From desire to mysticism: allegorical readings of the Song

For almost two thousand years the Song of Songs was read less as a poem of human love and more as an allegory of a spiritual relationship. This interpretation allowed the book to remain at the centre of Jewish and Christian religious life, and it gave rise to one of the richest commentary traditions in history, from the rabbis of antiquity to the Spanish mystics of the sixteenth century.

The Jewish interpretation

In Jewish tradition the beloved man was identified with God and the woman with the people of Israel. The Targum, the Aramaic paraphrase of the Song, turns the book into a sacred history running from the exodus from Egypt to the expectation of the Messiah, reading each image as an episode of the covenant. The link with Passover, when the book is read, reinforces this historical reading.

Medieval Jewish mysticism also returned to the Song. In the texts of the Kabbalah the union of the two lovers was interpreted as an image of the harmony between different aspects of the divine. Human desire was not denied, but transfigured into the symbol of a higher relationship, by a process shared by many religious traditions of East and West.

Origen and the Church Fathers

In early Christianity the decisive figure was Origen of Alexandria, who in the third century wrote a long commentary and several homilies on the Song. For him the bridegroom is the Logos, the divine Word, and the bride may be the Church or the individual soul. The text, Origen held, should be reserved for mature readers, able to go beyond the literal sense without stopping at bodily images.

Jerome translated two of Origen's homilies on the Song into Latin and helped spread his interpretation in the West. Gregory of Nyssa devoted fifteen homilies to the book, making it a guide to the soul's ascent towards God, an endless journey because the divine is inexhaustible. From then on the Song became a fixed part of the liturgy and of monastic spirituality, especially in the feasts dedicated to the Virgin.

Bernard of Clairvaux and bridal mysticism

The medieval summit of this tradition is the 86 Sermons on the Song of Songs by Bernard of Clairvaux, begun in 1135 and cut short by his death in 1153. Bernard did not manage to finish the commentary, which had only reached the beginning of the third chapter. The first sermons meditate on the kiss of the mouth with which the book opens, and the whole work explores the soul's love for the Word in language of extraordinary emotional intensity.

In sixteenth-century Spain John of the Cross composed the Spiritual Canticle, a mystical poem modelled on the biblical text, and accompanied it with a prose commentary. The Augustinian friar Luis de León instead translated the Song into Castilian: that version was among the reasons for the trial the Inquisition brought against him, which kept him in prison for several years, from 1572 to 1576.

The allegorical reading did not erase the literal sense, which modern exegesis has recovered by studying the text as the love poetry of ancient Israel. But without centuries of spiritual commentary the Song would hardly have become so important a source for European literature, which found in it a model for describing love as a total experience, physical and spiritual at once, able to speak of humanity and of God in the same words.