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Introduction 7
bride, notably—but either sex can take the female role in the symbolic
register, as is evident from Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on
the Song of Songs, where the monks are the bride. Nevertheless,
the following simple and powerful idea is shared by Christianity
and Hinduism: that union between humans and the divine is like a
marriage.
Hinduism also shares with Catholic Christianity a strong doctrine
of the indissolubility of marriage. The correlation with the similar
approach to marriage symbolism is significant and should be borne
in mind by readers following the argument of this book. There is
no sociological entailment here, no necessity, but the ideal type of a
relation between the social rule of unbreakable marriage and highly
developed marriage symbolism makes sense.
In Christian spirituality it is the ‘soul–God =bride–bridegroom’
imagery which comes closest to Hinduism. Another variant of marriage
symbolism, the image of the Church as bride of Christ, is further
away from Hindu analogues. This is because of its collective or
corporate community character, the idea of ‘the Church’ and even
the human race as in some sense a unity, capable of being collectively
infected by original sin and collectively redeemed by Christ.
So far as one can generalize, Hinduism does indeed emphasize the
character of the whole universe as a collective whole, but much less
so the human race, or the collective identity of a society within it. In
Hinduism there is the self (atman), there are status groups (castes)
through which the self passes on the journey of reincarnations towards
final release, and there is the All, but the idea of a society as
an organic body with a collective role in the drama of History is
alien. The medieval Church saw itself as just such a society, whose
relation to God could be called a marriage.
To this symbolism the closest parallel is in ancient Israel, where
the Jewish people are themselves, collectively, the bride of God.
It has been pointed out that according to Deuteronomy 24: 1–4 ‘a
divorced woman who has remarried can never be reconciled with
her former husband. Because God is anxious to bring back Israel
as his beloved spouse, he must never have divorced her.’
Keller argues that ‘the roles of bride and bridegroom become fixed with regard
to gender’, suggesting that there was a ‘gradual narrowing of the role of the bride to
(primarily religious) women on the one hand’ and a ‘successive masculinization of
the divine bridegroom on the other hand’ (My Secret is Mine, 8).
See, however, below, n. 36.
C. Stuhlmueller, ch. 22 on ‘Deutero-Isaiah’, in The Jerome Biblical Commen-