Song of Songs
At 9:00am and 11:15am this Sunday, February 4, Saint Philip’s choirs will sing a work of ravishing beauty by English composer Patrick Hawes, with text based on the Song of Solomon. Featuring choir, string quintet with harp, and a solo sung by soprano Mary Paul, this music celebrates human love as an embodiment of the love between Christ and His Church.
Notes on the Song of Songs (both the Biblical Book and the Musical Work by Patrick Hawes) by Justin Appel, Director of Music
Rowan Williams, in his dense and rich book Looking East in Winter, discusses the writings of St Maximos the Confessor, and specifically the place of eros in this Saint's ontology.
For Maximos, the created world is a complex series of “reflections of, and participations in, the single eternal Logos” and that "created eros is understood as the energy that drives us to our proper place in the relationships that constitute this universe, an energy that is consistently self-relativizing, self-displacing. We can call it ecstatic in the strict sense of the term. It steps out of the closed definitions we instinctively work with, opening the life of any subject, any individual substance, to the life of the Other, both the finite and the Infinite Other.” (From the beginning of Chapter 2)
In other words, as God’s creatures we exist in a web of meanings and relationships that drive us all back to God, in whom we “move and breathe and have our being,” as St Paul described. Eros is understood in this system as the very energy that draws us towards God, and our ability to “see” the other is determined by whether our “looking” corresponds to this ordered relationship to God. To see the other in an “angelic” manner is to see the other as part of this Logos-centric relationship, whereas a “demonic” sight sees the other as merely an object to be acquired.
This vision of St Maximos is perhaps a perfect place to start in a discussion of a book that clearly describes human love and desire, the Song of Songs, the book of the Bible from which Andrew Hawes adapted the text for Sunday’s choral offerings, a musical work penned by his brother, Patrick Hawes.
The Church, in her wisdom, has read the Song of Songs, not merely as a historical account of love between a particular man (was it King Solomon?) and his Bride (which one?), but rather as poetry about real human love and as allegorical poetry about the love between God and his creatures, between Christ, the Bridegroom, and his Church, the Bride—to summarize an image used in the New Testament. Properly understood, the love between the man and woman of the Song of Songs is a manifestation, a reflection, of the true love that Christ has for us with all of the complexity, weightiness, and beauty that this implies.
Eros, it is said, gets a bad rap in the Western Church these days, likely because we associate the word with our sinful tendency to turn desire into an acquisitive activity (St Maximos’ demonic sight). However, we are invited, in part by the Eastern Church, to delight again in books like the Song of Songs, in its beautiful natural imagery—with its apples, raisin cakes, bundles of myrrh, gazelles and vineyards—and in the excellent love it describes between Lover and Beloved.
This book is bursting with loveliness: through it we are called to imagine this story, along with our human loves, as sublime images of Christ's love for the Church, of the Father's love for us children, for the Spirit's loving movement, "in all places and filling all things, Treasury of blessing and Giver of life.”