Review: With "the Kisses of the Mouth": Recent Works on the Song of Songs

Reviewed Work(s): The Song of Songs: A Commentary on the Book of Canticles or the
Song of Songs by Roland E. Murphy, O. Carm and S. Dean McBride,: Hermeneia. A
Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible by Roland E. Murphy and O. Carm:
The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity by E.
Ann Matter: The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages by Ann W. Astell
Review by: Bernard McGinn
Source: The Journal of Religion , Apr., 1992, Vol. 72, No. 2 (Apr., 1992), pp. 269-275
Published by: The University of Chicago Press

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 Review Article

With "the Kisses of the Mouth": Recent Works on the

Song of Songs*

Bernard McGinn / University of Chicago

The Song of Songs is arguably the most enigmatic book of the Hebrew
Bible. This is not for lack of commentaries or of influence. Indeed, the
Song was probably the most commented book of the Bible in the Christian
Middle Ages, and its role in Jewish thought has always been great. It was
by no means neglected in the Reformation-Luther wrote an important
explanation to demonstrate the insufficiencies of previous readers. One
could argue that it was only with the growth of modern Protestant "bibli-
cal theology" that the Song was relegated to a marginal position in biblical
research. The publication of three volumes devoted to the Song and the
history of its interpretation in 1990 argues that perhaps the Song of Songs
is ready to regain the central role it enjoyed in Jewish and Christian
thought for many centuries.
The enigma of the Song has many facets. From the viewpoint of its his-
torical origins and meaning, the Song resists interpretation both because
it is unlike any other book of the Hebrew Bible in the extraordinary frank-
ness of its use of erotic imagery and because it gives virtually no clue to its
dating and Sitz im Leben. (It also has a higher percentage of unique and
unusual terminology than any other book.) From the perspective of the
history of its use, both in Judaism and in Christianity, it presents the clear-
est example of a book whose traditional interpretation (i.e., as a spiritual
allegory of the love of God and humans, collectively and individually con-
ceived) is largely rejected as fanciful by most modern historical-critical
scholarship. With regard to many biblical books, the disputes revolve
around issues of detail, major or minor; in reading the Song of Songs, the
divergences often begin at first premises.
The appearance of two books devoted to the influence of the Song on

* Roland E. Murphy, O. Carm., The Song of Songs: A Commentary on the Book of Canticles or the
Song of Songs, ed. S. Dean McBride, Jr., Hermeneia-a Critical and Historical Commentary on the
Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), xxii+237 pp., $21.95; E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My
Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva-
nia Press, 1990), xxxv+227 pp., $29.95; Ann W. Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages
(Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), xi+193 pp., $27.95.
?1 992 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-4189/92/7202-0006$0 1.00

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The Journal of Religion
medieval culture in the same year gives some indication of growing recog-
nition of the importance of the Song in Western history and culture. But
modern accounts of the historical influence of the Song depend on, or at
least presuppose, some sense of what the Song of Songs originally meant
in its Jewish context. Hence, the appearance of Roland Murphy's excel-
lent commentary is an important event for all students of the book,
whether biblical scholars or not. I cannot pretend to give an expert opin-
ion on the linguistic and exegetical details of Murphy's work, but I would
like to begin this review article with some remarks on what Murphy's com-
mentary contributes to the overall study of the Song, primarily from the
perspective of the history of interpretation.
English-speaking historians, theologians, and literary scholars who have
needed up-to-date biblical criticism on the Song in recent years have gen-
erally turned to Marvin Pope's massive commentary in the Anchor Bible
series.' Anyone who has ever looked into Pope's commentary will appreci-
ate the vast store of information it contains, but there are several prob-
lems that confront the user of this commentary. The most obvious to
those interested in the history of the interpretation of the text is Pope's
total lack of sympathy with the traditional spiritual readings of the Song.
Despite the relatively large discussion given to the history of exegesis (pp.
89-229), Pope's negative attitude often skews his presentation to the
point of travesty (e.g., the remarks on Bernard of Clairvaux on pp. 123-
24). The second major issue is Pope's idiosyncratic adaptation of the
cultic-mythological interpretation of the text. Granted the importance of
this view in modern scholarship, even the outsider can wonder if the
details of Pope's presentation do not seem excessive and often not really
to the point.2
In comparison with Pope's work, Roland Murphy's commentary has the
advantages of greater conciseness, wider sympathy with different forms of
exegesis, and (at least to this outsider) a more convincing argument. Given
the growing interest in the study of the Song and its influence, the book
should form a necessary starting point, even for those who might not
share its interpretive perspective. What is most striking about Murphy's
presentation is its humaneness and balance-his willingness to admit the
value in the wide variety of readings of the Song, while still being willing
to defend the priority of the book as fundamentally "a theology of human
sexuality" (p. 101).
Murphy's extensive introduction surveys issues of authorship, date, and

i Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor
Bible Series, vol. 7C (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977).
2 See, e.g., the emphasis on cultic funeral rites (pp. 210-28) and the material on the "black god-
dess" on pp. 307-18.

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 Song of Songs
canonicity and gives a sympathetic, if necessarily incomplete, review of the
history of interpretation (pp. 11-41) as well as of the background of love
poetry in Egypt and in cuneiform texts.3 But the major contribution for
the general scholar lies in his treatment of the structure, style, and theo-
logical meaning of the Song (pp. 57-105). Murphy sees the Song, not as a
drama, but rather as an anthology of love poems basically composed by a
single author, possibly a woman (see pp. 70, 91) since the woman's per-
spective on the erotic relation predominates.4 He identifies three basic
interpretive options: (1) modern versions of the traditional view that the
Song is really about the marriage of God and his community, that is, Israel
or the Church; (2) the cultic-mythological view that became popular in the
last century; and (3) what he calls the "Eros and Wisdom" approach of
such authors as Jean-Paul Audet and Daniel Lys. His own approach
(detailed on pp. 100-105) is a variant on the last.
Although Murphy wishes to see the Song of Songs as basically a praise
of the goodness of human eroticism within the perspective of the ancient
Jewish notion of creation (a view not unlike that of Karl Barth, as he
notes), he also tries to maintain at least a point of contact with the long-
standing tradition of spiritual interpretation of the Song. He finds this in
the climactic verse of Song 8:6, whose last part he translates as, "Its [i.e.,
love's] shafts are shafts of fire, flames of Yah [i.e., Yahweh]."5 On this
basis, he claims "that the varied dimensions of human love described in
the Song ... can be understood, mutatis mutandis, as reflective of God's
love" (p. 104).
Biblical scholars will have to judge the validity of this possible connec-
tion, but, from the point of view of the theological meaning of the text, I
would argue that the spiritual interpretation is not just a possible, but even
a necessary, part of the whole picture. Exegetical meaning, by itself, must
depend on stringent historical-critical criteria, according to which, as
Murphy notes (p. 94), current biblical scholarship has been "unable to
establish an objective exegetical basis for decoding the Song along the

3 On the parallels with Egyptian love poetry, Murphy makes considerable use of the excel-
lent work of Michael V. Fox, The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), a book to be recommended to any student of the Song of
Songs.
4 The woman's perspective in the Song of Songs has also been emphasized by Julia Kristeva in
her insightful essay, "A Holy Madness: She and He," in Tales of Love (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1987), pp. 38-100. Murphy does not cite this important paper.
5 See the argument for this reading on pp. 191-92 and 196-98. It is interesting to compare
other recent versions with this rendering. Pope, in Song ofSongs, pp. 653, 670-71, translates it as
"Its darts are darts of fire, Its flames ... ," refusing to reconstruct what he regards as a proble-
matic text. Fox, pp. 167, 170-71, takes it (as many authorities do) as an intensive: "Its darts are
darts of fire-lightning (itself)!" Fox also cautions against hanging "too much theological weight
on this very uncertain reference to God" (p. 171).

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 The Journal of Religion
lines of patristic and medieval Christian exposition." But theological
meaning, insofar as theology remains in some way a discipline that grows
out of and serves a believing community, cannot neglect the history of the
use of the book by the community as an integral part of its datum. From
this perspective, the real theological task presented by renewed attention
to the Song of Songs is to try to work out the lines of connection (and also
the perhaps inevitable tensions) between the ancient spiritual readings of
Jews and Christians and contemporary attention to the celebration of
human eroticism uncovered by biblical scholarship. Murphy's book and
some other recent works have begun this task,6 but much remains to be
done.
The books of E. Ann Matter and Ann W. Astell are contributions to the
history of this interaction between divine and human eros modeled in the
Song of Songs. Though these surveys overlap in many particulars, the
materials are so rich and the interpretive viewpoints adopted by the
authors so varied that the two books present quite different messages.
Ann Matter's The Voice of the Beloved has a broader focus and a more suc-
cessful outcome, so I shall begin with it.
Matter's main concern is to provide an introduction, more literary than
theological, to the medieval commentaries on the Song (a handy appendix
lists over sixty commentaries prior to A.D. 1200). Building on the still
indispensable works of Friedrich Ohly and Helmut Riedlinger, which
gave detailed surveys of many of the medieval commentaries,' she takes a
new perspective-the development of Song of Songs commentaries as a
distinct subgenre defined as an attempt to absorb, elaborate, and trans-
form the primary genre (the biblical text) in the service of medieval cul-
ture. In answer to modern readers (e.g., Marvin Pope) who often see these
commentaries as a series of endless repetitions on the same themes, Mat-
ter shows how the internal transformations of the genre turned it into a
"metacritical genre" that affords a key to many other literary forms. Such
a broad agenda means that Matter's book is often more useful for setting
out issues than for giving careful textual analysis, and this introduces con-
siderable unevenness into the presentation. The Voice of the Beloved is best
in reviving some of the neglected, but still important, byways of Song of
Songs exegesis than in giving any new insight into the major contributors.
Thus, the chapter on Origen is remarkably skimpy in its actual attention

6 See, e.g., Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric ofSexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978).
7 Friedrich Ohly, Hohelied-Studien: Grundziyge einer Geschichte der Hoheliedauslegung des
Abendlaindes bis um 1200 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1958); and Helmut Riedlinger, Die
Makellosigkeit der Kirche in den lateinischen Hoheliedkommentaren des Mittelalters, Beitraige zur
Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters 38.3 (Miinster: Aschendorff, 1958).

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 Song of Songs
to the principles and practices of the great Alexandrian.8 Also disappoint-
ing is chapter 5, "The Marriage of the Soul," in which the mystical treat-
ments of the Cistericians and Victorines are surveyed. Matter's attention
to the Victorine Eulogium sponsi de sponsa is welcome, but the bland treat-
ments of Bernard of Clairvaux and William of Saint Thierry leave one
wondering why they were so influential. Chapter 4, dealing with the
ecclesial interpretations, is more successful, as is chapter 6 on the
Mariological commentaries. One of the few places where Matter actually
engages a text, rather than generalizing about it, is in chapter 3 where she
provides a detailed analysis of Honorius Augustodunensis's Expositio (pp.
58-76) as an example of thoroughgoing allegory. One can only wish that
there had been more of this. In short, for a careful and insightful reading
of most medieval commentaries, especially the mystical ones, readers will
still profit more from Ohly and Riedlinger; however, Matter's work sets a
helpful framework in terms of the recognition of the commentaries as a
specific genre, a viewpoint especially evident in her final chapter that stud-
ies the way in which the "metacritical genre" of the Song of Songs com-
mentaries influenced three kinds of vernacular literature in the later
Middle Ages. She concludes, "as the commentary genre continually
refined itself in relation to both internal and external stimuli, it became
ever more complicated" (p. 201). Anyone who studies the history of the
Song of Songs can only say "amen" to that!
Ann Astell's book is somewhat narrower in scope than Matter's work,
dealing primarily with the twelfth-century commentators (chs. 2-3) and
the influence they had on Middle English literature, which is covered in
chapters 4-7 (dealing respectively with Richard Rolle, the Pearl, religious
love lyrics, and late medieval biblical drama). The first chapter studies
Origen, setting up a series of strong oppositions between his mode of exe-
gesis and that found in the twelfth-century commentators. It also
advances a Jungian theoretical framework for the investigation of later
medieval uses of the Song, arguing that they can be understood as
attempts to integrate the male and female aspects of the human persona
through their respective emphases on one or another of the four Jungian
female archetypes. Astell's provocative work, at least insofar as it rests on
these two premises, seems to me to be wrong. I would argue that the con-
trasts between Origen and the twelfth-century students of the Song of
Songs are not supported by the texts and that the Jungian hypothesis is a
dubious tool, one whose criteria for success are never made clear.

8 Indicative of this is the fact that Matter spends as much time discussing four modern views of
Origen as she does his text. She also neglects what is far and away the best modern interpretation
of Origen's Song of Songs exegesis, that found in KarenJo Torjesen, Hermeneutical Procedure and
Theological Method in Origen's Exegesis (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986).

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The Journal of Religion
On the basis of a few citations from the prologue to Origen's commen-
tary on the Song, and without any attention to the actual procedures of his
exegesis (so well laid out by K. Torjesen, whom Astell never cites), The
Song of Songs in the Middle Ages presents a picture of Origen's exegesis that
will be scarcely recognizable to anyone who has ever read him. This is
unfortunate, because so often in later parts of the book the author shows
herself to be a sensitive and at times original reader. To be specific about a
few of the misreadings, despite what Astell claims both in chapter I and in
the epilogue (pp. 177-80), Origen paid more not less attention to the
literal sense of the Song than his twelfth-century successors, though the
latter may have had a somewhat different sense of what constituted the
"letter."' It is even less correct to slight Origen's interest in the personal
appropriation of the Song, its moral, or tropological sense (see Astell, pp.
8-10, 22, 178-79), in favor of the later expositors. The whole purpose of
Origen's exegesis was aimed at personal transformation. Finally, both
Origen and the twelfth-century writers used anthropologies based on the
matter-spirit distinction, which introduced significant tensions as they
tried to deal with the bodily erotic images of the Song of Songs. Since both
Origen and the medieval commentators were nondualists-Christians
who believed that God had created the body and the material universe-
they tried to bridge the gap between matter and spirit, between bodily
eros and its spiritual archetype, in various ways. Among the most notable
of the exegetical tools used in this transformative process, especially with
regard to the interpretation of the Song of Songs, was the notion of the
"spiritual senses" first advanced by Origen and used by all subsequent
commentators on the Song. (The role of this central exegetical tool is not
noticed by Matter or Astell.) My point is not that Origen and the twelfth-
century exegetes said the same things about the Song, but that their dif-
ferences are not those that Astell imagines.
The second pole of the thesis of Astell's The Song of Songs in the Middle
Ages is the Jungian typology adopted to explain the contribution of the
twelfth-century commentators and the literary works influenced by them.
Astell argues that the Victorine commentaries present the soul under the
archetype of the Medial Woman, the Cistercian commentaries as the
Hetaira, the ecclesial commentaries (such as that of Bruno of Segni) as the
Virgin, and the Marian commentaries as the Mother (see Rupert of Deutz
and Alan of Lille). In studying Astell's application of these archetypes to
the commentaries, this reader (no Jungian) was alternately intrigued and
mystified. My intrigue was provoked by those places where the author
advanced readings that were original and even plausible (e.g., her reflec-

SMurphy, pp. 17-18, provides a good corrective to Astell here.

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 Song of Songs
tions on Bernard's transitions from the masculine to the feminine voice on
pp. 94-95); my mystification came from trying to determine whether
these insights were the products of the Jungian theoretical perspective or
whether they could have been arrived at independently and subsequently
incorporated into it. These doubts were underlined by my increasing in-
ability to see on what grounds one feminine archetype had been preferred
to another as the identifying "character" of a particular commentary,
when even on the basis of the evidence presented other archetypes
seemed to be equally present (e.g., see the discussion of the Marian-
Mother type in chap. 2, where many of the texts seem to be of the Bridal-
Hetaira type). I grew even more suspicious as many of the claims made
(e.g., the author's identification of an ascent-descent-ascent paradigm as
central to Bernard's Sermones in Cantica) seemed to have no real founda-
tion in the text. Non-Jungians will always be left wondering why these
Jungian analyses tell them more about Jung than about the matter under
investigation.
These two quite different books, however we may wish to evaluate their
success, are signs of a renewed interest in the Song of Songs and its
immense influence in Jewish and Christian history, an influence that at
least in the later Middle Ages had important ramifications in picture as
well as in word.'" Recent appreciation of the true human eroticism of the
Song of Songs-surely to be ranked with the greatest love poetry of any
culture-needs to take a new look at the centuries of "spiritual," but no
less erotic, understandings of the Song of Songs both in Judaism and in
Christianity to try to gain a deeper appreciation of these inspiring "kisses
of the mouth."

10 See the recently published work of Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Rothschild Canticles: Art and
Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1990), which studies a magnificent early fourteenth-century manuscript containing striking illu-
minations of the Song of Songs among other motifs.

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