gregory of nyssa: homilies on the song of songs - Society of Biblical ...

INTRODUCTION xxiii
Gregory sounds tired, and his language is not that <strong>of</strong> a person who foresees
a much longer life. Indeed, he did not enjoy a much longer life. His death
occurred at some time around, though probably shortly after, 395.
2. The Themes, Method, and Sources <strong>of</strong> Gregory’s Interpretation <strong>of</strong>
the Song
The Problem <strong>of</strong> “Allegory”
Anyone with a properly modern outlook and a properly modern taste in literary—and
especially biblical—interpretation is likely, on reading Gregory’s
Homilies for the first time, to undergo something <strong>of</strong> a shock. If, moreover,
such a person is asked what occasions this reaction—<strong>of</strong> dismay, incredulity,
and rejection—the answer that comes is likely to specify (1) Gregory’s systematic
treatment <strong>of</strong> the text as allegory, and, in the particular case <strong>of</strong> the
Song, (2) his use <strong>of</strong> allegory to cleanse away or purge or trivialize its marked,
and cheerful, sexual eroticism. Gregory himself acknowledges that there
are, in his own day, exegetes who could be said to have shared something
<strong>of</strong> this aversion to allegory, teachers who “do not agree that Scripture says
anything for our pr<strong>of</strong>it by way <strong>of</strong> enigmas and below-the-surface meanings” 24
(a phraseology that represents Gregory’s carefully neutral way <strong>of</strong> saying
what “allegory” means as he understands it). Nor is there much doubt that
the people he has in mind here are representatives <strong>of</strong> the so-called Antiochene
School, teachers such as Diodore <strong>of</strong> Tarsus or Theodore <strong>of</strong> Mopsuestia.
The first <strong>of</strong> these, moreover (Diodore) he could well have met, and probably
did meet, at the Council <strong>of</strong> Antioch (379) or the Council <strong>of</strong> Constantinople
(381) or both. 25 In any case, Gregory’s dedicatory letter to Olympias undertakes
what he doubtless regarded as an obligation, namely, the defense <strong>of</strong> his
exegetical policy—a policy he had already followed in his De vita Mosis and
In inscriptiones Psalmorum—against just such critics. And he does so in terms
that indicate his debt to Origen but, at the same time, as we shall see, depart
significantly in some ways from Origen’s theory and practice.
It is a temptation, then, when confronted with Gregory’s exegetical policies
in the Homilies, to turn straightway to this dedicatory letter and to set out
the terms <strong>of</strong> his defense <strong>of</strong> allegory, that is, to attend deliberately and narrowly
to the question <strong>of</strong> his method <strong>of</strong> eliciting what he takes to be the teaching <strong>of</strong> the
Song. To adopt this procedure, however, would be to ignore the presupposi-
24. Homily preface, p. 4 (Jaeger). On the meaning <strong>of</strong> “enigma,” see ibid., n. 1
25. For an excellent discussion <strong>of</strong> this issue, see Cahill 1981, 453ff.