Reading Scripture Like a Medieval Saint: Bernard of Clairvaux on the Song of Songs

“With the Scriptures the soul athirst for God ... is sure to find Him Whom she seeks.”

This is the beginning of Song of Songs in the manuscript Bible believed to have been used by St. Bernard. This image was hard to track down! The codex is held by a library in Troyes, near Clairvaux in France, and I eventually found the digitized version of this leaf on the French website Biblissima. Note that the title of the book in St. Bernard’s Bible is Cantica Canticorum; cantica is the nominative plural of canticum, so the title translates not to Song of Songs but to Songs of Songs.

On Sunday we returned to the topic of the medieval relationship with Holy Scripture—a relationship that in my view is in dire need of revival. Since high-ranking churchmen these days are thoroughly preoccupied with other things, the revival will need to begin with us.

To learn more about this relationship, we could hardly find a better teacher than Bernard of Clairvaux. Few men so luminously represent the spiritual culture of the western Middle Ages, and something special is sure to occur when a saint who is central to medieval culture composes sermons about a scriptural text—namely, Song of Songs—that also is central to medieval culture.

Song of Songs seems to be the sort of biblical text that many folks these days would prefer to ignore. At the very least, it shouldn’t be discussed in polite company—that strange, mildly scandalous book about erotic love that never mentions God and wanders aimlessly through the meadows of human sensuality. Such are the lamentable and ruinous effects of puritanism, which has cast a baleful shadow over Anglo-American Christianity for far too long. Our ancestors of the Patristic and medieval periods would pity us, or worse, for neglecting a book that they saw as a literary treasure whose words were radiant with spiritual mysteries.

As one scholar points out, Song of Songs contains

no treatment of the great themes found elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, such as law, covenant, divine mercy and justice, land, exile, or wisdom…. And, yet, the work was one of the most commented upon biblical books in ancient, medieval, and early modern Judaism and Christianity.¹

Another scholar says that the book “was considered to be the epitome of allegorical poetry” and was seen by some early Jewish exegetes—this is a remarkable statement—as “a key to the rest of the Scriptures.”²