NOTES for Sol 2:8-14

Throughout the history of both the Synagogue and the Church, the Song of Songs has been interpreted in very different ways. The bridegroom was seen as God or the Messiah, and the bride as God's people or the Church. Allegory became the basis for interpreting the Song of Songs. Of course, everyone understood that this was one of the most beautiful examples of love poetry, but hardly anyone would even entertain the thought that such poetry belonged in the Bible, especially in the Middle Ages. Nor was it much better in the modern era, particularly where strict Puritan traditions, with their sometimes excessive moralism, played a decisive role. For the moralist, if love is permissible at all, it can only be something lofty and disembodied. There must be nothing bodily in it, or such love will not please God.

Yet God commanded people to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ even before the Fall, apparently seeing nothing wrong with bodily love in itself. On one condition, admittedly: it must be part of the fullness of the relationship that binds the spouses to each other. And by no means the determining part. But there is nothing peculiar to this case: in God's design, the natural component was not meant to determine the quality of human life at all. That was to be determined by God's ‘breath of life’, which He breathes into the human being's nostrils at creation. Nature was to be merely one element of this life God gave to humanity.

An important element, but by no means the principal one. It is hardly surprising, then, that in God's design human nature was also meant to play a part in the beginning of a new human life. To play a part to precisely the same extent as it does in human life generally. No more and no less. But certainly not to dominate that life, determining it and overshadowing everything else.

If the relationship between a man and a woman is indeed like this, then it really can serve as a model for the relationship between a human being and God, between His people and Him, or between Christ and the Church. For love is one; its spiritual space is one. And if it is the spiritual component that proves decisive, then nature too ceases to be base. It can become base if it comes to dominate the lives of the two, turning them into animals.

Animals that they can never actually become, because God did not intend them to be such. And whose beauty, like their naturalness, will therefore remain beyond their reach. By allowing nature to triumph over the spirit, a person does not become an animal but a sinful human being. Yet the relationship as such is not to blame: it merely creates a space for communion. A space that can be filled with anything, from God's breath to animal impulses. And it is only what fills it that determines whether the relationship becomes an image of a brothel or a foreshadowing of the Kingdom.