In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

169 Christ as Incarnate Wisdom in Bede’s Commentary on the Song of Songs Arthur G. Holder For the Venerable Bede, the Song of Songs was an allegorical drama prefiguring “the mysteries of Christ and the Church . . . under the figure of a bridegroom and a bride.”1 In this interpretation he was, of course, following well-established patterns of Christian interpretation. However, unlike many other exegetes both before and after, Bede understood those mysteries of Christ and the Church in a distinctly historical manner. For Bede, the Song of Songs presents an elaborately detailed theology of history, with its centerpoint in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ—the coming in human flesh of God’s own divine Wisdom and Word. With this in mind, my purpose in this essay is twofold. First, I want to illustrate the determinative influence that Bede’s theology of history exercised on his exegesis; in order to do so, I will examine his use of sources in the Song commentary, with particular reference to some very interesting passages that speak of the incarnate Christ as a nursing mother. Second, I want to suggest some ways that Bede’s commentary on the Song of Songs may help us appreciate what he is doing in the Historia ecclesiastica and the other works of hagiography and history, particularly in his famous treatments of the Northumbrian saints Cuthbert and Hild. Although at first glance it may seem that source analysis and considerations of intertextuality hardly represent dra1 Bede, In Cant. 1 (p. 190, lines 1–3): “mysteria Christi et ecclesiae…sub figura sponsi et sponsae.” Arthur G. Holder 170 matically new directions in Bede studies, I hope to demonstrate the need for more consistent and sophisticated application of these familiar interpretive tools. In the Song commentary, as in so many others, Bede explicitly claims to be “following the footsteps of the Fathers.”2 But which Fathers, precisely? There has been a considerable amount of scholarly confusion about the answer to this question, which I have attempted to address in more detail elsewhere.3 In brief, I conclude that Bede knew neither Origen’s commentary on the Song nor that of Gregory the Great. In a long polemical preface , and elsewhere throughout his commentary, Bede was refuting a lost treatise by Julian of Eclanum, a Pelagian author who had interpreted the Song as a celebration of human sexuality; understandably, Julian’s influence appears to have been mostly that of a foil. The last book of Bede’s work is a compendium of fifty-three extracts from various writings by Gregory of Great; Bede explicitly says that he did not have access to the similar collection compiled by Paterius.4 But the single most important influence on Bede’s exegesis of the Song was the massive commentary produced by a writer named Apponius, who was probably abbot of an Italian monastery early in the fifth century.5 Apponius acknowledged Origen among his own sources, so by using Apponius Bede was influenced by Origen, albeit indirectly and unwittingly. Most significantly, it was from Apponius that Bede drew his overall interpretive scheme, in which the Song of Songs appears as a progressive narrative of salvation history focused on the incarnation of the Word of God. 2 Bede, In Cant. Prol. (p. 180, line 503): “patrum uestigia sequentes.” 3 Arthur Holder, “The Patristic Sources of Bede’s Commentary on the Song of Songs,” Studia Patristica 34 (2001): 370–5. 4 Bede, In Cant. 6 (p. 359, lines 17–24). 5 Apponius’s commentary on the Song of Songs is edited in CCSL 19: 1– 311. Christ as Incarnate Wisdom 171 What was distinctive or unusual about Bede’s reading of the Song in comparison with that of other early Christian interpreters ? To begin with matters of form, it is worth noting that Bede did make it all the way through the Song of Songs, and that his commentary on all eight chapters has been preserved. That is more than we can say for most of his predecessors, or for many who came after. Origen’s commentary and homilies both stop before the end of the second chapter, and of course we only have them in Latin translation. The commentary of Gregory the Great covers only the first eight verses of chapter one. And, in the twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux notoriously took eighty-six sermons just to get to the beginning of chapter three, and then he died. On the other hand we have Apponius...

Share