Tag Archives: Gregory of Nyssa

“Arise, Come, My Love… My Dove”

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 Altarpiece depicts the Mother of God holding Christ while treading the serpent underfoot in St. Jürgen church in Gettorf (Schleswig-Holstein). In Genesis, God tells the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel” (Genesis 3: 14 – 15). Christians have always understood this promise to be made not to Eve, but to the new Eve, the Virgin Mary.
“He will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel.” Scripture scholars over the years have debated regarding the word “he.”  Should it be translated he or she or even they? In other words, the he is generally understood to refer to the Messiah but can also be understood to refer to Mary and to the descendants of Mary, as well; i.e., Christ and the Church.

“Arise, come my love, my beautiful one, my dove” (Song of Songs 2:13-14).

“The bride hears this command,” St. Gregory of Nyssa explains, “and she is empowered by the word; she arises, advances, comes close, becomes beautiful, is called a dove. Now, how can you see a beautiful image in a mirror unless something beautiful has come near the mirror? So it is with the mirror of human nature: it cannot become beautiful until it draws near to the Beautiful and is transformed by the divine Beauty.”

The bride in the Song of Songs becomes beautiful because she comes close to the bridegroom, who is Beauty itself. Or, she has embraced the Beauty which has come close to her. The movement is twofold: bride and groom approach each other and the groom proclaims his desire for his beautiful bride, who becomes beautiful because she is close to him.

But this beauty is not a static presence. The bride becomes more beautiful the closer she is to the groom and the longer she remains there but if she were to pull away, her beauty would fade just as the reflection in the mirror fades if what is reflected is taken away. Her beauty is constantly growing or shriveling, intense and intensifying or fading and faded.

Many of us have heard the quote from Dostoevsky’s book The Idiot that “beauty will save the world”…. But we do need to read the whole conversation in the book to get the fuller picture, for this statement is soon followed by the question, “But what is beauty?” just as Pilate asked, “What is truth?”

St. Gregory tells us, “When our human nature lay fallen upon the earth, it looked towards the serpent and reflected it. But now our nature has arisen and looks toward the Beautiful, turning its back on sin and reflecting the Beauty which it faces. For now it looks at that archetypal Beauty… turning towards the light, it has been made into the image of light and within this light it has taken on the lovely form of the dove–I mean the Dove that symbolizes the presence of the Holy Spirit.”

Human nature has turned its back on the serpent and now reflects the divine Beauty, radiant and filled with light. The bride, now the beautiful one because of of the Beauty she reflects, is also the place where the Dove can be found.

“Pleasing is the fragrance of your perfumes….”

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This image of the Mother of God, “Health/Salvation of the Roman People,” dates from the 6th century and is kept in a chapel of the St. Mary Major basilica in Rome. The Mother of God is frequently identified with the bride in the Song of Songs; just as this image is reputed to bring health and salvation to those who venerate it, the fragrance which the bride shares with her companions also brings health and salvation.

“Even though one may gather every perfume and every flower of fragrance from all the different meadows of virtue and is able to make one’s whole life fragrant with the scent of all these virtuous actions … still one could not look steadily upon the Bridegroom, the Word of God, any more than one could look directly at the sun.”

St. Gregory of Nyssa is commenting on a verse from the Song of Songs:

“Pleasing is the fragrance of your perfumes;
    your name is like perfume poured out.” (Song of Songs 1:3)

St. Gregory goes on to quote St. Paul the Apostle, who said that he was “the good fragrance of Christ” (2 Cor. 2:15). St. Gregory points out that the apostle “inhaled the fragrance of that inaccessible and transcendent grace, offering himself to others as a kind of incense for them to partake of according to their ability….” St. Gregory urges us to treasure this fragrance in our hearts, as the bride does in the Song of Songs. The bride makes a sachet of this fragrant perfume and keeps it between her breasts; the warmth of her heart enables all her actions to spread the beautiful scent of the perfume.

Some manuscripts specify that this perfume is frankincense or myrrh. In the medical theory of the ancient world, these scents strengthened and energized certain animals but acted as poison to others. The effect of these scents on humans, however, was the result of human choice: a person could choose to be energized and invigorated by the scent or to be weakened and debilitated by the scent.

The choice is up to us.

“My Beloved is a sachet of Myrrh”

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Medieval illumination of the royal couple in the Old Testament Song of Songs, also known as the Song of Solomon

“My beloved is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts.” (Song of Solomon 1:13 ) St. Gregory of Nyssa comments on this, saying: “The Lord Himself, having become a balsam of myrrh (in His death) and taken residence in my heart itself, occupies the center of my awareness.” St. Bernard of Clairvaux also understands the bitter myrrh as an emblem not only of Christ in the Passion but as the personal repentance of each believer. “This perfume of repentance,” he preaches, “reaches to the very abodes of the blessed in heaven…. God will not scorn this crushed and broken spirit. This [myrrh] not only inspires us to amend our lives but even makes the angels dance for joy,” because the angels greatly rejoice over one sinner who repents. “Those who have renounced sinful ways are inevitably gripped by bitterness and confusion… like fresh wounds” but the bitterness of the myrrh gives way to the sweet scent of the oil of gladness described in Psalm 45:8 (which also describes the royal bride preparing to wed her groom).

In modern Judaism the Song is read on the Sabbath during the Passover, which marks the beginning of the grain harvest as well as commemorating the Exodus from Egypt. Jewish tradition reads it as an allegory of the relationship between God and Israel, while Christian tradition reads it as an allegory of Christ and his “bride”, the Church.

The Church’s interpretation of the Song as evidence of God’s love for his people, both collectively and individually, began with Origen. Over the centuries the emphases of interpretation shifted: first, reading the Song as a depiction of the love between Christ and Church; in the 11th century, it was read as describing the relationship between Christ and each Christian; in the 12th century the Bride was seen as the Virgin Mary, Each of these new readings absorbed rather than simply replaced earlier interpretations, so that the commentary became ever more complex. Reading the Song of Songs as a theological metaphor reveals the two partners–whether understood as Christ and the Church, Christ and each believer, or God and the Blessed Virgin–are eternally bound in a relationship that the idea of “marriage” can only approximate.