The Homilies on the Song of Songs

St. Gregory of Nyssa’s fifteen Homilies on the Song of Songs (In Canticum Canticorum), like the Life of Moses a work of his last years, read the Song of Solomon as the drama of the soul’s bridal ascent to God. The bride is the soul (and the Church), perpetually wounded by the “arrow” of divine love and forever pursuing a Bridegroom who is always one step ahead — a mysticism of insatiable desire that is the affective counterpart of the intellectual ascent of Moses. The prologue mounts a celebrated defense of spiritual, allegorical exegesis, standing in Origen’s line while quietly correcting him.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Fifteen Homilies

The In Canticum Canticorum is a series of fifteen homilies preached or composed for Olympias, a noble deaconess of Constantinople, and reaches only as far as Song of Songs 6:9 — Gregory did not, or did not live to, complete the book (PG 44:755–1120; GNO VI, ed. Hermann Langerbeck, 1960). Like the Life of Moses, it belongs to the very last phase of his life, and the two works are best read together: the same doctrine of unending ascent appears here in the register of love rather than of knowledge, of the bride rather than of the lawgiver.

Where the Life of Moses moves through the imagery of mountain, cloud, and darkness, the Homilies move through the imagery of the wedding chamber, the garden, the kiss, the wound, and the night search of the bride for her beloved. The progression is cumulative: each verse of the Song marks a further stage in the soul’s purification and ascent, so that the fifteen homilies together compose a continuous itinerary from the first stirring of desire (“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” Song 1:2) toward an ever-deeper, never-completed union (Norris, Homilies on the Song of Songs, introduction).

The Bride as the Soul and the Church

Gregory reads the bride of the Song on two registers at once. Most often the bride is the individual soul rising toward God, conformed to him by love and stripped of every earthly attachment. But the bride is also the Church, the corporate body espoused to Christ, and at the deepest level the bride is human nature itself restored to the divine likeness (In Canticum Canticorum, Homily 1; Homily 8). These readings are not in competition: what is true of the Church’s union with Christ is true of each soul, because each soul is a member of the bride.

The Bridegroom throughout is the divine Word, Christ. The erotic language of the Song — the kisses, the embraces, the bodily beauty of the lovers — Gregory does not suppress but transposes: physical eros becomes the figure of the soul’s agapē and erōs for God, the highest and most ardent form of the soul’s movement toward the Good. Far from being embarrassed by the Song’s sensuality, Gregory makes it the very point: only the most intense human passion is adequate as an image of the soul’s longing for God (In Canticum Canticorum, prologue; Homily 1). He insists that the soul’s love must become as total, as exclusive, and as consuming as the bride’s love for her bridegroom.

The Ascent of the Soul and Perpetual Desire

The structural principle of the Homilies is the same as that of the Life of Moses: epektasis, the endless straining forward of Philippians 3:13. The bride never reaches a final rest; each consummation opens onto a further pursuit. Gregory’s recurring formula is that the soul moves “from glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18) and “from beginning to beginning by beginnings that never cease” — every attainment is only a fresh starting-point, because the infinite God can never be exhausted (In Canticum Canticorum, Homily 8; cf. Homily 5).

The decisive image is the ever-fleeing Bridegroom. In the night scenes of the Song, the bride seeks her beloved, finds him, holds him — and he slips away, drawing her onward into the next stage of the search (Song 3:1–4; 5:2–6). Gregory reads this flight not as the Bridegroom’s cruelty but as his pedagogy of love: he withdraws precisely in order to enlarge the bride’s desire, leading her ever higher by always remaining just beyond her grasp (In Canticum Canticorum, Homily 6; Homily 12). To “possess” God fully would be to circumscribe the infinite, which is impossible; so the soul’s union with God is real but never final, an embrace that is also a pursuit. The flight of the Bridegroom is the erotic equivalent of Moses seeing only God’s “back” — both are images of a love that follows endlessly because its object is infinite (see The Life of Moses).

The Wound of the Arrow of Love

If the Life of Moses culminates in the luminous darkness, the Homilies culminate in the wound of love. Gregory takes up the bride’s cry, “I am wounded with love” (Song 2:5, LXX), and develops it into one of the most influential images in the history of Christian mysticism. The soul that loves God is pierced by an arrow — and the archer is God himself, or rather Christ the chosen arrow dipped in the Spirit, shot by the Father into the bride’s heart (In Canticum Canticorum, Homily 4, on Song 2:5; cf. Homily 13).

The paradox of the wound is the paradox of epektasis made affective. The arrow inflicts a wound that does not heal but deepens; the more the soul is pierced, the more it desires to be pierced again. Gregory describes the bride as glorying in her wound, naming the sweetness of the hurt, because the wound is the love, and a love that could be satisfied and quieted would be a lesser love (In Canticum Canticorum, Homily 4). The soul does not seek to be cured of its longing but to have it intensified without end. This is insatiable desire (epithymia akorestos) raised to a principle: holiness is not the extinction of desire (the older Stoic-philosophical ideal of apatheia) but its infinite purification and expansion toward God.

This is the precise affective counterpart of the intellectual doctrine in the Life of Moses. There the mind discovers that to know God is to know that he exceeds all knowledge; here the heart discovers that to love God is to long for him without ever being filled. In both, the experience of the infinite is an experience of un-satisfaction that is paradoxically the deepest satisfaction — “satisfied,” as Gregory says of Moses, “by the very things which leave the desire unsatisfied.” The arrow of love and the divine darkness are two names for one truth about the infinite God.

The Prologue: A Defense of Spiritual Exegesis

The Homilies open with a substantial prologue that is one of the most important early defenses of allegorical, or “spiritual,” interpretation of Scripture. Gregory writes it because the literal sense of the Song — a frank love poem — had troubled some readers, and because allegorical method itself was contested. He argues that the inspired text has a meaning beyond its surface, and that the interpreter who passes through the letter to the “more divine sense” (theōria) is doing not violence to Scripture but obedience to it (In Canticum Canticorum, prologue; GNO VI:3–13).

Gregory is careful about terms. He is willing to call his method “anagogy” or “spiritual contemplation” (theōria) rather than insist on the word “allegory,” precisely to avoid the charge that he is imposing arbitrary meanings; the point, he says, is to find the sense that builds up virtue and leads the soul toward God, the sense the Spirit intended (In Canticum Canticorum, prologue). The criterion is edification and conformity to the rule of faith: a spiritual reading is legitimate when it yields the truth the whole of Scripture teaches, not when it indulges the interpreter’s ingenuity.

Continuity and Difference with Origen

The prologue places Gregory consciously in the line of Origen, whose great Commentary on the Song of Songs was the founding work of this tradition and whom Gregory openly honors (Daniélou, From Glory to Glory, 1961; Norris, introduction). Like Origen, Gregory reads the Song as the marriage of the soul (and the Church) to the Word, and like Origen he defends the spiritual sense against a flat literalism. To read Gregory’s Homilies is to stand within the Origenist exegetical inheritance.

Yet Gregory writes after Origen had become controversial, and he both receives and corrects him. The differences are real. Where Origen tends toward a tripartite anthropology and a more Platonizing scheme of the soul’s pre-existence and return, Gregory grounds the ascent in his own doctrines of divine infinity and epektasis, so that the soul’s journey has no pre-existent fall behind it and no final terminus before it — it is endless ascent into the infinite, not return to a prior state (Daniélou, Platonisme et théologie mystique, 1944; Laird, Gregory of Nyssa and the Grasp of Faith, 2004). And where Origen’s spiritual reading sometimes loosens from the text, Gregory disciplines allegory by the rule of faith and by edification. The result is a transformation of the inherited method from within: Origen’s allegory of ascent becomes, in Gregory, the bridal mysticism of unending desire.

[Disputed: the degree of Gregory’s dependence on versus departure from Origen is debated; older scholarship (Daniélou) stressed continuity within an “Alexandrian” line, while interpreters such as Richard Norris and Morwenna Ludlow have emphasized how thoroughly Gregory recasts the inheritance around his own metaphysics of infinity and epektasis.]

The Bridal-Mysticism Legacy

The Homilies on the Song of Songs founded a long tradition of bridal mysticism — the reading of the spiritual life as the soul’s espousal to Christ — that runs through the whole of Eastern and Western Christianity. In the East the affective language of longing, the wound of love, and the ever-fleeing Beloved fed directly into the literature of erōs for God; in the West the same Song-derived imagery would flower centuries later in Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on the Song and in the bridal mysticism of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, with their own arrows and wounds of love. Gregory’s transposition of eros into the highest reach of the spiritual life — desire not abolished but infinitely intensified — became a permanent possibility for Christian spirituality (Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, 1981).

Within the Orthodox tradition the Homilies belong, with the Life of Moses, at the source of the doctrine of theosis as endless participation in the infinite God, and of the apophatic-affective spirituality later gathered up in the hesychast tradition. The work was recovered for modern theology in the same twentieth-century movement that recovered the mystical Gregory as a whole — above all by Jean Daniélou, and made widely available in English by Richard Norris’s critical translation (see The Modern Recovery).

References

Gregory of Nyssa. Homilies on the Song of Songs (In Canticum Canticorum). Greek text: GNO VI, ed. Hermann Langerbeck (Leiden: Brill, 1960); PG 44:755–1120.
Norris, Richard A., Jr., trans. Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Song of Songs. Writings from the Greco-Roman World 13. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012.
Daniélou, Jean. Platonisme et théologie mystique: Doctrine spirituelle de saint Grégoire de Nysse. Paris: Aubier, 1944.
Daniélou, Jean, and Herbert Musurillo, eds. From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s Mystical Writings. New York: Scribner, 1961.
Laird, Martin. Gregory of Nyssa and the Grasp of Faith: Union, Knowledge, and Divine Presence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Louth, Andrew. The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.
Ludlow, Morwenna. Gregory of Nyssa, Ancient and (Post)modern. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Origen. Commentary on the Song of Songs, trans. R. P. Lawson. Ancient Christian Writers 26. New York: Newman Press, 1957.