Jesus Thoughts (23) : Song(s) of Songs

A quick follow-up : another facet of this riddle of gender & the Bible.  To proceed from what we said in #22 : if God's personhood includes a capability to act out gender roles & sexuality (as humans tend to do)... what further can we say?  Well, as is true with a lot of things, but maybe especially with eros & sexuality - once you start looking, you see it just about everywhere.

Sacred symbols of Sky-father and Earth-mother originated long before Biblical times, back in prehistory.  Many were the archaic cultures organized by religious concepts like this, centered on seasonal rituals of sacred "weddings" - hieros gamos - on hilltops and temple-tops.  This background can be heard also in the Bible - though Yahweh was also careful to emphasize his cosmic transcendence and invisibility, his difference from the other gods.

Yet the sexual dimension and the erotic imagery are there, in both Jewish & Christian texts.  Israel is the "spouse" of Yahweh; the Church is the "bride" of Christ; the (feminine) soul espouses Jesus through the Holy Spirit.  Jesus both reigns and is expected as the coming Bridegroom; the Song of Songs - Solomon's lyric paean to erotic desire and wedded bliss (to summarize reductively) - is a key book for both faiths.  I think of the erotic terms with which some of the saints, like St. Bonaventura, San Juan de la Cruz, or Teresa of Avila, expressed their "spiritual ravishment" in meditation. 

In fact if one looks at Christian doctrine and the sacrament of Eucharist in this light, one could say that, at least in traditional terms, the pre-existent, spermatic Logos - the Word, which spoken, generated all creation - becomes Man, and marries His Spouse, the Church (and the individual soul) : and out of this spiritual marriage are re-born into "new life" the offspring of this union - the spiritual children of God.  Thus, the bread & wine of the sacrament take on an almost Dionysian aspect, and the Church becomes the site of an ongoing, vital hieros gamos - a spiritual seduction, epithalamic and "fruitful" in every sense.

This whole view of things sounds less strange when we remember that the first story in the Bible - in Genesis, of Adam and Eve - is the story of Man's fall from grace through an abandonment of God, a forsaking of God through the temptation of the flesh.  The Song of Songs was attributed to King Solomon, "foremost in wisdom" : perhaps we can understand all this as part of the wise (unfathomable) providence of God.  Since men & women fell through Eros, then perhaps God's most effective means of redeeming them might be through the "erotics" of the Logos.

"Wise as serpents, innocent as doves."  This interpretation illustrates St. Paul's theme, that when Christ became Man, he plumbed the "heights & depths".  But I believe that Paul would also reiterate - along with the other fathers & mothers of the church - that it must be a part of God's wise providence to harness (by means of the "song" of scripture) human eros to the ends of agape and caritas : these more profound and universal forms of love.  For, as Jesus says, "unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of God."  Agape and caritas are the fire-tested foundation of that deeper communion, which transforms us, alchemically, from creatures of mere need and selfish desire into imago Dei - children of God - capable of radiating love, freedom & affection : a spiritual fire of pure, self-giving generosity.

Responding in part to Robert A.'s interesting post on public/private manners & mannerisms:

Here's a passage from an essay that TS Eliot published in The Egoist in 1919 (& never republished):

"This relation is a feeling of profound kinship, or rather a peculiar personal intimacy, with another, probably a dead author. It may overcome us suddenly, on first or after long acquaintance; it is certainly a crisis; and when a young writer is seized with a passion of this sort he may be changed, metamorphosed almost, within a few weeks even, from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a person...
...We may not be great lovers, but if we had a genuine affair with a real poet of any degree we have acquired a monitor to avert us when we are not in love... We do not imitate, we are changed; and our work is the work of the changed man; we have not borrowed, we have been quickened, and we become bearers of a tradition."

- this is quoted in Langdon Hammer's Hart Crane & Allen Tate, as part of his history of Crane/Tate/Eliot's ambiguous-subliminal erotic psychologies. Crane responded (as a gay man) to this early Eliot; Tate, on the other hand, to the reserved, impersonal, authoritative Eliot of "Tradition and the Individual Talent".

I post this to point to the contrast between this, on the one hand, and the informal, relaxed familiarity of the NY School approach (which RA describes). Poet-friendships, there, are not surrounded by an aura of ambiguity, romance & taboo.

This "demotic" attitude seems connected with the general relaxation (or vulgarization) of sexual mores : the taboos have broken down.

The idea that private name-dropping in poems, etc., impinges on the boundaries of traditional public speech is true in more ways than one.

I think it's possible to send private, personal messages & public messages - separately - in one and the same poem. The overuse of obviously private messages seems kind of slack, in a way. But it may also be a realistic acknowledgement of the limits of a poet's reach & impact. & it reflects, back to us, the quality of our own private lives.

Eliot's passage above, by the way, seems like a script for my own comically-representative experience (I mean Mandelstam's impact, & the "Shakespeare episode"). Shakespeare's ambiguously erotic & narcissistic sonnets literally knocked the wind out of me - & threw me back into the Biblical fold.

Oddly, Eliot here seems sane & healthy to me. He's talking about love, not "eros" or sex (hence his phrase, "we may not be great lovers" - funny). Love may involve passionate erotic energies, but it's not only that. Contemporary mores often simply reduce love to eros.