.’ . . . Carnal love, because not ‘sheltered from thieves’ or vicissitudes, is thus greater than divine love. It ‘risks’ me and the one I love” (1997: 95). Affirming that it is the very precariousness of desire—the fact that it is not sheltered—that constitutes its desirability, Bataille nevertheless complicates the truism by introducing two other propositions: first, that carnal love not only is at risk itself but also puts those in its thrall at risk; and second, that precisely this double-edged risk makes carnal love superior to divine love. The first of these propositions may once again seem to repeat what any melodrama or soap opera knows about desire—“star-crossed lovers” and all that—but Bataille pursues it in unexpected ways. In the book Erotism (1986), he begins by emphasizing that we exist as “discontinuous beings.” Although individuals may interact, affect each other, and even experience an intense solidarity with each other, each being is nonetheless separate and distinct from all others. “Between one being and another,” Bataille writes, “there is a gulf, a discontinuity” (1986: 12). Birth is the starting point for this discontinuity, as a being emerges out of the continuity of being-ingeneral and into a self-contained existence. Death is the return to continuity, a dissolution of individual existence back into being-in-general. Eroticism arises when “we yearn for lost continuity.” The promise of Eros is the promise of “a total blending of two beings, a continuity between discontinuous beings” (Bataille 1986: 20). Bataille himself cannot seem to decide whether or not the promise is ever kept. Indeed, who among us can tell if desire is simply a quest for the impossible or if there is in carnal love a moment— “precarious yet profound”—of genuine dissolution of individual existence. In any case, it is this promise of continuity by which Bataille links sexuality to death: both represent ways of overcoming the discontinuity of being— an overcoming that is, in each case, both promise and threat. The second of these propositions—that carnal love is superior to divine love—is based on Bataille’s insistence that “God by definition isn’t risked.” “However far the lovers of God go with their passion,” he writes, “they conceive of it as outside the play of risk. . . . In carnal love we ought to love excesses of suffering. Without them no risk would exist. In divine Linafelt: Biblical Love Poetry (. . . and God) 325 love the limitation of suffering is given in divine perfection” (1997: 95– 96). Coming into Old French and Middle English from the Latin Christian theological term for the sufferings of Christ (patior, passus), the word passion came to designate not only the sufferings inflicted on Christ or the martyrs, or even affliction in general, but also the very fact or condition of being afflicted, indeed, of being acted on or affected from outside oneself. The Oxford English Dictionary finds attestation for this latter meaning as early as Chaucer (fourteenth century) and as late as 1846, when Richard Chenevix Trench states, in his book Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord, “That work shall be a work of passion rather than of action.” It is a short step from this second sense of passion to the idea of love or desire. Thus, Shakespeare, in Romeo and Juliet, writes: “But passion lends them power, time, means to meet / Tempering extremities with extreme sweet” (act 2, prologue, lines 13–14). And Milton writes in Paradise Lost: “the Love-tale / infected Sion’s daughters with like heat, / Whose wanton passions in the sacred Porch / Ezekiel saw” (book 1, lines 453–455). It seems to me that, for Bataille, these three meanings—from “suffering,” to “the state of being affected by an external agent,” to “desire”— are bound up with one another still. Passion in relation to an external agent exists as suffering both because the promise of unity may well turn out to be a fraud and because of the threat that this promise may not be a fraud. That is, to experience, even for the briefest of moments, continuity with another is to experience what Bataille calls “the abrupt wrench[ing] out of discontinuity” (1986: 16). To take seriously the fact that we exist as discontinuous beings is to take equally seriously the fact that “the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence” (Bataille 1986: 16). The commingling of selves exists only in the violation of borders, only in the state of being affected by an external agent, which, though we may know such violation as an experience of ecstasy, is no less an experience of anguish. In the present article I intend to use Bataille’s reflections on desire, death, and God as the basis for considering the love poetry of the Song of Songs as a manifestation of the commingling of separate realms and separate bodies in the service of a longed-for continuity, while acknowledging that such a commingling is never far from the domain of violence and that continuity of being is never far from death. But I also intend to use the biblical book to introduce something that is missing from Bataille’s analysis—that is, a more complex understanding of the implications of desire for the divine. What if, contra Bataille, God were not “by definition” immune to risk? What if God were not above the fray of passion? What if the divine were not understood to be perfection but, rather, bound as well to the vicissitudes of desire, with all the anguish and ecstasy that it implies? We may begin to answer these questions by first exploring the 326 Journal of the American Academy of Religion lyrical presentation of Eros in the Song of Songs and by then thinking about how this body-to-body business might have rather profound implications for how we talk about God.1 I As the only example of erotic literature in the Bible, the poetry of the Song of Songs stands out for its unabashedly voluptuous character.2 It is, as Robert Alter has aptly put it, “the great love poem of commingling— of different realms, different senses, of the male and female bodies” (in Bloch and Bloch: 121). In alternating voices, two young and obviously unmarried lovers take great delight in describing each other’s bodies and their desire for one another. In these descriptions, all borders become fluid and begin to dissolve: as the voluptuousness of the body fades into the voluptuousness of nature and back again, as the five senses of these bodies become intertwined, and as the bodies themselves are intermingled. Consider the following exchange between the male and female voices:3 [The male voice begins:] How sweet your caresses, my sister, my bride— how much better your caresses than wine, and your fragrance than all spices combined. Your lips drip with nectar, my bride, honey and milk lie beneath your tongue. The fragrance of your garments, is like the fragrance of Lebanon. A private garden is my sister, my bride, a secret well, a spring concealed. Your branches are an orchard of pomegranates, of all the choicest fruits, with henna and spikenard, spikenard and saffron; with cinnamon and cane, and every kind of frankincense; 1 This opening section repeats material originally published in Keefer and Linafelt. Reference should also be made to Ps. 45 and Proverbs 7, the former identified as a “love poem” (shir yedidot) and the latter giving a monitory description of the sexual wiles of the “strange woman.” But neither should really be termed erotic literature in my judgment. There are certain parallels between the Song of Songs and other ancient Near Eastern poetry, including the Mesopotamian sacred marriage songs (Kramer) and, especially, the Egyptian love songs (Fox). There are likewise parallels with the ancient Tamil love poetry of South India, although, contra Rabin, most scholars do not think there is a direct influence at work. 3 Unless otherwise noted, translations from the Hebrew text of the Song of Songs are my own. I have, naturally, been influenced by other translations, most especially those in the New Revised Standard Version, Michael Fox, and Ariel and Chana Bloch. 2 Linafelt: Biblical Love Poetry (. . . and God) 327 with myrrh and aloe, with all the finest spices. You are a spring in the garden, a well of living water, a stream flowing from Lebanon. [The female voice responds:] Awake, north wind; come, south wind— breathe upon my garden, carry its spices. My lover shall enter his garden, he shall taste these choice fruits. [Reverting to the male voice:] I have entered my garden, my sister, my bride— I have gathered my myrrh and my spices, I have tasted my nectar, my honey, the rich milk and the sweet wine. (4:10–5:1) As elsewhere in the Song of Songs, nature and landscape provide the poetic metaphors for the lovers’ imaginings. Sometimes the surrounding landscape is presented as the place of the couple’s lovemaking (“Wherever we lie our bed is green. / Our roofbeams are cedars, our rafters firs” [1:16–17, in Bloch and Bloch]), but at other times the bodies of the lovers become the landscape, as in the above quoted passage in which the woman’s body is represented as an impossibly rich garden bursting with a superabundance of sights and scents, a babbling brook, and the taste of milk and honey. The mingling of the senses and the poetic identification of the lovers’ bodies with the surrounding landscape provide the metaphorical means of imagining a union between these two discontinuous beings. Bataille’s language of discontinuity and continuity is quite appropriate here: the woman is described as “an enclosed garden, a sealed spring”; yet she invites her lover to come into the garden, which, we are told, he does. Now, the Song of Songs is full of double entendres, and on one level the garden most certainly represents the woman’s sexuality, with her invitation being to the pleasures of carnal love. Yet the garden is also more than the woman’s sexuality, it is the woman herself, and the invitation is to more than the act of consummation. It is an invitation for her lover to become one with her, an invitation to, in the words of Bataille, “substitute for their discontinuity a miraculous continuity between two beings” (1986: 19). This longing for continuity is what drives the poetry of the Song of Songs, and it is expressed in both subtle and overt ways. For example, an implicit expression of continuity may be seen in the essential mutuality between the lovers that persists even in the choice of descriptive metaphor. Each of the lovers, not just the woman, is described in terms of beauty and tenderness: thus, both are said to have eyes like doves, both 328 Journal of the American Academy of Religion are associated with lilies, both evoke the grace of fawns and gazelles, and both have pretty hair and a sweet smell. But likewise, each, not just the man, is described in terms of power and strength: the woman being compared with towers and ramparts and said to be as daunting as a bannered army, whereas the man is said to be as strong as a cedar tree and to have thighs like marble pillars. One also finds more explicit expressions of this longing for continuity, as in the woman’s account of her desire in the first of two “night scenes”: In the night, lying in my bed, I sought the one I love; I sought, but did not find. I will get up, and go out in the city, into the streets and the squares. I will seek the one I love; I sought him, but did not find him. But the watchmen found me, as they patrolled the city. “Have you seen him,” I asked, “have you seen the one I love?” Scarcely had I passed them when I found the one I love. I held him tight and would not let go, until I brought him to my mother’s house, to the room where she conceived me. (3:1–4) Night after night the woman in her bed longs for her lover. Her longing drives her out of her house in the middle of the night to search incessantly for the object of her desire. When he is found she brings him into the place of ultimate safety and, one could say, ultimate identification: “I brought him to my mother’s house / the room where she conceived me.” This image of the lovers as having existed in the same womb of continuous being before the wresting apart into discontinuity, and of their desire to return to this state of continuity, is reinforced by the woman’s statement in another passage: “If only you were a brother who nursed at my mother’s breast! / I would kiss you in the streets and no one would scorn me” (8:1, in Bloch and Bloch). All is not, however, milk and honey and desire fulfilled in the Song of Songs; though many modern interpreters, understandably captivated by such a positive and egalitarian portrayal of sexuality, have portrayed it so. But the Song of Songs, like much of the world’s great love poetry, recognizes what Bataille has deemed “the anguish of desire” (1986: 19)—the precariousness wherein it exists, never quite fulfilled yet never quite de- Linafelt: Biblical Love Poetry (. . . and God) 329 nied. Thus, in one of the most compelling passages of the book one finds the counterpart to the woman’s first nighttime search for her lover: I slept, but my heart stayed awake. . . . Listen! My lover implores: “Open to me, my sister, my darling, my dove, my perfection. My head is wet with dew, my hair with the night’s mist.” But I have undressed myself; should I dress again? I have bathed my feet; should I get them dirty? My love reached in for the latch, and my heart beat wild. I got up to open to my love, my hands wet with myrrh, my fingers dripping myrrh on the handles of the lock. I opened to my love— but he was gone. I longed for his voice. I searched, but did not find him, I called, he did not answer. Then the watchmen found me, as they patrolled the city. They beat and bruised me. They stripped me of my shawl, they who guard the walls. So you must swear to me, daughters of Jerusalem: If you find my lover, you will tell him that I suffer for love. (5:2–8)4 As confident in the undeniableness of Eros as the earlier passage might have seemed, with its culmination in fulfillment and union, the book refuses to pretend that this is the inescapable end of desire; it refrains from telling us that this telos is inevitable. So now instead of the presence of the lover there is stark absence, and instead of the longed-for body of the lover there is a beating at the hands of the watchmen. (It is no accident that they are called “the watchmen of the walls,” they who guard boundaries and refuse Eros its power to overcome the discontinuity over which they stand guard.) 4 I have borrowed the line “and my heart beat wild” from Bloch and Bloch (83). 330 Journal of the American Academy of Religion Perhaps even more striking, though, is that the Song of Songs, again in anticipation of Bataille, recognizes that not only is desire at risk from the vicissitudes of the world (in this case the intrusion of the watchmen and, in chapter 8, the woman’s brothers) but that there is something intrinsic to desire itself that entails risk. Not only is there the risk that borders may be rigorously policed, there is the equal if opposite threat that borders may well be violated. As Bataille puts it, “What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners?—a violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?” (1986: 17). Or as the female voice in the Song of Songs puts it: Stamp me as a seal upon your heart, sear me upon your arm, for love is as strong as death, passion as harsh as the grave. Its sparks will spark a fire, an all-consuming blaze. (8:6)5 Though thoroughly rooted in the body, Eros transcends the confines of the body and takes on near-cosmic dimensions. The risk to discontinuity is immense, as a mere spark of desire threatens to become an uncontrollable blaze. The language of the body, elsewhere in the Song of Songs so positive, teeters here on the brink of obsession, as one lover demands to be stamped into the very being of the other and tattooed upon the other’s skin. This is serious continuity. And it perhaps comes as no surprise that here, at the poetry’s most intense moment of continuity and dissolution of borders, that love is matched with death. The passage represents a sort of crescendo in the book, offering for the first time a second-order reflection on the nature of love, even the metaphysics of love, rather than the first person declarations and descriptions that one encounters to this point. And yet we are still in the realm of lyrical poetry and not philosophy. Thus, it is important, I think, to resist two equal if opposite temptations in interpreting this text. The first temptation is to jump immediately to the “meaning” of the verse: What do we learn about love here? Why does the poet compare love with death and passion with the grave? As poetry, the passage cannot be simply reduced to its paraphrasable content. (As John O’Hara has noted, all love poetry in any case can be paraphrased as: “I need you, you need me, yum yum” [in Vendler: 14].)6 Unlike Plato’s Symposium, in which Socrates holds 5 The translation of 8:6 is my own, though the image of “searing” is borrowed from Marcia Falk. As my colleague Darlene Weaver suggests, one might add the alternative, “I need you, you don’t need me, boo hoo.” 6 Linafelt: Biblical Love Poetry (. . . and God) 331 forth with an account of the nature of Eros that is meant to demand the reader’s assent by its unshakeable logic, our passage makes its case for the nature of love in a different way. Its primary tools are not the tools of philosophy but the tools of Hebrew verse: metaphor, diction, alliteration, and assonance. It is worth reading out loud the statement on love as it sounds in the Hebrew: simeni kakhotam al-libbeka kakhotam al-zero’eka ki azzah kamavet ahavah qashah kishe’ol qinah reshapheyha rishpey esh shalhevetyah. (8:6)7 Undoubtedly the first answer to the question of why the poet compares love with death and passion with the grave must be “because it sounds good.” Yet we want also to avoid the second temptation of thinking that this answer is the only answer. If the poetry is not reducible to a paraphrasable content, neither is it reducible to ornamental flourish. The aesthetics of the poetry are, in fact, intimately related to its meaning. In this case, the hardness of passion is inseparable from the hardness of that alliterated /k/ sound: “kakhotam . . . kakhotam . . . ki azzah kamavet . . . qashah kishe’ol qinah.” And while that hardness gives way to the dancing and popping of sparks into flame in the repeated /r/s and /sh/s (and the single hard consonant /p/) of the phrase “reshapheyha rishpey esh,” those initial sparks and flames of desire quickly become, in the final phrase of the verse, “an all-consuming blaze.” Moreover, the basic structuring principles of biblical Hebrew verse lend themselves to the intensification of feeling that we find here and that conforms so well to the content of the passage. Biblical poetry makes great use of parallelism, in which an initial short line is matched with a second (and occasionally third) “parallel” line. As Adele Berlin has made clear, the phenomenon of parallelism is enormously complex, comprising grammatical aspects, lexical and semantic aspects, and phonological aspects. In Song of Songs 8:6, in fact, we find all of these aspects of parallelism represented—a situation that is very unusual in the poetry of the book, which tends to deviate from the norm of parallelism more than other biblical poetry—lending a certain emphatic gravitas to the lines. Semantic parallelism, or parallelism of meaning, has been the most easily identifiable form of biblical parallelism and has thus received the most attention. This attention often has taken the form of claiming that the parallel lines 7 This is a simple phonetic, rather than technical, transliteration of the Hebrew. 332 Journal of the American Academy of Religion are two ways of saying essentially the same thing. But as Alter has shown so well, the phenomenon is much more subtle than this formulation would suggest; the second line, which may seem to be saying the same thing in different words, often serves to intensify, specify, or make more concrete an image from the first line.8 The verse under consideration begins with what appear to be genuinely parallel or equivalent lines, “Stamp me as a seal upon your heart, / sear me upon your arm,” but the next couplet (“for love is as strong as death, / passion as harsh as the grave”) evinces the dynamic relationship identified by Alter, with the second term of each of the three syntactically matched pairs (love/passion, strong/harsh, death/grave) serving to intensify, specify, or concretize the first. The third couplet makes this intensification even more acute, with the move from sparks, to fire, to an allconsuming blaze. If one looks again at the transliterated Hebrew above, it is apparent that the final line of this third couplet consists of a single word, shalhevetyah. Given the equally weighted lines the precede it and the syntactical parallelism they manifest, this abbreviated final line pulls the reader up short, causing one to pause, to stumble, and thereby to dwell on the effect of that all-consuming blaze, love. That sense of being pulled up short for the sake of emphasis is bolstered by the occurrence here of a fragment of the divine name: -yah, the last syllable of the last word of the verse, is a shortened form of Israel’s personal name for God, Yahweh, and serves grammatically as an intensifying particle; it is what justifies the translation “an all-consuming blaze.” In a book that never directly mentions God, this particle of divinity—occurring as it does here at the moment the poetry chooses to make its most highfalutin statement on the nature of erotic love—can only add to the freightedness of the line. All this is brought to play in our verse simply (or not so simply) by the poetic form or technique of the passage: alliteration underscores the harshness of love; strict use of parallelism adds a heightened sense of formality and abstraction to the passage (signaling its status as a climax to the book) only to be abandoned at the moment the poetry finds its defining image for love, “an all-consuming blaze”; and diction adds a whiff of divinity to an otherwise thoroughly human love. Moreover, even when we move to explore the very large claim being made about love here— even, that is, when we ask about the “meaning” of the passage—because this is poetry we find a richly ambiguous text. In what does the hardness of passion consist? How do mere sparks burst into flame? And, most cen- 8 In addition to Alter’s The Art of Biblical Poetry, see James Kugel’s The Idea of Biblical Poetry and Adele Berlin’s The Dynamics of Biblical Parallelism. Linafelt: Biblical Love Poetry (. . . and God) 333 trally I think, how are we to understand the relationship between love and death? If this were Socrates comparing love and death, Plato would provide him with a foil, a philosophical inferior who would make some assumption about how love is like death (representing perhaps the reader’s own most likely position), only to be made to look foolish by the much wiser Socrates, who in the end would tell the reader how and why love is as strong as death. But with poetry the hard work of interpretation is left to us, and the question of what it means to say that “love is as strong as death” resists a definitive answer. To say that the poetry resists a definitive answer is not to say, however, that we are absolved of the work of interpretation. Quite the contrary, for the function of metaphor is to force the reader to explore the possibilities of meaning making that it provides.9 For example, though the verse does not say that “love is stronger than death,” it is possible to read it this way because any force that is as strong as death is a force capable of resisting death. To take the line this way would mean to affirm that love is somehow able to pull off the impossible act of defeating time and death. Such a theme is by no means foreign to love poetry, one of the more famous examples being the final lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (this is the sonnet that begins, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”): But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. For Shakespeare, love poetry itself is the means by which love is immortalized, so that as long as there exists one to read the poetry—as I am today 400 years later reading Shakespeare’s poem and some 2,400 years later reading the Song of Songs—love has defeated death. But it would seem to me that our verse makes a more vaunted claim, a claim along the lines of that in the sonnet “Love More Constant than Death” by the Spanish Renaissance poet Francisco de Quevedo: A soul which once imprisoned an entire God, veins that brought fuel to such flames, marrow that so gloriously burned: 9 My understanding of the dynamic nature of metaphor is largely indebted to the work of Paul Ricoeur (see especially 1976, 1981), as well as the very useful collection of chapters in Sacks. Ricoeur builds on the work of I. A. Richards, Max Black, and Monroe Beardsley. Of the many books that relate Ricoeur’s work on metaphor and hermeneutics to the theological task, that of David J. Bryant stands out. For an interesting and accessible treatment of metaphor in poetry, see Borges: 43–55. 334 Journal of the American Academy of Religion they’ll leave this body, but not its cares: ash they’ll be, yet still aware; they will be dust, but dust in love. (in Paz: 74) For Quevedo, the soul may abandon the body but not the love that was once rooted in that body. But it may also be that, instead of taking love to be a force of resistance against death, we are meant to understand love as actually being somehow like death. Thus, consider Ben Jonson’s poem “Love and Death”: Though I am young, and cannot tell Either what Death, or Love is well, Yet I have heard, they both beare darts, And both doe ayme at humane hearts: And then againe, I have beene told, Love wounds with heat, as Death with cold; So that I feare, they doe but bring Extreames to touch, and meane one thing. (407) The question remains, however, what is that “one thing” that both love and death mean? Is it that love, like death, makes all possessions and worldly concerns moot? Or that love, like death, is inevitable: it always gets its object? Or that love, like death, is fierce and unpredictable: it gets us all, but we never know when or where? Or that love, like death, is permanent: it gets us all, sometimes when we least expect it, and once it has us it never lets us go? Just as we do not have to choose between these possible ways (and there are no doubt others that we could think of) that love may be thought of as “as strong as death,” so too do we not have to choose between seeing love as a force of resistance against death (a force that survives or immortalizes the lovers) and love as a force like death (a force complicit in death’s dissolution of one’s being and identity). Love, and most especially erotic love, can be and perhaps must be understood as both. In this understanding, Eros is a fierce, unpredictable, and irresistible force for destruction; it is also a fierce, unpredictable, and irresistible force for life. The ancient Greek poet Sappho coined a word to describe this contradictory nature of Eros: glukupikron, “bittersweet.” Here is Anne Carson’s very literal translation of the relevant poetic fragment: “Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me / sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up” (3).10 Eros, for Sappho, is impossible to resist, by turns bitter and by turns sweet, 10 The fragment is number 130 in the standard edition of Sappho by Lobel and Page. The lines read in Greek as follows: “Eros d{ute m’ o lusimel{s donei / glukupikron amachanon orpeton.” In addition to Carson on Sappho, see further Williamson and, on the fragmentary nature of the poems, duBois. Linafelt: Biblical Love Poetry (. . . and God) 335 and sometimes both at once. The Song of Songs shows us in 8:6 that, like Sappho, it knows about the double-edged nature of Eros. And like Bataille, it knows that the fundamental dynamic of desire—the breaching of borders, the violation of one’s separate existence—is not so far from the fundamental fact of death. Eros has the power to leave us gasping, though it is not always clear if we are gasping for more or gasping for relief. II With all this talk of Eros, one needs reminding, perhaps, that this love poetry is in the Bible. Given that fact, we are justified in thinking about the poetry not only in the context of the history of love poetry, which I have mostly been doing so far, but also in the context of biblical literature and the history of biblical interpretation. In such a context, the character that is most conspicuously absent from all this is God. In fact, the Song of Songs is one of only two biblical books, along with Esther, that fails to mention God. The absence of the divine in the Song of Songs, combined with the presence of erotic descriptions of breasts, thighs, and belly buttons, has resulted in a sort of “vexed wonderment” on the part of religious interpreters throughout the century.11 The vexation comes from the problem of how to reconcile the frank sexuality and unabashed voluptuousness of the Song of Songs with the increasingly circumscribed religious notions of sexual morality. The wonderment comes from the realization that the eroticism of the Song of Songs offers an uncommonly compelling way of expressing the relationship between God and humanity. The Song of Songs quickly goes from being a source of embarrassment to religious authorities (an embarrassment reflected in the second-century report of Rabbi Akiva’s strictures against those who were “trilling the Song of Songs in the taverns”) to being a privileged fount of spiritual and theological wisdom (thus the same Rabbi Akiva could state that “the whole world was not worth the day on which Song of Songs was given to Israel, for while all scripture is holy, the Song of Songs is the holy of holies”).12 And Gregory the Great, the sixth-century Roman administrator and abbot-cumpope, introduces his commentary on the Song of Songs by declaring that the biblical book should not be “held in ridicule” because in it God “goes 11 I borrow the phrase “vexed wonderment” from Walter Brueggemann (private communication, 26 August 1989). 12 The first quote from Akiva is from the Mishnah (m. Yadayim 3:5), and the second is from the Tosefta (t. Sanhedrin 12:10). The phrase “holy of holies” (qodesh haqqodashim) occurs in the Bible (Exodus 26:33–34) as a designation of the innermost sanctum of the tabernacle, which is said to have housed the Ark of the Covenant and served as a concrete symbol of the presence of God. 336 Journal of the American Academy of Religion so far as to use the language of our shameful loves in order to set our heart on fire with a holy love” (218). For centuries, then, Jewish and Christian interpreters expended great interpretive energy in the service of allegorical interpretations whereby the two unmarried young lovers whose voices we find in the Song of Songs are transposed into ciphers for God and humanity. Thus, in traditional Jewish interpretation, Israel is cast as the female lover and God as the male lover. Collections of midrashic interpretations become virtual compendiums of homoeroticism, as the male heroes of Israel’s faith become the objects of God’s desire. One such interpretation of Song of Songs 4:7, “Every part of you is fair, my darling; there is no blemish in you,” reads: “This refers to our ancestor Jacob, for his bed was blameless before God and no flaw was found in it” (Shir ha-Shirim Rabbah 4:7, 1). When the biblical book has the male lover state that “your breasts are like two fawns / twins of a gazelle” (4:5), the midrash explains (from its thoroughly masculine perspective), “These are Moses and Aaron. Just as the breasts are the beauty and ornament of a woman, so Moses and Aaron are the beauty and ornament of Israel” (4:5, 1). Christian interpreters are no less imaginative as the human lovers of the biblical book are taken to refer variously to God and the church, or Christ and the individual soul, or even Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Commenting on the Vulgate translation of 1:1, which following the Greek of the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew reads, “Your breasts are more delightful than wine,” Gregory writes: “His breasts are the apostles, his breasts are all the Church’s evangelisers” (236). Modern biblical scholars have tended to pooh-pooh these allegorical interpretations, for they so obviously do violence to the literal sense of the text. But although it is true that such a mode of interpretation spiritualizes the Song of Songs, and thus tames its potentially subversive role in a Bible that has so often been taken as shoring up borders and fencing in sexuality, it is no less true, as Eilberg-Schwartz (164) has pointed out, that such interpretation eroticizes theological discourse, with potentially very radical results. With the stroke of an allegory, God becomes both an object and a subject of desire. And by dismissing the allegorical interpretation modern interpreters have forfeited the profound implications of eroticizing theological discourse. The question is not whether the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs was intended by the author or authors; it clearly was not. The question is, rather, why later interpreters found the erotic metaphor to be such a compelling way of talking about God. This eroticization of God talk may play out in various ways. In Jewish interpretation the allegorical approach becomes primarily a way of construing the history of God’s interactions with Israel. And while this may sometimes take the form of interpretations that seem silly to Linafelt: Biblical Love Poetry (. . . and God) 337 modern readers—such as Moses and Aaron as two female breasts—it has potentially more profound implications as well. For example, there is a midrashic interpretation of 8:6 that turns the verse into a manifesto of righteous martyrdom. The statement that “love is as strong as death” is taken to refer to “the love which the generation of destruction [that is, those who suffered and died during Roman persecution] bore” for God, citing as an intertext Psalm 44:23, “for Thy sake are we killed all the day.” And the statement that “jealousy is cruel as the grave” is taken to mean that “God will one day be greatly jealous for Zion,” citing as an intertext Zechariah 1:14, “Thus saith the Lord: I am jealous for Zion with a great jealousy.” In this case, the erotic metaphor is used as a form of theodicy: Israel remains faithful to the bond of love even to the point of death, while God appears to have repudiated it. But such is the power of love that God simply cannot get Israel out from under His skin; God’s jealousy for Israel ensures His return to relatedness. One sees the negative side of this jealousy in the prophetic biblical texts that play out the implications of the love relationship between God and Israel, especially in Hosea 1–3, Jeremiah 2–3, and Ezekiel 16 and 23. The pornographic violence of these texts is at times stunning: But she whored still more, remembering how in her youth she had played the whore in the land of Egypt; she lusted for concubinage with them, whose members were like those of asses and whose organs were like those of stallions. . . . I will direct My passion against you, and they [her former lovers] shall deal with you in fury: they shall cut off your nose and ears. . . . They shall treat you with hate, and they shall take away all you have toiled for, and leave you naked and bare; your naked whoredom, wantonness and harlotry will be exposed. (Ezek. 23:19–20, 25, 29; Jewish Publication Society Version) With the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs in Judaism one gets the flip side of the coin; all the passion and potential jealousy of love are present, but they are mobilized in a much more positive direction. In medieval Christendom one encounters the apparently incongruous fact of a centuries-long tradition of commentary on the Song of Songs carried on by monks and priests who had taken vows of chastity. The incongruity is more apparent than real, however, for the language of eroticism provided the most appropriate way of addressing certain pressing theological issues in medieval Christian theology and in monastic life. There is, for example, a problem in medieval theology with the very fact of creation. Having inherited a Neoplatonic worldview in which God is above all else unity, oneness, and perfection, the existence of creation as multiplicity and imperfection seemed contradictory to medieval theology; indeed, the existence of creation at all was a problem. The question 338 Journal of the American Academy of Religion of how God could have created an imperfect, or even simply a differentiated, creation gives way to the even more basic question of how there could have come into existence anything outside of God in the first place—how, in fact, there could even be an outside of God—if God is by definition completeness and perfection. In Neoplatonic philosophical theology one simply cannot imagine God being lonely and resorting to creation or God wondering what it might be like to be in relation to something else, for this would imply a lack (or at the least a differentiation) in the very godness of God. It is the dialectics of Eros that provides the key to working out this problem. For the philosophical paradox of oneness and differentiation is precisely at the heart of erotic love, whereby one experiences union with another while nevertheless remaining oneself. In eroticism the difference between oneness and differentiation is transcended: One does not cease being oneself even in becoming one with another; nor does the persistence of one’s “selfness” negate the continuity with the other. Thus, we have the paradox of God and creation, as expressed by the mystical theologian Pseudo-Dionysius, who writes in his treatise The Divine Names: “[God] is as it were, beguiled by goodness, by love [agape] and by yearning [eros] and is enticed away from his transcendent dwelling place and comes to abide within all things, and he does so by virtue of his supernatural and ecstatic capacity to remain, nevertheless, within himself ” (82). One need not, however, accept the philosophical presuppositions of Neoplatonism and the scholastic theology that it influences to appropriate the dialectics of Eros for religious purposes. The same tensions of “oneness with” and “otherness than,” of presence and absence, indeed, of longing and consummation, play out in at least two other ways in Christian interpretation of the Song of Songs. The first of these is in the realm of eschatology. How better to express the “now” and the “not yet” of God’s salvation then through the “now” of erotic fulfillment and the “not yet” of erotic longing? The medieval church saw itself situated precisely on that threshold between the promise that fulfills and the fulfillment that brings new promise. Or as Denys Turner describes it: “the sense of the christian way as that of a longing for that which cannot yet be, together with a sense that the presence is somehow already given in the longing itself” (87). This was especially the case for those living a monastic life, who saw themselves as more explicitly poised on the knife-edge between this world and the next. In commenting on the line from the Song of Songs, “the King has brought me into his cell,” Alain de Lille writes: “Just as a person who lives in a cell, as does a solitary hermit, is withdrawn from the clamour of the times, so is a person in heaven withdrawn from the turmoil of the world” (299–300). A third way that the eroticism of the Song of Songs plays out in medieval Christian interpretation is one that reaches beyond scholastic theol- Linafelt: Biblical Love Poetry (. . . and God) 339 ogy as well as beyond monastic eschatology: namely, the mystery of union between the individual soul and the divine. This way of allegorizing the Song of Songs is manifested especially in later medieval mystics, such as Denys the Carthusian (1402?–1471), Theresa of Avila (1515–1582), and John of the Cross (1542–1591). One hesitates even to call this tradition of interpretation “allegorical,” for it more or less takes wholesale the experience of Eros—its language, imagery, and emotional content, without watering these down a bit—and applies it to God. Denys the Carthusian writes that the divine bridegroom “is pleased to unite this poor diminished soul intimately to his unrivaled and infinite excellence . . . so that I may taste his sweetness, an unfathomable, limitless and measureless stream; so that I may rest in his most pure embrace, so that I may be carried away, transformed and absorbed into him and all enraptured, be plunged into the most joyful, vast ocean of his happiness” (435). Moreover, the mystics knew that desire is experienced most keenly in the tension between longing and consummation, that pure fulfillment equals the end of desire, and that suffering is part and parcel of Eros. So Denys structures his commentary as a dialogue between a voice of reason and temperance and the captivated soul, and immediately following the passage just quoted comes the protestation: “How can you have the presumption, the boldness even the least self-assurance to ask a kiss of him, of whom the heavens, the earth, the seas are all in awe, before whom the highest of the supreme spirits tremble, beneath whom bow the foundations of the globe?” (435). The soul’s reply is not unlike the reply of any lover in the anguish of separation from his or her beloved: “Why do you call me back from the sight of my bridegroom? Why do you hold me back from his embrace? Why do you turn me away from our converse? Why, in this affair that transcends all reason do you demand an explanation? Do you not know that the eagerness of love is not to be restrained by commonplace decencies?” (Denys: 436). It would be wrong, I think, to imagine that the truth of mystical experience of God were contained only in the soul’s response; rather, both voices are necessary: one voice claiming (rightly) the impossibility of union, the brute fact of discontinuity, and the other voice claiming (also rightly) that the impossible has become miraculously possible. Moreover, it is precisely the impossibility, the suffering of separation, that makes the possibility so sweet. As Denys writes: “Love, fretting at separation, compels me” (436). Compulsion depends on separation. Reading the Song of Songs as an account of a passionate love affair with God reached something of a zenith in the eighty-six (!) sermons on the book by Bernard of Clairvaux (1091?–1153). Jean Leclerq has argued that Bernard’s focus on the Song of Songs extends at least in part from 340 Journal of the American Academy of Religion his audience, monks who had been recruited after having lived many years outside of the monastery. Many of these men would have been previously married and were familiar with—indeed, perhaps had even written— secular love songs, and Bernard was appealing to the psychology of desire already well known to these new monks.13 Caroline Walker Bynum has taken Leclerq’s insights into the psychological efficacy of Bernard’s use of the Song of Songs and has argued that its real force is in the way it engages what his all-male audience would have seen as the feminine domain within each of them, the affectus as opposed to the masculine ratio.14 In any case, Bernard, like Denys the Carthusian, retains the sense of Eros as an incorrigible, irrational, and excessive force but makes more explicit the essential violence of that force. He also recognizes the intimate relationship between separation and compulsion. Thus, the opening lines of his comments on Song of Songs 3:3, “Have you seen him whom my soul loves,” from his Sermon 79, are as follows: O strong and burning love, O love urgent and impetuous, which does not allow me to think of anything but you, you reject all else, you spurn all else but yourself, you are contented only with yourself! You throw order into confusion, ignore moderation; you laugh at all considerations of fitness, reason, modesty and prudence, and tread them underfoot. All the Bride’s thoughts and words are full of nothing but your music and fragrance, so completely have you taken possession of her heart and tongue. (137) With Bernard we are not so far from Bataille, who writes that “intimacy is violence, and it is destruction, because it is not compatible with the positing of the separate individual” (1997: 214). For Bernard, too, to be drawn into an erotic affair with God is a violent act against the resistance of our fallen nature. One does not naturally and peacefully experience union with God but, rather, only through “tears, sighs, and moans.”15 The violation of borders and the threat such violation represents for human lovers do not simply evaporate with lovers of God. I think of the opening lines of Rainer Maria Rilke’s first Duino Elegy: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart: I would perish in that overwhelm13 See Leclerq’s “New Recruitment—New Psychology” (1979). See also Leclerq’s classic study of the monastic life more generally, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, and in that study his comments on Bernard’s sermons on the Song of Songs (1962: 104–109). 14 In addition to Bynum’s Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, see also Ann W. Astell’s The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages. 15 This is the case, perhaps, because Bernard refuses to scuttle the bodily basis of desire. As he writes in a letter, “Love must begin in us with the flesh, for that which is spiritual does not anticipate what is animal; on the contrary the spiritual comes only in second place” (in Kristeva: 398). Linafelt: Biblical Love Poetry (. . . and God) 341 ing existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we admire it so because it calmly disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible” (331).16 To paraphrase Bataille (1986: 19), what human lovers and the lovers of God desire alike is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity such a world can sustain. The shame is that we can finally sustain very little—the wonder is that we can sustain any at all. III It would seem, then, that Georges Bataille is mistaken in his insistence that it is only in carnal love that the lovers perceive themselves to be at risk. The risk exists not in the carnality of love but, rather, in the erotic nature of love—the two are intimately related but not coterminous; eroticism may begin with the carnal fact of sexuality, but it does not end there. Yet even if lovers of God are at risk, does this mean that God is also at risk? Bataille would seem to be on firmer ground here, as the allegorical interpretation has tended to downplay the effects of desire on God. That is, while divine Eros is said to be the cause of human desire for God, the reverse is rarely considered. Having inherited from Pseudo-Dionysius the notion that divine and human Eros are formally similar but qualitatively different, medieval allegorical interpreters try to delimit the flow of Eros so that God remains unmoved by human desire (see Turner: 143–144). But the effort seems ultimately in vain; God is introduced into the vicissitudes of erotic existence and is no longer “by definition” unrisked. As Bernard admits, “God desires us not only on account of his infinite love (as his only son who is in the Father’s bosom tells us, ‘My Father loves you’), but also for himself (as the prophet says, ‘I shall do this not for you but for myself’)” (Kristeva: 160). God desires the world, and God desires the world’s desire. I realize that it is just at this point that things begin to get interesting— at this point when we begin to imagine God as subject to the throes of desire—but it is at this point that I will stop and leave the implications of such imaginings to the reader. I begin this article by invoking Wallace Stevens’s line that “not to have is the beginning of desire” and by ruminating on the “having” that would represent the end of desire: lack and absence versus plenitude and presence. The theological question that remains is, Can we imagine God according to the former terms? I would not hazard to say that I know what God desires or even that God desires. But I would hazard to 16 I have modified the translation by Stephen Mitchell slightly with reference to the German text of the poem. 342 Journal of the American Academy of Religion say that something feels right about understanding the divine–human relationship in terms of the erotic. Erotic union is a “utopia”: a “no place” that exists nowhere except between two lovers and even then only fleetingly. But the memory of the experience pervades and transforms the rest of the world. What could be a more appropriate religious metaphor? In the end, of course, all we are talking about with the Song of Songs is love poetry. That is all. And so I finish with one final love poem, by Walter Benton, from his book This Is My Beloved (the title of which is a quote from the Song of Songs): Because hate is legislated . . . written into the primer and the testament, shot into our blood and brain like vaccine or vitamins Because our day is of time, of hours—and the clock-hand turns, closes the circle upon us: and black timeless night sucks us in like quicksand, receives us totally— without a raincheck or a parachute, a key to heaven or the last long look I need love more than ever now . . . I need your love, I need love more than hope or money, wisdom or a drink Because slow negative death withers the world—and only yes can turn the tide Because love has your face and body . . . and your hands are tender and your mouth is sweet—and God has made no other eyes like yours. (3) Or, to paraphrase, “I need you, you need me, yum yum.” All the rest is commentary. 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