Reading the Song of Songs with St. Thomas Aquinas

For all that he wrote, for all the centuries that he has been carefully studied, Thomas Aquinas is still not well understood. There are many reasons for all the confusion. A few rather arbitrary examples will demonstrate the point. To begin with, some highly influential popular historians of the mid-twentieth century Humanistic persuasion like Daniel Boorstin or Will Durant seem to have read Aquinas primarily as a precursor to the Renaissance Humanists. For this group, Aquinas and his fellow Scholastics only represent the first stirrings of enlightenment that started to extricate European culture from the forest of Dark Age superstition. On the other hand, some contemporary Protestants like Nancy Pearcey view Aquinas’s thought as a prime example of what went wrong with Christian spirituality in the Middle Ages, as the faith detached itself from scripture and became over-rationalized and spiritually destitute. Additionally, following Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris, Catholic ecclesiastical attempts to present Aquinas as an alternative to certain philosophical currents of the late nineteenth century were not always helpful, either. As Marie-Dominique Chenu and Étienne Gilson have pointed out, certain strands of “neo-Thomistic” thought were sometimes used as blunt instruments for counteracting the more pernicious forms of modernism.

Given all this, it is apt that Serge-Thomas Bonino’s Reading the Song of Songs with St. Thomas Aquinas has been released in English translation as part of the “Thomistic Ressourcement Series” by the Catholic University of America Press. For his part, Bonino acknowledges that modern appropriations of Aquinas’s thought can be problematic. The broad sweep of Aquinas’s thought across philosophy, theology, scriptural interpretation, and spiritual devotion can be lost when he is used in ideological narrative battles. While the book’s substance focuses narrowly on Aquinas’s interpretation and use of the Song of Songs, Bonino’s broader aim is clear. He invites us to consider what it would mean to examine something approaching the whole Aquinas, rather than artificially considering him only as a philosopher, a theologian, an exegete, etc. In this way, we can begin to get a renewed sense of the truly massive achievement of this towering figure, not only as a thinker but as a spiritual master. As will become clear, we stand to gain much from the exercise.

Before we get into the substance of the book, a little background may be in order. The Song of Songs is an Old Testament love poem ascribed to the King of ancient Israel, Solomon. It describes the longing of a lover for his beloved in a series of charming episodes. The two figures encounter each other, praise one another, withdraw, and return in a perennially evocative text. The frivolities and delights of young love are tangible even today. As its name suggests, it is a strong contender for the greatest love poem ever written.

Bonino’s book begins with an interesting survey of Patristic and Medieval interpretations of the Song. Origen of Alexandria established the mystical interpretation of the text, which marks its appropriation even today in Catholic circles. While it is not known whether Aquinas himself read Origen’s exegesis of the Song, his influence was passed along by the tradition through the Glossa Ordinaria and the exegetical writings of Hugh of Saint-Cher. The gist of these interpretations is that the Song is a mystical allegory of the Father’s love for his people, Christ’s love for his Church, and the individual Christian’s love for Christ. Additionally, this deep tradition came to view the trio of Solomonic writings in the Old Testament, i.e., Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song, as progressive steps for the believer. Thus, the believer can progress from the initial practical wisdom of Proverbs to the “world-despising” outlook of Ecclesiastes to the loving embrace of the Bridegroom in the Song. Bonino explains that “in the milieu of the thirteenth century, at the time when Thomas is immersed in it, the Song appears as the summit of the spiritual journey of the believer: it is addressed to the ‘perfect,’ to contemplatives, and it celebrates their union of love with Christ.” Let us examine just a few of the myriad ways in which Aquinas interpreted and applied the Song throughout his corpus.

First, Bonino highlights how Aquinas interprets descriptions of the lover as descriptions of Christ’s beauty. Verses like “Let thy voice sound in my ears: for thy voice is sweet, and thy face comely” (Song 2:14) are interpreted as encomia to Christ who pleases the eye on account of his divinity, whose words beguile the ear. Of course, this beauty does not enter only through the senses. Christ’s spiritual beauty also shines through the glory of his actions and teachings.

Similarly, the garden imagery of Song 6:2 invokes the community of the Church, made up of its saints, visited by Christ. Aquinas explains: “The garden is the Church . . . in which there are various plantings, according to the various orders, all of which the hand of the Almighty has planted. This garden is watered by Christ with the rivers of his sacraments, which flowed from his side.” The winds that blow through the garden symbolize the Holy Spirit present in the Church: “Arise, north wind, and come, O south wind, blow through my garden, and let the aromatical spices thereof flow” (Song 4:16). The Church as beloved is sought after and inhabited by the spirit of the lover.

Bonino’s final chapter on “The Faithful Soul” addresses how the individual Christian is read into the poem. This is the most prominent aspect of the Song’s traditional mystical interpretation noted above. Aquinas uses the imagery of the song to explain all the effects that love has on the lover: it “causes the union and mutual indwelling of the lovers. It brings ecstasy, in that it makes the lover go out of himself . . . It excites good zeal . . . love, of itself, when it bears on the authentic good, far from destroying the lover, perfects him. . . it carries him to a richer, more intense life.”

In one of the most often-quoted Bible verses in Thomas’s corpus, love is likened to fire: “[Love’s] arrows are arrows of fire, flames of the divine” (Song 8:6). Like the fire of the burning bush in Exodus chapter 3, this fire enflames the soul but does not consume it. Rather, it intensifies the passion already present in the soul, bringing it to a new level of dynamic activity which radiates out outward to others. According to Bonino, this “fire communicates itself, and to anything to which it is communicated it transmits its own communicative dynamism. Likewise, love is a principle of action that is always developing.” This fiery love that seizes the soul and overflows to the other finds its culmination in charity, for “many waters cannot quench charity” (Song 8:7).  

The operation of this dynamism is reflected in the Song 3:1, where the beloved pines after the beloved: “In my bed by night I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, and I found him not.” Bonino highlights that the lover as Christ is sometimes present to the beloved, but then withdraws which kindles the desire to burn yet brighter (this can be observed in certain episodes from the Gospel; see John 6:17; 13:36-37). It is only in the ecstasy of mystic contemplation or the beatific vision achieved after bodily death that union between the lover and beloved is achieved. Of course, here below, moments of union with God are few and fleeting. It is only in the beatific vision that the unquenchable desire of the beloved will be met by the equally unquenchable love of God.

Thus, the life of the Christian on his or her earthly pilgrimage is marked by a sort of existence-in-tension, where the ultimate end of contemplation is sought yet never grasped. This way, desire is never extinguished, because it never burns itself out nor does it ever fully achieve its object. Yet there is an extremely important byproduct of the heat of this divine fire: the overflow of divine love reaches out to the neighbor. Bonino explains, employing the motto of the Dominican order: “for Thomas Aquinas, friar of the Order of Preachers, contemplation overflows (super)naturally in preaching for the salvation of souls. Contemplata aliis tradere (hand down to other the fruits of contemplation). Such is the necessary effect of charity, that lamp of fire, which burns in the heart of the contemplative.”

In other words, through God’s grace, the lover who experiences the superabundant vertical love of the divine and allows it to overflow laterally to his or her community. It is in this that the beloved reflects most perfectly the divine condescension of Christ: by returning from contemplation, from union with God to the earthly city, where it will kindle a similar love in others. In Aquinas’s own words: “This going out is very similar to the savior’s going out from the secret dwelling place of the Father to the public area of what is visible.” This is intimated in the text of Song 2:10: “Come, my beloved, let us go out into the fields.” Also: “I will arise and go round about the city, through the streets and squares” (Song 3:2). The beloved, who has been with the lover, must go out to the city.

This is just one impressive example of the possible fruits of Bonino’s approach to the text. The implications are striking. Suddenly we have a new possibility for understanding how Aquinas conceives the way that truth appears in the communitas. As so poignantly pointed out by Karol Wojtyla, persons are thresholds between the earthly and the divine. Bonino helps us to the added realization that there are two axes along which this threshold can be understood: between myself and the divine, and myself and the other. Truth only appears in the city when those who have contemplated the object of their divine love allow such love to overflow to others. Perhaps we can begin to see through a dark glass why Plato mysteriously asserted that “the half is greater than the whole.”

As you can surmise, this is an extraordinary little book. The reflections on offer in this review do not come close to examining all the possibilities that Bonino brings to bear. On the surface, the book seems like a rather arcane contribution to a niche area of Catholic scholarship. But it quickly becomes clear that it represents so much more. Bonino makes real for us the staggering potential of a more holistically conceived Thomas Aquinas. He succeeds brilliantly in showing that we have a long way to go toward understanding this philosophical, theological, scriptural, and spiritual master. It is obvious that we stand to benefit much from his approach.

Reading the Song of Songs with St. Thomas Aquinas
By Serge-Thomas Bonino, OP. Translated by Andrew Levering
Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2023; 168pp

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