In six meaty chapters, Shuve explores the use of the Song of Songs by ancient Latin theologians. The first section is devoted to North African and Spanish writers, who cite the Song in arguments pertaining to the Church. For Cyprian and Donatists, the Church is a closed community; a ‘garden enclosed, a fountain sealed’. Pacian, Tyconius and Augustine offer a more inclusive view of the Church as a mixed body, ‘a lily among the thorns’. Finally, Gregory of Elvira appeals to the Song to claim that the Church is the flesh of Christ. The second section of the book turns to Italy, with two chapters devoted to Ambrose and one to Jerome and his opponents. Here, verses from the Song are mined less to argue about ecclesiology than to support ascetic ideology. A brief epilogue points ahead to medieval exegesis of the Song.
Shuve argues that these writers cited the Song ‘to illuminate complex problems of identity posed by differences in liturgical practice, doctrinal definition, and attitudes toward the body and sexuality’ (p. 4). It provided ‘a fund of potent images, unmoored from specific dogmatic, ethical, and cultic claims, which could be deployed in a myriad of circumstances’ (p. 13). Often invoked in situations of conflict, the Song's verses helped to mark boundaries – whether between competing communities or versions of ascetic renunciation.
Especially valuable is Shuve's explanation of the use of the Song by Pacian of Barcelona and Gregory of Elvira, two of the lesser-known figures whom he treats. Gregory's Tractatus de epithalamio, which Shuve dates to the early 350s, is the earliest extant Latin commentary on the Song. He argues that the Tractatus offers ‘something of a retrospective on a highly developed Latin ecclesiological interpretive tradition that was soon to be merged with a far more ascetic one’ (p. 82). In an era of complex theological debate, Gregory reminds his readers and hearers that the Church is ‘the very extension of Christ's body on earth’ (p. 94).
Discussing Ambrose, Shuve carefully plots that bishop's changing emphases. By (probably) the late 370s, Ambrose had transformed the tradition (deriving from Origen) of the bride of the Song as the ‘soul’ into a virgin, and then ‘began to extend the ascetic ideal onto the whole of the Christianity community’ (p. 136). In later ‘mystical’ writings, Ambrose calls on the Song to bridge ‘the corporate body of the church and the individual bodies of Christians’ (p. 157): the virgin's vocation now seems indistinguishable from the Christian's. Shuve shows how the interpretations of Ambrose and Jerome differed from those of Origen, even though his writings on the Song had provided considerable inspiration.
By Jerome's time, the text of the Song had been so thoroughly asceticised that ‘pro-marriage’ interpretations stood as reactions to asceticisation, not vice-versa. Jerome, who made the act of reading Scripture a prelude to ‘the erotic encounter with the divine’ (p. 189), bypassed ecclesiology. While Jerome's letters explore the Song ‘for pearls of ascetic wisdom’, in Against Jovinian, he reads the Song as ‘a narrative about the coming of Christ and the emergence of the Church’: here, ‘virginity becomes the hallmark of the New Covenant’ (p. 207). Shuve's fine study -- detailed, scholarly and smoothly-written -- opens new vistas on the multifarious uses to which the Song of Songs could be put in late ancient Latin Christianity.
