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8 Introduction
The Song of Songs may or may not be about the love of God
and his people, but in any case this religious interpretation of these
songs is the ‘oldest interpretation, in both Christian and Jewish
tradition’. Hebrew ideas about God’s marriage to or love of his
chosen people are not only a parallel to but also a crucial source for
Christian marriage symbolism. The reading of the Song of Songs
adopted by the third-century Christian theologian Origen owed
much to Jewish tradition, and Origen is a decisive influence on the
whole subsequent tradition of Christian marriage symbolism (on
the ‘Church as bride of Christ’ as well as on the ‘Soul as bride of
Christ’ themes).
Thus the Bernardine tradition of bridal mysticism has parallels in
Hinduism, and the image of Christ’s marriage to the Church draws
on Old Testament Judaism. What may be harder to find in other
religious traditions is the sober rationality with which medieval
scholastic writers and canon lawyers integrated marriage symbolism
into their systematic and coherent religious frameworks. The
Supplement to the Summa theologica of Thomas Aquinas succinctly
integrates the di·erent levels into a coherent structure. Marriage
is formed by signs of consent, usually verbal, not necessarily in a
religious ceremony. These external signs represent a further level:
the binding of man and woman. If the couple are Christians, this
signifies and also brings about a spiritual union. This is the ‘sacrament’
in the more technical theological sense, worked out by the
time of Aquinas, of a sign of grace that brought about what it represented.
Beyond that, there is another layer still. The spiritual
union of man and woman represents, but does not bring about, the
union of Christ and the Church. This dense symbolism from the
tary, ed. R. E. Brown, J. A. Fitzmyer, and R. E. Murphy, i (London, 1968), 366–86
at 377, on Isa. 50, with reference to Isa. 54: 6–8 and 61: 4–5.
R. E. Murphy, ch. 30, ‘Canticle of Canticles’, ibid. 506–10 at 507.
‘For Christian readings of the Song of Songs, especially as popularized by
Origen, this assumption [that the “Old Testament” is reflected in the “New Testament”]
automatically suggested the scope of prior meanings; that is, the poems read
by Jews as the love between God and Israel naturally find their “true” sense as the
love between Christ and the Church’ (E. A. Matter, The Voice of my Beloved: The
Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia, c.1990), 51).
Supplementum, 42. 1, ‘Ad quartum’ and ‘Ad quintum’, 42. 2, ‘Respondeo’,
and 42–3, ‘Respondeo’ and ‘Ad secundum’: see SanctiThomaeAquinatis...opera
omnia, iussu . . . Leonis XIII P.M. edita, xii (Rome, 1906), 81–2. For the Supplement,
put together after the death of Aquinas on the basis of his commentary on the
Sentences of Peter the Lombard, see J. Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d’Aquino: His Life,