Introduction
What is sex, in the sense of sexual intercourse between two people?
Is it a biological function through which the human species reproduces itself? Is it a pleasurable pastime engaged in by consenting adults? Is it an act of genital intimacy restricted to married couples by moral and religious rules ?
Or is it much more than any of these? Could there be a mystical or even sacred dimension to sex that has been largely forgotten or overlooked in our modern world? Could it be that sexual longing, sexual ecstasy, has the potential to bring us closer to God?
Growing up as I did in the Ireland of the 1950s and 60s, I learnt early on that sex in virtually all its manifestations was frowned upon by society in general and the Roman Catholic Church in particular. There was one exception to the otherwise negative outlook on sexual activity. That was the marital bed. Indeed procreative sex was encouraged and both medical and religious authorities promoted frequent childbearing, even if it put the mother’s health at risk.1
It was only later that I learnt of a Catholic angle on sex that was not condemnatory; quite the opposite in fact. This perspective was to be found in the poetry of St. John of the Cross, in the autobiographical writings of his contemporary, St. Teresa of Ávila and, most spectacularly, in the Bible itself – the Song of Songs to be precise. Not only did these sources not reject sex as a shameful and sinful act, they portrayed it as a kind of gateway to God.2
So when I studied the history of early Christianity I decided to focus on the origins of the Church’s perspective on sex. I wanted to see if, and how, its two quite different attitudes to sex, the censorious and the celebratory, could be reconciled. This led me to an interesting man named Origen and the result was an essay I wrote in 2012.
I have trimmed and edited it to make it more readable for a general audience.
What do Origen’s writings on the Song of Songs reveal about his attitudes to sexuality? (2012)
There is general agreement that the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon as it is also known) was considered part of the Hebrew bible by the Jews, perhaps from the second century BC. Its place in the canon was confirmed in the 1st century AD when a leading rabbi is said to have described it as ‘the holiest of the holy’.3 The early Christian Church decided in the 2nd century to accept the entire Hebrew canon rather than risk dissension over individual books. However, the process by which an ostensibly secular text celebrating the joys of love-making was incorporated into sacred scripture at all is a question that has confounded scholars.
The preamble to the Song, in which authorship is attributed to King Solomon, is considered to have been a factor and the book is placed just after Solomon’s other supposed compositions, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Another theory is that the text may have been interpreted allegorically rather than literally by the compilers, and this would have made it acceptable to both Jews and Christians as a legitimate aspect of divine revelation. Whatever about the role of allegory in determining the Song’s biblical status, it became central to Christian understanding of the text right up to the modern era. Primary responsibility for this allegorical reading of the Song of Songs lies with a 3rd-century theologian and philosopher named Origen.
The precise details of Origen’s birth are uncertain, but he was probably born in Alexandria in Egypt around 185 AD. Alexandria was an important centre of Greek philosophical learning, and was home also to a vibrant Christian community of which Origen’s family were members. This cultural mix is reflected in the diversity of Origen’s education - his teachers included Ammonius Saccas, a renowned Platonist, as well as an unknown ‘Hebrew Master’ with whom Origen studied the Old Testament. Notwithstanding his eclectic background, Origen’s commitment to Christianity ran deep and he became a celebrated teacher and theologian, travelling around the eastern Mediterranean in response to requests for instruction from his co-religionists. He ended his days in what is now the Lebanon, where he died at the age of about 70.4
Origen wrote the 10 books of his Commentary on the Song of Songs over a number of years, starting in 240 AD.5 However, the prologue and the first three books alone survive, and even those are available only in a Latin translation made by Tyrannius Rufinus, a fourth-century theologian. Sadly, the original text of Origen’s two Homilies on the Song of Songs, written shortly after the Commentary, is also lost. What we have instead is a Latin translation made by Jerome, who was a contemporary of Rufinus. Notwithstanding these gaps in the sources, the translations of both Rufinus and Jerome are deemed by modern scholars to ‘provide us a sound apparatus for interpreting this most original interpreter of the Song’ and present to the reader ‘the genuine Origen’.6
In his writings on the subject, Origen constructed an allegorical interpretation of the biblical text in which the erotic interplay of the two lovers was transformed into a meditation on the human relationship with the divine. Origen did not invent this form of interpretation. Greek philosophers such as Plato used allegory to disguise the coarse behaviour of the gods as described in the writings of Homer. However, Origen’s is the earliest surviving allegorical reading of the Song of Songs and the most influential in terms of subsequent Christian interpretations.
For modern commentators, who almost unanimously read the Song as ‘an unequivocal celebration of male-female sexual love’, allegorists such as Origen employed their exegetical skills to ‘unsex… a ticking time bomb within Scripture itself, an occasion for sin just waiting to happen’.7 In short, Origen and his successors are accused of having engaged in mental gymnastics in order to render safe for its readers a plainly salacious text.
Origen’s own writings offer some support for this view. However, they also reveal that his perspective on the Song of Songs and on the role of human sexuality was more complex than a cursory reading might suggest.
The ideal of virginity was held in high regard within the eastern Mediterranean cultures from which Christianity developed. Zealous members of the new religion, like Origen, adopted this concept of lifelong celibacy, seeing it as ‘the mark of exceptional closeness to the Spirit of God’.8 On the other hand, Origen was well aware of the so-called ‘temptations of the flesh’. In his Homily on Genesis, he warned of the dangers faced by the celibate male: ‘… some women, for we do not censure all equally, but there are some who serve passion incessantly, like animals without any distinction, whom I would not even compare to the dumb beasts’.9 Given this apprehension about ‘occasions of sin’, why did Origen devote so much attention to a text featuring an assertive female who addresses her male lover with a plea to ‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth’? Was he, as the scholar quoted above claimed, attempting to ‘unsex’ the Song of Songs through allegory lest a literal reading lead its readers into unchaste thoughts?
To be sure, Origen anticipated this possibility. In his prologue to the Commentary, he warned anyone who had ‘not ceased to feel the passion of his bodily nature’ to keep away from both the Song itself and the Commentary.10 However, for those who had undergone a process of training and purification, it was possible to appreciate what Origen described as the ‘secret metaphors of love’ contained in the Song of Songs.11 Clearly, Origen was aiming his treatise at a select few who could penetrate the true meaning of the text.
For Origen, there were two types of Christian: the masses who could accept only literal teachings, and the smaller number of initiates who were capable of understanding certain ‘mystical doctrines’ hidden from the rest. Origen distinguished between exoteric and esoteric truths, the latter communicated privately only to those ready to receive them.
He offered the example of Pythagoras, who ‘taught in secret those doctrines which were not deemed fit to be communicated to profane and insufficiently prepared ears’.12 Referring to Mark 4:34, Origen pointed out that Jesus also was said to have ‘conversed with His disciples in private’ in terms that were not suitable for the generality of people, and consequently these teachings had not been preserved.13 It was to a likeminded and specially-trained ‘inner circle’ of Christians that Origen revealed what he perceived as the true meaning and purpose of the Song. In doing so did he, as those scholars cited above have asserted, employ allegory to de-eroticise the text? Or is it the case, as another writer has suggested, that this exegetical method ‘cannot adequately be explained as an exercise in pathological rejection of human sexuality’?14
It is evident from a reading of the Prologue to his Commentary, that the charge levelled against Origen of ‘unsexing’ the Song of Songs is misplaced. Far from playing down the erotic content of the Song, he actually revealed it more clearly. For instance, he pointed out that mild words like ‘charity’ and ‘affection’ were used in the text of the Song to signify the intense feelings of the woman towards her beloved. This, he argued, was ‘to avoid the danger of the mention of love becoming an occasion of falling for its readers’. Origen then paraphrased a passage in which the woman exclaimed that she had ‘been wounded by charity’, rendering it as ‘I have been smitten through with the dart of his “passionate love”’.15 This more highly charged language reflected a certain insight on Origen’s part into the nature of female sexual longing. Another example of this is to be found later in the Prologue when he described a woman ‘whose whole heart and soul and strength are on fire with passionate love’ for the object of her desire. For Origen, such an intensity of erotic feeling was perfectly natural:
Everyone who has reached the age that they call puberty loves something, either less rightly when he loves what he should not, or rightly and with profit when he loves what he should love.16
In writing about the Song of Songs, Origen does not seem to have been trying to persuade his readers to suppress their sexual urges. Instead he wanted them to redirect those feelings towards God. As one scholar has written, Origen believed that ‘physical pleasure was a stale and bland displacement of true feeling’. He viewed the world as a pale reflection of divine reality and it was only ‘the numbness of their spirits’ that prevented more people from perceiving the ‘sensuous delight’ of the ‘spiritual realm’.17 On the other hand, as Origen himself wrote, ‘he who has reached the peak of perfection will be delighted by the Word of God in all his senses’. Origen’s focus on the full sensory experience awaiting the spiritually advanced illustrates his understanding of the ‘divine meaning’ behind the erotic language of the Song.18 Clearly, he saw that meaning as more real, not less, than the joys to be found in physical love-making. As to exactly what Origen understood to be the ‘divine meaning’, we have a few brief glimpses.
On those rare occasions when he left allegory behind and wrote in the first person, Origen revealed a little of what the ‘secret metaphors of love’ meant to him. For instance, in his First Homily he echoed the female protagonist’s longing with a plea that he too would one day ‘be able to say what is written in this same book: “His left hand is under my head, and His right hand will embrace me”’.19 Further on, he described how he had ‘often perceived the Bridegroom (God) drawing near me and being most intensely present with me; then suddenly He has withdrawn and I could not find Him’.20
A modern commentator on Origen’s philosophy has referred to the Alexandrian’s belief in the ‘cosmic ascent of the soul’, a process that leads ultimately to the soul’s unification with God. According to this interpretation, the process is ‘symbolised by the marital eros of the bride and bridegroom in the Song of Songs’.21 In his First Homily, Origen appeared to be signalling his own stage on that journey to the summit of ecstatic union with God, a journey he had yet to finish. In pursuit of his ultimate goal Origen had redirected rather than repressed his sexuality, using the sensual language of the Song of Songs as his ‘roadmap’. By interpreting that ‘roadmap’ allegorically he hoped to guide those of his readers who were capable of making the same ‘cosmic ascent’ upon which he had embarked.
It is incorrect to regard Origen simply as a sexually-inhibited celibate who sought to detoxify a sacred text of its dangerous erotic content. On the contrary, Origen appreciated the potency of the sexual drive and saw it as the means by which the Christian mystic could embrace and be embraced by God. For him, the Song of Songs could lead those few, who had been shown the true meaning of sacred teaching, to the culmination of their spiritual quest.
Origen regarded celibacy, not as a means of rejecting his erotic feelings, but as a way of redirecting them toward the divine. This belief, while largely incomprehensible to the modern mind, points to the subtlety of Origen’s understanding of sexuality.
Diarmaid Ferriter, Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland (London 2009) pp 299-301.
See 1) “Song of the soul in intimate and communication with the love of God” in Roy Campbell (tr.), The Poems of St. John of the Cross (Glasgow 1983), pp 28-9, and 2) E. Allison Peers, (tr.), The complete works of Saint Teresa of Jesus (3 vols., London 1946), i, pp 192-3.
Ann W. Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1990), p. 1, fn.1. Marvin H. Pope, Song of songs: a new translation with introduction and commentary (New Haven, Conn., 2007), pp 18-9. Roland E. Murphy, The Song of Songs: a commentary on the Book of Canticles or the Song of Songs (Minneapolis, 1990), pp 5-6.
John A. McGuckin, The Westminster Handbook to Origen (Louisville, Ky., 2004), pp 1-24.
There was no single authoritative version of the Song of Songs available to Origen. According to Jerome, Origen drew upon several sources, including the Septuagint, the Alexandrian Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures which dates from 250 BC (see Origen, The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, trans. R.P. Lawson. London, 1957, fn. 3, p. 359).
J. Christopher King, Origen on the Song of Songs as the Spirit of Scripture (Oxford, 2005), p. 13. F. Barth, ‘Prediger und Zuhorer im Zeitalter des Origenes’, Aus Schrift und Geschichte, Festyschrift fur Orelli cited in Lawson, p. 6.
Stephen D. Moore, ‘The Song of Songs in the History of Sexuality’, Church History, Vol. 69, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 328-49.
Peter Brown, The body and society: men, women and sexual renunciation in early Christianity (New York, 1988), p. 66.
Origen, ‘Homily V on Genesis’, in Origen: Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, ed. Ronald E. Heine (Washington, 1982), p. 117.
Origen, Commentary: Prologue, in Lawson, p. 23.
Ibid., p. 44.
‘Origen against Celsus’, Book I, Ch. VII, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, iv, 399.
Ibid., iv, 575.
Murphy, The Song of Songs, p. 16.
Origen, Commentary: Prologue, in Lawson, pp 30-2.
Ibid., pp 36-7.
Brown, The body and society, pp 172-3.
Origen, Commentary: Book 1, in Lawson, p 79.
Origen, First Homily, in ibid., pp 270-1.
Ibid., p. 280.
Alan G. Paddle, ‘Mystical Thought’, in McGuckin, Westminster Handbook, pp 154-8.