Homilies on the Song of Songs

Description

Gregory of Nyssa's fifteen homilies on the Song of Songs offer an important resource for the history of Christian biblical exegesis, as well as for the history of Christian ascetical and spiritual teaching, and stand alongside Origen's commentary on the Song as a source for the later interpretative tradition. In addition to offering the original text and first English translation of all fifteen homilies, Norris provides an analysis of the characteristic themes of Gregory's ascetical teaching, emphasizes its connection in his mind with the institution of baptism, and stresses the degree to which Gregory sees the teaching of the Song as addressed not to a special class of believers but to any and all Christians.

Sébastien wrote:

Quote # 2 in last email: I was quoting old Albert from memory, and did not get it exactly right:

“We have too many experiments we do not understand […] We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us”.

“It is the theory that decides what we can observe”.

About the last quote here: Very true in particle physics, where the craft consists, as it were, in seeing in the invisible—seeing theoretically , meaning beyond the pre-imposed boundaries of naturalistic constructs based on mere models (e.g. Standard Model of Particle Physics and its bogus last piece, the world famous “Higgs particle”).

It is for this reason, so I surmise, that he also said: “The truth of a theory is in your mind, not in your eyes […] In a certain sense, therefore, I hold true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed”.

To my view, it does not really matter that old Albert was recuperated by big bang dogmatists and mathematical crackerjacks. His own diehard mixed naturalism sure didn’t help preventing it. Yet his penetrative insights beyond the veil of positivistic thinking and dogmas in modern science set him apart philosophically. Too bad he probably never read St. Gregory of Nyssa…

At any rate, there is no doubt in my mind as to what he (old Albert) would have thought of CERN’s Promethean agenda. Apply to CERN and its LHC-based project of breaking through new energy limits this final quote of his:

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction”.**

“Where does St. Gregory discuss θεωρία?”

Especially 1) throughout his penetrating Life of Moses, wherein he insists on the epistemic contrast between two specific types of inquiries: ιστορία and θεωρία; and 2) in his Commentary on the Song of Songs, where he essentially dwells on the hermeneutic contrast obtaining between αλληγορία and θεωρία. Both texts are typologically very substantial and offer profound insights into the contemplating mind of a true exegetical genius. What’s also distinctive of St. Gregory’s overall approach is his ability to recognize the principles governing and correlating both the revealed text of Sacred Scripture and the universal order (visible and invisible) of creation.

As faith-related knowledge, theoria as conceived by St. Gregory is an ascending participation in divine Wisdom, coming to fruition in this life as quintessential intellectual vision of the mind considering (through understanding) the invisible causes underlying the work of divine creation—which is consistently echoed in St. Thomas’ definition of sapientia as higher understanding or consideration of the altissimas causas (ST , I-IIae, q. 57, a. 2).

I wrote, year(s) later:

By the way, I finally began reading St. Gregory of Nyssa's commentary on the Song of Songs , and I am absolutely astounded by it! I forgot that Song of Songs is one of the Wisdom books; the supreme one, it seems. The introduction—addressed to St. Olympias, who was a legendary titan of the virgin widows in the early Christian centuries (she was widowed in her 20s) and whose Life of Olympias was influential in convincing others to embrace the virginal state — summarizes well the semiotics , I would say, of St. Gregory: he likens the literal sense of Song of Songs to the paint on a canvas and says we should not be preoccupied with the different color pigments as we should be with what they signify. It's almost as if he considers Song of Songs a "poetic icon."

I thought I would be turned off by his Neoplatonic background, but his emphasis on intelligibility being immaterial reminds me of the 18th Thomistic thesis:

Immaterialitatem necessario sequitur intellectualitas , et ita quidem ut secundum gradus elongationis a materia, sint quoque gradus intellectualitatis. Adaequatum intellectionis obiectum est communiter ipsum ens; proprium vero intellectus humani in praesenti statu unionis, quidditatibus abstractis a conditionibus materialibus continetur.

John Deely (who has read St. Gregory) mentions in his semiotics works that the signs that signify better are those whose "sign-vehicles" (representamens) are more dissimilar to what they signify (cf. fn30 of this for a relevant quote from John of St. Thomas's Tractatus de Signis). This is precisely the point St. Gregory is making when he justifies the use of the extremely corporeal subject-matter of Song of Songs as a means for signifying its polar-opposite, for what is more opposed to immateriality than materiality?

I was surprised he uses the word ἔρως when not even LXX uses it here. Also, I never knew Origen attributed Proverbs to ethics, Ecclesiastes to physics, and the Song of Songs to "theoretics" (cf. p. 23 fn10 of the bilingual edition I'm reading); it seems related to the three ages of the spiritual life. Origen's attribution of Ecclesiastes to physics makes sense in the light of the explanations of St. Augustine and St. Thomas (S.T. II-II q. 9 a. 4) on why the beatitude "blessed are those who weep" corresponds to the Gift of Knowledge (scientiæ) of the physical world—and of its vanity, illusion.

It seems St. Gregory's having been married aided him with his insights into this mystical book of Wisdom. As St. Augustine (De Doctr. Christ. ii) said and the Roman Catechism reiterates, every sacrament is a sign of a spiritual reality. Of what spiritual reality is marriage the sign? Eph. 5:32 answers: "This is a great sacrament [sign]. but I speak in Christ and in his Church." Destroying the sign of matrimony thus leads to the destruction of the union of God with man, much like how destroying the human corpse with cremation leads to the destruction of the belief of bodily resurrection.

I think I understand why Song of Songs was traditionally the last book Dominicans (et al.) would commentate on their death-bed. Even the literal sense is very mysterious (what really is a kiss? loving embrace? conjugal union in a bridal chamber? etc.); but to reach the heights of understanding the spiritual, such an elevated instrument would indeed seem necessary.

Felix festum S. Luciæ Virginis et Martyris, qui dicebat "Caste et pie viventes templum sunt Spiritus sancti."

Reply:

St. Gregory of Nyssa offers many marvelous insights in to the intelligibility of some of the countless mysterious figurations (αλληγορίες & αναλογίες) that saturate Holy Scripture (especially the Song of Songs). He stands as a true exegetical model (one of my favorites) among the pre-schismatic Eastern theologians. “Neoplatonic” ideas do not over-dominate his spiritual theology of Scripture, despite the pervasive conceptual and linguistic tools he and others certainly borrow from the Platonic tradition—filtered essentially through Philo’s and Origen’s eyes (although St. Gregory’s philosophical outlook is on a number of points more Aristotelian than Platonic). Underneath it, I often find that the likes of St. Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor’s theoretic exegesis (the object of which is the spiritual sense) to be of the same mind as that of the mystical Scholastics (of the likes of St. Thomas and Bonaventure), notwithstanding the stylistic, linguistic, and methodologic differences.

As for the Song of Songs (שִׁיר הַשִּׁירִים , The Song which excels all songs = lit. Concatenation of the Concatenations), it is the supreme hidden jewel of biblical mysticism couched in the most exquisite original ancient Hebrew, LXX’s Greek, and St. Jerome’s Latin (the Hebrew title calls to mind the “Holy of Holies”). Its revealed text draws on a wealth of uncannily rich and veiled imagery to predominantly and prophetically speak about the Incarnation of the divine Λόγος hypostatically uniting Himself to our feeble, bride-like human nature—as He already does in deigning to be expressed in the corporeal/literal words of the Song of Songs (which therefore truly speaks to us of the most astonishing realities, using the language of outward yet somewhat cryptic representamen).

However, it appears that we are mostly unable to recognize it in our present, indeed severely wounded condition (the misery of modern scholarship, which is not ashamed to find fault with Scripture and bring it down to naturalistic platitudes, sadly illustrates this point time and again). Humility, the mother of discrimination (i.e. θεωρία) by which the intellect is first able to discern its own ignorance, as well as true devotion to God, have gone dramatically rarefied. Spiritual knowledge being primarily and essentially a gift of grace (i.e. not a matter of human learning), it is hardly a surprise that it would be so lacking in our prideful days of “scholarship” without God. Hence also the validity of the point you make about Origen’s correlation of Ecclesiastes with physics

“[…] in the light of the explanations of St. Augustine and St. Thomas (S.T , II-II q.9 a. 4) on why the beatitude "blessed are those who weep" corresponds to the Gift of Knowledge (scientiæ) of the physical world—and of its vanity, illusion.”

The three forms of knowledge you remarked may be “related to the three ages of the spiritual life” are also referred to as ethics, physics, and enoptics (= en -optics , εν-οπτική, which, like θεωρία, literally alludes to a kind of vision akin to the spiritual spectatio divina of the preternatural Adam placed in the Garden to “keep”/“contemplate” it, לְשָׁמְרָהּ).

The use of ἔρως in St. Gregory’s commentary is not so surprising, even in the absence of the term in LXX. The term has always implied (besides its primary connection to a certain sexual orientation of the concupiscible appetite) a non-carnal response of the soul’s intellect toward intelligible beauty mediated by way of signs in relation to αλήθεια, i.e. to truth unveiling /uncovering (αποκάλυψη) itself.

Certainly all the analogies drawing from the sacrament of marriage, its conjugal act and related gestures intended to express union and intimacy of two bodies and souls, are truly meant to convey something of the sublime destiny of both body and soul in relation to the divine Bridegroom they ultimately belong to. But they also are for us, in our present condition marked by the effects of original sin, deceptively fathomable (as the dire state we are in as a culture and society “marrying” anybody with whoever and/or whatever, and so with the pseudo “blessing” of a false church ‘sexhorting’ unrepentant sinners to “communion”, sorrowfully shows).

The Dominicans of old did know better (as did also the Cistercians) in their humility and corresponding discrimination. Therefore they did refrain from hastening into some careless and ultimately blasphemous ‘explanation’ of so mystical and unfathomable a Song.

We too may fruitfully ask Our Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Gabriel the Archangel, besides prayerfully meditating on the text of the Song of Songs with the help of interpreters of the likes of Origen, St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Bernard, to help us chastely contemplate the sublime mysteries hidden in that most sublime Canticle. And thus instructed, may we join in meditatively marveling at the glories of the hypostatic union of two natures in the Incarnation of God prophetically expressed therein.

O Virgo incarnationis, doce nos intelligere sanctarum aenigmata in canticis Verbi.

Are you referring to Song 5:2b ("Aperi mihi, soror mea, amica mea, columba mea, immaculata mea, quia caput meum plenum est rore, et cincinni mei guttis noctium."), upon which St. Gregory of Nyssa commentates:

τῷ μεγάλῳ Μωϋσῇ διὰ φωτὸς ἤρξατο ἡ τοῦ θεοῦ ἐπιφάνεια, μετὰ ταῦτα διὰ νεφέλης αὐτῷ ὁ θεὸς διαλέγεται, εἶτα ὑψηλότερος καὶ τελειότερος ἤδη γενόμενος ἐν γνόφῳ τὸν θεὸν βλέπει.

[the revelation of God to the great Moses began with light as its medium, but afterwards God spoke to him through the medium of a cloud, and when he had become more lifted up and more perfect, he saw God in darkness.]

?

The whole Canticle is itself a nocturnal revelation, talking in precise analogous hints of the Incarnation (which itself began in the night of the virginal womb at conception and throughout the nine months leading to Christmas Night), and especially of the wholly “fair dove” in whom the Word became flesh (the flesh connoting hidden revelation, as it/the flesh both reveals per its natural visibility, but also hides by clothing what is truly divine).

5:2 specifically talks about the “drops of the night/noctium /לָיְלָה” (LaYeLa), which is deeper than “vesperal,” in the sense that the latter is more downreaching into the darkness of more perfect divine revelation (as underscored by St. Gregory of Nyssa in that quote from his commentary you provided).

The other passage in found in 2:14:

“columba mea, in foraminibus petrae, in caverna maceriae, ostende mihi faciem tuam, sonet vox tua in auribus meis : vox enim tua dulcis /עָרֵב [AReV , lit. “vesperal”], et facies tua decora.”

The voice of “perfect” (= “fair one” → the unspotted one) and espoused human nature found in the “dove” is a revelation of Incarnate Wisdom itself assuming it. But it is hidden (in the flesh of the Incarnate God, circumtectus in sacramentum /mysterium as in in caverna), “in the clefts of the rock [= of unchanging truth], in the covert/סֵתֶר of the cliff [“cliff” = an opening → a revelation in the rock of immanent truth].”

The Hebrew word עָרֵב, translated in Latin by dulcis /“pleasing,” is a triconsonantal root, ערב, for the following words, primarily “vesperal” and “pleasing:”

ערב : “raven” (e.g. in Gen 8:6, corvum), “intermixed” (which is another feature of that which is vesperal, i.e. the mingling of light and darkness as the Sun sets), “making a wager.”

The “voice” of this hidden/vesperal revelation pointing to the Incarnation and the spotless Virgin in whom it is prophesied to take place is what the divine Spouse Himself yearns for:

“ /…/ ostende mihi faciem tuam, sonet vox tua in auribus meis : vox enim tua dulcis [Heb. “vesperal,” which partially hides], et facies tua decora [which by definition reveals].”

For, in 2:10, He already exclaimed:

“Surge, propera, amica mea, columba mea, formosa mea, et veni.”

Vox Spiritus esto inspiratio noster.