Finding Beauty in the Bible: An Aesthetic Commentary on the Song of Songs

By Robert D. Miller II, OFS

We approach Raphael's Agony in the Garden or Fra Angelico's Crucifixion for their beauty and not primarily to learn about fifteenth-century fashion or even to decode the iconography. Yet the many books on the Song of Songs, whether they try to read the book as an ancient Near Eastern love song or a Christian allegory, miss the main point of this book: its aesthetic elements. "Aesthetics" is the appreciation of beauty. Aesthetics examines literary form as a response to content, the way poetics works with contents, the use of loaded semantic terms, even the sound created by words and what cognitive science tells us it does to listeners. This book uses the commentary format to accompany an individual's reading of the Song of Songs, focusing on these neglected aspects of the text. It both reads the book as it is meant to be read and opens up a new vista on this magnificent biblical text.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Aug 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666795332

Robert D. Miller II, OFS

Robert D. Miller II, O.F.S., is associate professor of Old Testament at The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC.

Book preview

Introduction

An Aesthetic Commentary

Recent Song of Songs scholarship has been increasingly concerned with literary analysis. ¹ Such work no longer strictly seeks the historical context for the Song’s composition but explores the text itself synchronically. Studies that focus on the text as an object often explicitly invoke schools or trends in the field of literary criticism itself, including structuralism, ² semiotics, ³ formalism, ⁴ or New Criticism. ⁵ Yet the lament of Clines and Exum decades ago still holds true: It is not surprising the Old Testament studies should adopt the methods of general literary criticism only a decade or two after they are developed outside our own discipline. ⁶ The element absent in recent literary study of the Song of Songs that this book aims to remedy is literary criticism’s return to aesthetics. ⁷ More basically, the goal of this book is to make the beauty of the Song of Songs more evident. ⁸ As Adorno writes, Not knowing what one sees or hears bestows no privileged direct relation to works but instead makes their perception impossible. ⁹ And beauty is, after all, what the Song of Songs is about—not only about but also what it does; as Reynolds writes, The Song does what it says. ¹⁰ So an aesthetic approach is not merely another new tool applied to a given text, the Song of Songs. The Song is about beauty, and it demands a beauty-oriented reading.

Aesthetics, the study of sensory values or judgments of sentiment and taste that derive from the senses, was roundly rejected for some time in literary studies, derided as the artsy luxury of the bourgeoisie.¹¹ The judgment aspect of aesthetics is a philosophical undertaking with its own scholarly tradition, but it is beyond the scope of this study;¹² its inclusion would, as Adorno notes, necessitate critically examining its own metaphysical and epistemological principles.¹³ Jacques Maritain has one such theory, based on the traditional Aristotelean equation of beauty with truth (cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica i–ii, q. 27, a. 1, ad. 3; Thomas Cajetan’s commentary thereon).¹⁴ It is not as reactionary as one might think. Maritain is aware that integrity or perfection or complete execution can be realized not in one way only but in a thousand or ten thousand different ways.¹⁵ The Aristotelian transcendentals—the one, the true, the good, and the beautiful—are analogous; just as different creatures and beings are good in their own way, things can be beautiful in their own way.¹⁶ Maritain, however, is theorizing about the production of art, and avoids speaking about its criticism: his work, he said, is not to be considered a work of criticism, either of literature or art. The author has too many principles in his head to make any such claim.¹⁷ Aesthetic judgment will not be engaged further herein.¹⁸

The aesthetic turn that does undergird this study is a separate assertion that we should rethink the aesthetic and remake aesthetic discourse in how we read literature.¹⁹ A return to aesthetics has sought to read poetry as linguistic enactment of sensations, emotions, or thoughts with inversible structures whose invitations to simultaneous apprehension make a unique contribution to aesthetic experience.²⁰ Aesthetic analysis explores the role of emotion, tied intimately to the poetry itself, in appreciation.²¹

The aesthetic approach is not a wholesale return to content over form and structure.²² It continues to "distinguish between what is represented or depicted (subject, content) and how it is represented or depicted (form).²³ Yet, against what Adorno calls the philistine division of art into form and content,²⁴ Kandinsky affirms, The work of art is the inseparable, indispensable, unavoidable combination of . . . content and form . . . Form is the material expression of abstract content.²⁵ Daniel Soneson writes, Form is important, but an understanding of form’s effect evolves from a response to the work itself."²⁶

Words themselves also figure into this operation, and so a semantic element is essential to aesthetic criticism.²⁷ Nevertheless, the denotations and connotations of words in a poem such as the Song of Songs are contextual because they act on each other forwards and backwards.²⁸ A catalog-like lexicon of the vocabulary of the Song will be of value only when its spatial sequence is subordinated to a sense of the poem’s instantaneously apprehended structure and significance.²⁹

The aesthetic experience of the poem involves apprehending all of these elements combining to produce the overall significance.³⁰ No single element dominates the others.³¹ And repeated readings or discreet examinations of the Song will reveal subtle recesses and previously unrecognized meanings.³² But is this, then, simply reader-response criticism?³³ Or is it some modified form of both reader- and text-centered synchronic criticism, akin to Jan Fokkelman’s dialogue of the text with the reader who, if reading sensitively, will find what is always already in the text?³⁴ In the study done forty years ago, Francis Landy explores the Song for structural unity [that] corresponds to and expresses outwardly the unity of action, i.e. the union of lovers, and also to the fusion through metaphor of the lovers and the world,³⁵ and then he uses the theories of Jungian and Freudian psychology to explain the reader’s construction of meaning in the text.³⁶ Most recently, Melanie Peetz provides a thorough study of the emotional impact of the Song of Songs on the reader, which is an emotional Rezeptionsgeschichte.³⁷

Back to the question above, the answer is both yes and no. The answer is yes on the one hand because the text as object is not completed but only finished in its aesthetic apprehension.³⁸ Appreciation is a personal and relative matter.³⁹ The aesthetic approach differs from strict reader-response and from Landy’s work because it holds that some reader attitudes (like pure observation) will be less able to apprehend the significance that is nevertheless dependent on apprehension.⁴⁰

On the other hand, however, first, aesthetic criticism according to Wolfgang Iser insists on attention to the verbal incarnation that allows the reader to experience and feel.⁴¹ Not every reaction to a work of art [is] an aesthetic reaction, writes Göran Hermerén; only reactions based in relevant phenomena of the text will count.⁴² Of course, as Hermerén continues, a person who asserts that a text can be frightening—while denying that someone is or would be frightened by it—clearly does not know what frightening means.⁴³ Beauty is harder to analyze than truth, and it is easier to be pleased by literature than to know why you are pleased, which is what we are after.⁴⁴ As Salvador Dali writes, The work of art must not begin by analysis of the effect but by analysis of the cause.⁴⁵ The emotion I am after is an aspect of cognitive science, not reception—I understand aesthetics as the science of how emotional evocation is not reader-response. Second, as Marcuse argues, art is capable of transcending the lives of its readers, their social places, needs, etc.⁴⁶ Third, unlike pure reader-response or even text-centered synchronic criticisms (e.g., New Criticism), aesthetic criticism includes (but is not limited to) a concern for the author’s own intention to provoke certain effects,⁴⁷ as Hough rightly states, To say that the design or intention of the author is never available as a standard seems an absurd piece of purism.⁴⁸ Whewell, too, says, The very identity of the affective response depends on the identity of the intentional object.⁴⁹

In one sense, we are after emotion,⁵⁰ and as we have seen,⁵¹ the key to emotion in literature is an appeal to the senses.⁵² Léopold Senghor writes, The poet expresses himself by drawing on the diverse forms of the visible universe, by referring to all his senses.⁵³ The authors of the Song of Songs have what Teju Cole calls deep fidelity to the world of the senses and to the translation of those sensations into poetry.⁵⁴

Ezra Pound enumerates and examines distinct appeals to sight, sound, and text,⁵⁵ to which, I add a few more pieces. Smell works similarly to sight and hearing, and scent plays a major role in, for example, both early Arabic and Ancient Egyptian love poetry.⁵⁶

We cannot ignore the interesting delimiting of time via perceived structure and form.⁵⁷ As Glyn Maxwell writes, You master form, you master time.⁵⁸ In order for us to clearly understand form, we should understand native Hebrew poetics.⁵⁹ Yet as biblical scholars well know, this is a minefield of competing models of Geller, Berlin, O’Connor, Pardee, etc.⁶⁰ I happen to prefer the work of Chip Dobbs-Allsopp which builds on Benjamin Hrushovki and sees Hebrew poetry as non-metrical free rhythmic poetry in lines of limited length variability.⁶¹ But for two reasons I will generally avoid syllabic stress structure and such things.

First, it is too easy to reduce poetic form to quantification.⁶² While meters, as parallelisms of stress, are plausible candidates for causes of feeling that figure in the experience of reading the poems, yet metrical arrangements are not easily seen as providing a reason for having a certain feeling.⁶³ Moreover, as Maxwell writes, If you still think every syllable in poetry is only stressed and unstressed you must dwell in a binary world where it takes 10 to tango, 11110 days hath September, and there must be 110010 ways to leave your lover.⁶⁴ Second, and relatedly, as Reuven Tsur writes, All restraints on metricalness have been violated by the greatest masters of musicality in poetry.⁶⁵ Thus, musical logic throughout history has added syllables where words lack them,⁶⁶ as Americans will agree that Land sung in Land of the Free and Home of the Brave has two clear syllables.

Moreover, the oral stress accent by increased volume we use may not be what accent meant in antiquity.⁶⁷ In classical Latin, accent was expressed by bodily movement: corporis motus (Quintilian 9.4.50–51), modulatnium pedum (Pliny, Natural History, 2.95–96, 209). For these reasons, this commentary will consider rhythm not via syllables but from syntax: the way syntax regulates the rhythm by which information and images are dispensed.⁶⁸

Literary Cognates

This commentary will invoke three different kinds of intertextuality. The first type includes intertexts available to the text’s original authors and audiences. Yet the goal is not to guess what the Song’s author might have read, but to see how words, names, and images worked in ancient Hebrew parlance, to explore their role in Israelite discourse.⁶⁹ The key to understanding such nouns’ intertextual meaning is to look at where they are used memorably.⁷⁰ This sort of intertextuality can only be postulated where we can argue the intertext was available. Tim Rucker wisely suggests that true intertextuality be proposed only where the quotational range is three or more identical words—where those words are not a standard idiom—except in the case of rare words.⁷¹ Fewer than three words, however, or three or more related words (e.g., from the same root), can be considered an allusion, if not technically intertextuality.⁷²

This is intertextuality as that term is used by Julia Kristeva, Stanley Porter, Michael Fishbane, Kelly O’Brien, but not Roland Barthes, for whom intertexts are anonymous and untraceable. In other words, Barthean intertexts are the unconscious texts floating in the author’s mind as she creates, unknowingly drawn upon, therefore relevant not to reading but to the writing process.⁷³

The importance of my first kind of intertextuality here is twofold. First, it is a crucial way by which the verbal content of the poetry works affectively on the audience, at least if the intertext was available to them as well as to the author.⁷⁴ To unpack the nouns, therefore, we will need to open their intertexts.⁷⁵

On a more basic level, though, intertextuality brings aesthetic pleasure.⁷⁶ The audience experiences the ludic joy of discovery, even when reading unpleasant material.⁷⁷ This joy is greatest when the intertextual connections are neither too blatant nor insolvably obscure.⁷⁸

The second variety of intertextuality presented here is better termed cognate texts. These are texts that are not cited or alluded to in the Song of Songs but ones that operate similarly, deploy the same techniques, share generic features, and so forth. Their citation here will serve to highlight the tactics of the Song by showing how those tactics work in other texts.

In general, these will be texts from the Persian and Hellenistic periods, as will be many of the descriptions of poetics and realia, since the Song of Songs probably comes from the middle of the third century BCE,⁷⁹ while having some older material within.⁸⁰ The Hellenistic dating is supported by multiple factors. As we shall see, Persian and possibly Greek loanwords appear in the Song (4:4, 13), along with many Aramaisms.⁸¹ Instead of Biblical Hebrew’s relative pronoun אֲשֶר, the later form of שֶ- is used, except for the first verse. Standard and early Biblical Hebrew forms, such as waw-consecutive and infinitive construct with proclitic particle, are avoided.⁸² Numerous words are used that are otherwise unknown in Biblical Hebrew but common in Mishnaic Hebrew: שוּק (3:2), אָמָן (7:2), כֹתֶל (2:9), מֶזֶג (7:3), and קְוֻצוֹת (4:2);⁸³ and so are items not found in Judea until the Persian period like apricots (see below).

Scholars are divided as to whether the Song’s intertextual connections of either of these two kinds are strongest with earlier Egyptian love poetry or with Hellenistic poetry. All this is part of a very large and complicated subject into which we need not try to enter very deeply. On the one hand, the lexical, semantic, idiomatic, and structural parallels with Ramesside (1300–1100 BCE) Egyptian love poetry are remarkably strong.⁸⁴ Michael Fox, the scholar who worked on this connection the most, says he initially assumed no genetic relationship between Ancient Egyptian love poetry and the Song of Songs, but came to change his mind.⁸⁵ He holds, agreeing with Martti Nissinen, that the Egyptian poems attest to a reservoir of metaphors and symbols from which the Song also drew.⁸⁶ Some of the parallels are so close—the man saying I passed by her door in the dark, I knocked and no one opened⁸⁷—that it is hard to imagine independent composition.

On the other hand, the time span between the latest of the Egyptian poems and the Song of Songs seems to preclude a connection,⁸⁸ especially since later Demotic and Ptolemaic Egyptian love poetry look entirely different.⁸⁹ Hagedorn, Hunter, and others have rejected the Egyptian parallels in favor of the Hellenistic world, especially Theocritus (see below).⁹⁰ Even though the Egyptian story of Wen-Amon places an Egyptian ballad singer in the Levant in the eleventh century, this cannot suggest a channel for early transmission—so much earlier than the Song and beyond the bounds of early Israel.⁹¹

We should note, however, that many of the parallels found in Egyptian and in Hellenistic love poems can also be found in Akkadian love poetry.⁹² From the