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118 Recent Books
However he does not remind us of Origen’s act of self-castration, a proceeding
suggesting that this Father’s efforts to hold together the sexual and the
spiritual were not entirely successful. Others in the same Christian mystical
tradition have been inspired by the Song without recourse to the knife,
most notably St John of the Cross, whose own Spiritual Canticle, Watson
suggests, comes closest in its literary and spiritual mastery to the Song itself.
Most of these pages are devoted to an extended devotional
commentary on the text of the Song. These lovely lyrics forbid a plodding
verse-by-verse exposition. Instead Watson divides the Song into fifty
sections and, on each, offers a searching reflection on one or more of the
text’s images, suggesting what they might mean to the Christian reader. A
particularly happy feature of these reflections is the frequent choice of a
pertinent hymn or poem—more than once from the works of George
Herbert—to illuminate one or other of the Song’s great themes.
The songs of the Song of Songs, like the parables of Jesus, are
mysterious and, again like the parables of Jesus, they leave the last word on
what they mean to those who read them. ‘Those who have ears to hear, let
them hear.’ Watson does not try to banish the book’s many mysteries. He
makes his own suggestions and he will not mind if we do not always follow
him. A mention in the Song of an ‘orchard of pomegranates’ (4:13), for
example, sets Watson off on a treasure hunt through the scriptural
references to pomegranates. Moses, we are reminded, ordered Aaron to adorn
the hem of his ephod with woven pomegranates. Ephods call to mind—at
least to Watson’s mind—‘garments such as the surplice, stole and vestments’
(p.100) and the worthiness or otherwise of the minister of the sacraments.
We have come a long way from the lady whose ‘lips distil nectar’ (4:11).
Graeme Watson recognises that the Song of Songs celebrates both
divine and human love. The question—there is no harder one—is how
these loves relate. The Song is about the relationship between the soul—and
the fellowship of souls—and the love that hung the stars. It is also about
the love between a boy and the girl next door. It was Dante who taught us
that—the source of all our loves being a single fountain—the latter love is
in principle no less lofty than the former. Watson robustly affirms that a
literal reading of the Song is an entirely proper one. He insists, however,
that, if read exclusively as a paean in praise of human love, it becomes
almost impossible to make sense of much of the Song’s language. (But is
not most pillow-talk gobbledegook?) For Watson the Song’s ‘less obvious
meanings … can transcend even the finest and deepest of human
relationships’ (p.5) and so it is on these obscurer connotations he broods.
There is much, much, for our profit in his reflections. But the commentary