The Song of Songs

The Song of Songs is a biblical love poem that Christian mystics read as a guide to the soul’s longing for God and its hoped-for union with Jesus Christ. Its importance rests on a double movement: the lovers’ desire can be read as human love on the surface and, beneath it, as a drama of spiritual desire. Origen shaped this allegorical approach, and Bernard of Clairvaux made the poem the subject of an extensive series of sermons. In the broader mystical tradition, its closeness and separation also gave language to alternating experiences of divine presence and absence.

The poem as a map of spiritual ascent

Origen connected the Song with a three-stage pattern of spiritual life. Proverbs represented the purgative way, in which a person works to clear away what obstructs the ascent to God. Ecclesiastes represented the illuminative way, teaching discernment about the nature and proper use of things. The Song of Songs represented the unitive way: desire and love draw the soul toward God. In this reading, the poem is not an ornamental addition to moral instruction but the culmination of a spiritual progression.

Origen also explained why Scripture could support readings beyond its historical surface. He compared Scripture to a human being with body, soul, and spirit: its common historical meaning is the body; a broader spiritual understanding is the soul; and its deepest wisdom is the spirit. That approach let him treat the Song’s love poetry as a drama of mystical meaning. Its language of desire pointed beyond the lovers to the soul’s aspiration to rise toward God, while the body could be understood as holding back the inward person whose desire is directed upward.

Bride, soul, and the desired encounter

Origen interpreted the bride in two related ways. She could represent the Church, betrothed to Christ and longing not merely for what has been taught about him but for Christ himself. The law and the prophets had disclosed the Son of God and prepared the Church for him, yet the bride’s desire remained unsatisfied by knowledge received through intermediaries. In Origen’s account, she longs for direct encounter and for Christ’s words to reach her without distance.

The same figure could also represent an individual soul seeking fellowship with the Word of God made flesh. Teachers may offer knowledge, but instruction alone does not end the soul’s desire. The encounter becomes intelligible when the reader moves from obscurity toward understanding—when what was tangled is unraveled. Origen therefore made interpretation itself part of the poem’s spiritual action: the reader’s search for meaning can become a prayerful longing for Christ, rather than a merely intellectual exercise.

Other details in Origen’s commentary extend this allegory. The bridegroom’s heart signifies a store of wisdom and knowledge that surpasses the kinds of teaching figured by wine. The bride’s earlier fragrances signify the law and the prophets; in the bridegroom’s presence, she recognizes their inferiority to what he brings. These interpretations preserve the poem’s movement from preparation toward a more immediate encounter. The allegory does not discard the imagery but redirects it toward the relation between Christ and the Church, and between Christ and the soul.

Medieval use and Bernard’s sermons

In the Middle Ages, the Song of Songs was regarded as a textbook for mysticism and was commented on more frequently than any other book of the Bible. Mystical readers believed that its surface did not exhaust its meaning: beneath the lovers’ pursuit, praise, longing, and joy lay truths about God’s love and the spiritual life. The poem could consequently be approached as a continuing field of interpretation, one that offered more than a single moral lesson.

Bernard of Clairvaux made the Song the focus of his best-known work. Beginning around 1135–36, he composed a series of eighty-six sermons, a project that continued through the rest of his life. He reached only the opening of chapter 3 before his death, and the final sermon remained unfinished. The incomplete sequence nonetheless became a major work of devotional literature, joining sustained biblical commentary to Bernard’s mature thinking about love and mystical encounter.

Bernard opened with the poem’s plea for a kiss, and returned to that image across the first four sermons and again in four later sermons after treating other topics. For him, the kiss was not a social formality but the fulfillment of a longing soul’s desire: a meeting in which divine light and the enlightened mind are joined. He associated it with the living word, the disclosure of mysteries, the strengthening of faith, and the union of God with humanity through Christ. The repeated return to the image gives the sermons a structure shaped by desire itself: the text voices longing, pauses to consider its meaning, and comes back to the encounter for which the soul longs.

Presence, absence, and mystical reading

The lovers’ joy in one another when together, and their intense longing when apart, also offered mystics a pattern for the changing conditions of spiritual life. At some times God seems unmistakably present; at others, the person experiences God through absence. The latter can be painful and can threaten faith. The Song’s emotional alternation thus gives a form to a recurring mystical pattern: heights of religious experience and periods of spiritual desert, ecstasy and desolation, desire and apparent distance.

This reading extends beyond Origen and Bernard. Many mystics interpreted the poem’s lovers as figures for the soul’s relation to God, even though God is not explicitly named in the Song. Its language could carry meanings that exceeded rational explanation, because mystical experience was understood as an encounter with God in Christ that surpassed what words could fully describe. The poem’s continued use in mystical writing therefore depended on both its intimate human imagery and its capacity to bear spiritual meanings that the surface alone could not settle.