Last week I was asked to be on a panel about 'Being Catholic today' for a group of schoolchildren visiting my parish. They had prepared several interesting questions, one of which was 'Which is more important to you: the Old Testament or the New Testament?' This left me thinking about how my relationship with the Old Testament had developed, particularly through engaging in medieval studies and learning more about medieval exegesis of the Old Testament. As a child I tended to think of the stories in the Old Testament as just that: stories. Yes, those stories taught us about Creation, the 10 Commandments, and how God keeps His promises and guides His people, but I don't think I fully understood what a treasure the Old Testament is: how those stories reveal God's deep and abiding love for us, and foretell the coming of Christ. It wasn't always easy to reconcile the jealous God of the Old Testament with the image we are shown in the gospels and I didn't entirely see how the Old and New fit together. And yet how rich and beautiful it is! How deep is the Lord's love for us as unveiled in the Old Testament!
The types of Christ in the Old Testament are not too difficult to discern: the sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham's only son, pointing toward Christ's sacrifice; Jonah's three days in the whale prefiguring Christ's three days in the tomb; Melchizedek, king and high priest like Jesus. However, delving into the Marian images used by the poets of the late Middle Ages, we see many prefigurements of Mary and the Virgin birth. While some of these, such as the Ark of the Covenant, are fairly well known from the Litany of Loreto, I've found it fascinating encountering other images that were often used in late medieval Marian lyric, such as that of the burning bush (Exodus 3:1-6). This was seen as a type of Mary: as the bush burned but was not consumed by the flames, so Mary conceived Christ while remaining a virgin. Similarly Gideon's fleece (Judges 6:36-40), which was wet with dew while the ground remained dry was seen as prefiguring the virgin birth. You can see some of these types depicted in the image below, painted by an unknown German artist in the 15th century and hanging in the Thyssen-Borneisza Museum.
Diptych with symbols of the Virgin and Redeeming Christ: Virgin and Child in the Hortus Conclusus (Left wing) © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Borneisza
In this panel Our Lady is sitting in the hortus conclusus, or closed garden, a further type for Mary's virginity. This image comes from the Song of Songs, a book of the Bible I have come to know well, primarily through my studies. It rarely appears in the lectionary, and even then, only briefly during the week, such that I don't think I have ever heard it preached upon. Yet it is a profoundly beautiful, lyrical text which communicates God's love for us powerfully through dialogue and encounter between a man and his beloved. The context in which most people tend to come across it is at weddings as, at its heart, it is a love poem. Patristic readings of the Song of Songs read it as allegory for Christ and His bride, the Church, and on an individual level, an allegory of the love of God for the human soul, which has inspired many mystical texts. However, during the Middle Ages a further allegorical reading was developed: the bride was identified with Mary, and the Song of Songs was conceived of as a narrative of her encounter with the Trinity at the Incarnation. The first Mariological reading was by Honorius Augustodunensis in his Sigillum Beatae Mariae in the twelfth century, soon followed by Rupert of Deutz and Alan of Lille's commentaries, such that reading the Song of Songs as an allegory for God's relationship with Mary became one of the standard readings. I have included a few references for further reading on this at the end of the post.
The language of the Song of Songs then made its way into Marian poetry, enabling poets to speak of Mary as an active participant in the Incarnation and seeing her as God's beloved. Because the bride of the Song of Songs speaks, it expands their imaginative horizons by offering more words to Mary, letting them go beyond her few words in Luke's gospel. For example, in one of the poems I've been working on this week, Albrecht Lesch's Goldenes Schloss (in Cramer's Die kleineren Liederdichter des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts), Mary speaks in the first person, declaring:
mein liebes lieb klokt an mein thuer
und gie so recht lieblichen fur
und wingket mir zu im
(My darling love knocks on my door and comes forth so charmingly and calls me to him.
cf Song of Songs 5:2 I hear my love knocking. 'Open to me, my sister, my beloved'.)
Mary refers to God as her 'friedel', or lover, and evokes the same flowers and scents and spices as in the Song of Songs, conjuring up the same erotic atmosphere in the poem and using the same language of desire as in the biblical text. The impression of Mary is of a bride desired by God and desirous of Him: it creates a sense of an intimate, sensual relationship characterised by overwhelming nuptial love.
Medieval exegetes and poets clearly found this a seductive image and a valuable way of meditating on the Incarnation and I have found that it can be so too: rather than solely envisaging the Incarnation as a single moment in time it rather allows me to imagine the relationship between Mary and the Trinity in a personal, intimate fashion. I often focus in my prayer, particularly when meditating on the Joyful Mysteries of the rosary, on Mary as mother but the Song of Songs offers a realm in which we can also meditate on her as spouse and beloved. Marian commentaries on the Song of Songs can help us to conceive of Mary and God's love for her in a new way that may not immediately seem obvious: this is a great example of how the Old Testament can help illuminate the New Testament for us. The Annunciation is narrated in only 12 verses in Luke 1, and yet there is a whole book of the Bible elaborating on it, offering us depth and insight into the Incarnation as the culmination of God's great love for Mary. I have found that reading medieval commentary, and even more so, the imaginative meditations of medieval poets, has helped enlighten me and offer me a new perspective on Mary's privileged relationship with God.
Further reading
Here are a few references for the development of Mariological readings of the Song of Songs:
Astell, Ann W., The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990)
Fulton Brown, Rachel, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002)
Matter, E. Ann, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity, Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990)
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