Reflections on the Commentaries
Basit Bilal Koshul,
Concordia College
This year's discussion at the annual SSR meeting centered around the
reflections offered by Davis, Safi and Goshen-Gottstein on the
relationship of love/Song of Songs with Scripture as a whole. In Richardson's words the panelist provided a
sampling of "theologies of love" to be read and commented upon. The
reflections by these panelists elicited more commentaries from the SSR
group than the panelists of previous years. From this greater quantity
emerge a qualitative and thematic depth that built upon and intensified
the SSR's prior work. Both the quantity and the quality of the
commentaries present a daunting task for anyone trying to present a
coherent and intelligible "summary" of the discussion initiated by the
reflections of the panelists. Still, the daunting task was made much
easier for me upon the discovery of certain themes that many of the
commentaries stressed — albeit in a variety of different ways.
Stated in summary fashion these themes are:
- Rupture and separation are not inherently (or ontologically)
tragic. Under certain circumstances separation and rupture are
potentially (or pragmatically) the prelude to the birth of new and
higher ideals.
- The resources for repairing/healing the rupture/separation are
located within that which is ruptured/separated.
- A third theme, related to the first two, that is to be found in a
number of the commentaries is: Given the fact that rupture and
separation entail the emergence of multiplicity from an originary unity,
the task of repair and healing is consequently (and necessarily) a
communal undertaking.
It is obviously the case that many, if not all, of the commentators
said much more than the three themes noted above. But since these are
the themes that I found to be discussed most often in the commentaries,
the focus of my summary will revolve around them — for no other
purpose than to make the task of summarizing manageable.
The Creative Possibilities of Rupture and Separation
The point that rupture, separation (or sin) has a dual character,
being both tragic and potentially generative, is a key point in Afzaal's discussion. He notes that the
God-human, human-nature and male-female ruptures identified by Davis in
her commentary on the Song of Songs are tragic ruptures indeed. They
are tragic because of the suffering and pain that results from the
ruptures. But from a particular Islamic/Qur'anic perspective these
ruptures should not be viewed as the product or manifestation of sin, or
a fall from an original state of spotless, innocent creation. These
ruptures can be viewed as "creative ruptures" whose bridging contains
the possibility of bringing a new state of creation into being, one
which is in some sense "more" or "better" than the one that preceded the
ruptures. In other words the possibility of healing the ruptures brings
with it the possibility of tasting a sweetness and bliss that could not
be had in the absence of the ruptures. Muers, summarizing the collective
reflections of the Cambridge Society for Biblical Reasoning, comes to a
conclusion analogous to Goshen-Gottstein's "thinking with" and "thinking
about" distinction. She notes that "thinking with" the Song signifies a
"drawing in" of the reader into the text that recreates the world
— a recreation that is the product of the "closest possible
relationship to another." Presumably this "closest possible
relationship" is possible only in the aftermath of separation. Muers
goes on to note that the "thinking about" the Song means that "the
scriptural world, the natural world and the political world are all
drawn into the text, and draw more and more deeply into the encounter
between the lovers." In other words rupture and separation (while
tragic and painful) bring with them the possibility of a deepened and
more profound relationality between the reunited "lovers" that would not
be possible in the absence of rupture and separation.
Pecknold echoes the sentiments of
Afzaal and Muers. He notes that the text of the Song is in a sense
"external" to the reader, but it is also generative because it is the
text "which generates even our belonging within and beyond its borders."
In other words the texts plays the dual role of situating the reader
both inside its narrative and outside its narrative — thereby
simultaneously (and paradoxically) giving rise to alienated otherness
and intimate identity. At the same time that the text plays this dual
role, it describes the city, the garden and love in dualistic and
paradoxical terms. The city is simultaneously a place of violence and a
place of beauty (i.e. the beautiful garden in the city.) The garden is
symbolic of the greatest of all tragedies (i.e. the Fall) and also
symbolic of a place of abundance and plentitude. In the words of
Cooley, the garden is symbolic of betrayal/ denial and
recognition/resurrection. Love is something that is carnal (i.e. love
of the body) but also something spiritual (i.e. love of beauty). Just
as the text of the Song "others" (thereby alienating him/her), but then
draws the reader into its narrative (thereby establishing an intimate
relationship with him/her), it also paves the way for establishing an
intimate relationship with that which has been otherwise alienated. Elkins states this point in different
terms. He notes that that the Song intimates that there is a gap
between seeking perfection and finding perfection, between fulfillment
and deferral. It is precisely in these gaps between polar opposites
that the creative space and possibilities of the text are to be
located:
[The] Song of Songs functions like a metaphor: it creates meaning by
connecting different conceptual fields through a complex interpretive
matrix that gives meaning to that which, outside the Song, is
uninterpreted.
For Afzaal, Muers, Pecknold and Elkins, the conditions of rupture,
separation and brokenness are not just tragic, they are also potentially
creative.
How is it logically possible that that which is painful and tragic
can become potentially creative? The answer to this apparent
contradiction lies in the mystery that is love. Following the exegesis
of Prophetic sayings offered by classical Muslim commentators and cited
by Safi, Umar notes that God's intense love not only of initiated the
process of creation and sustains all of creation (in its "otherness")
but also continuously perpetuates the activity of creating. Umar notes:
God created the world through love, so love produces the multiplicity
that fills the universe. He never ceases loving the creatures, so He
never ceases creating them, and this keeps the universe in a perpetual
state of transformation and flux.
It is out of His love that God created the universe and the
multiplicity in the universe. In a particular sense the love of God can
be seen as the "cause" of separation and rupture. But conversely (and
paradoxically) it is only through love that separated and estranged
parties can be reunited:
love for God grows up from the basic declaration of faith, the assertion
of God's unique reality "No god but God." Since love is a divine
attribute, it follows that "There is no true lover and no true beloved
but God." Once the lovers see things clearly, they find that they love
everything in creation, because all of creation displays God's beauty,
and their own love displays God's love. Ibn 'Arabi tells us that when
the seekers pass beyond "natural" and "spiritual" love, they reach the
stage of "divine" love, where they love God in all things through God's
own love of the things. Then they love all things in every dimension of
existence.
The same love that caused the original act of creation, thereby
ushering in rupture and separation, initiates the process of healing and
reconciliation. But the world that comes into existence as a result of
this healing and reconciliation will be a "new creation" created by
unified (i.e. reconciled) wills of the love and beloved. In the words
of Iqbal:
Why should I ask the sages about my origin,
It is my ultimate potential that I am really concerned about.
Raise your khudi (self) to such heights that before every decree,
God Himself asks "Tell me, what is it that you desire?"
The Broken Text as Resource for Repair
Given the fact that the world and everything in it appears to be
broken, given the fact that the Song of Songs itself appears to be
broken, where are the possibilities of repair to be found? This is a
pressing question in light of the fact that such repair and
reconciliation are the necessary prerequisites for the creation of a new
world. The answer to this question is provided by a number of the
commentaries on the structure of the Song of Songs. Young, following Goshen-Gottstein, focuses
on the "brokenness" of the Song itself. Young notes that the Song "is
both intertextual and broken all the way down — in its writing, in
its canonization and in its history of interpretation." For Young the
Song functions as an icon of rupture/separation, textually, historically
and hermeneutically. But it is precisely the "brokenness" of the Song
that makes it possible for the reader to discover that "the texts are
broken open so as to provide new life for the communities that take them
up." Young's valuation of the reparative capabilities of "broken" texts
is stated in even more forceful terms by Nelkin. Nelkin posits that the "Song's
central feature is that it is itself a text that heals, by rereading
Scripture's broken texts in the light of recovered intimacy." For both
Young and Nelkin, the broken character of the text serves as an
invitation to the reader to bring the narrative of his/her (ruptured?)
life into conversation with the "ruptured" narrative of the text,
thereby initiating the process of healing both of the ruptures. Young
goes on to notes that the reparative possibilities in brokenness are a
character of the Qur'anic discourse also. Commenting on Safi's
discussion of the history on Qur'anic exegesis Young observes: "It is as
if the Qur'an, and/or its tradition of interpretation, allows itself to
be broken open so as to restore the vitality and inspiration of the
community." In their own ways, Young and Nelkin are arguing that that
which is "broken" also contains the resources necessary for initiating
the healing process.
Davies' reflections locate the
reparative potential of broken texts in the broken texts themselves.
Beginning with the observations of Akiva and Origen, Davies focuses on
the special status of the Song within the canon of Scripture. For Akiva
the Song is the "holy of holies" and for Origen it is "the key to
Biblical exegesis." Consequently whatever is said about the Song is
reflective of the character of Scripture as a whole. Davies posits that
the text of the Song displays a degree of self-awareness in that the
Song "knows that that it is both canonical and uniquely, disruptively
polysemic." He goes on to note that the Song of Songs is,
an embodied thematic, pervasively reproduced in the stylistic surface of
the text, in the service of a work which resists any straightforward
assimilation into the narrativity of the canon, and which, as a
self-thematizing, self-presenting text-body metaphor, seems to display
canonically the nature of canonicity itself.
For Davies this is not just a description of the canonical and
polysemic character of the Song. This description provides a model of
Biblical hermeneutics as it was practiced by the early Rabbis - a
practiced that is embodied in the contemporary work of Ochs and Halivni.
This model of hermeneutics, based upon a specific appreciation of the
nature of canon and polysemy, undercuts the fundamentalist, sectarian
and arbitrarily post-modern approaches to hermeneutics. Kepnes' observations echo Davies' position
on this particular issue. Kepnes notes that the midrashic literature
embodies a praxis of this model - a model that maintains a "balance"
between hyper-literal and hyper-allegorical readings of the Song. In
short, the brokenness of the Song of Songs also contains within itself a
hermeneutical model of how the brokenness is to be repaired, thereby
countering the claims of inerrant literalism of fundamentalist/sectarian
readings and relativistic post-modern readings.
The Communal Character of Repair
Commenting on Davis's insights on the role and character of the Song
in the practice of interpretation, Harvey posits that Davis's insights allow
us to look at Goshen-Gottstein's "thinking with" and "thinking of"
distinction in a new way. He reaches this conclusion by looking at the
way that the activity of Scriptural Reasoning is actually carried out.
Harvey notes: "Scriptural Reasoning is not only thinking of Scripture
and with Scripture, but also thinking with friends and fellow travelers
about what we read in Scripture." This makes the practice of
thinking with/of Scripture a communal activity. For Harvey, the
communal aspect of interpretation is also located in the text/character
of the Song: "The meaning of the Song, according to Davis, is in its
interaction with the other texts of Scripture, as these are read
within an ongoing tradition." In looking at the issue from this
perspective, Harvey proposes a way of healing the rupture between the
tree of knowledge (critical, historical biblical scholarship) and the
tree of life (scripture itself.) In other words, the movement towards
this healing is not the result of individual effort cut off from life of
the community as a whole. And one may add that the healing is also not
the result of the efforts of a community cut off from the flow of
history (i.e. disregarding how previous communities interpreted the same
texts.) The fact that the "broken" text of the Song contains the
resources necessary for initiating the process of healing and that this
process can meaningfully unfold only in a communal setting is forcefully
stated by Hardy in these words:
The Song shows that the most intense awareness of the Lord requires, and
occurs in, the deepest involvement with the Lord in the full scope of
life with each other in the world, and vice versa.
While the healing process entails the overcoming of rupture and
distance between two parties, it does not mean the conflation of
identities or the complete exposition of the beloved. Hardy notes that
on the one hand "the Song places readers in a dynamic and self-involving
field of metaphors, through which they learn the identity of the
beloved." But at the same time "the Song allows the beloved to be
mysterious and one with whom we may be intimately involved."
Consequently, while "an amazing conjunction of identity and intimacy
appears" as a natural outcome of the healing process, it in no way
diminishes the element of mystery that is at the core of the
relationship. What Hardy calls "the deepest involvement" is specified
by Quash as "naming and recognizing."
For Quash, the human being is deeply involved with the created world as
its self-consciousness that is able to recognize and name different
parts of creation. Quash posits that this places the human being in the
mediating ("priestly") position between God and creation — but only
if the recognizing and naming is done in love. In other words, the
human being is in a position to repair the rupture between the Creator
and creation, if certain conditions are met. For Quash one of these
conditions is that we as human beings recognize and name each other in
love (i.e. repair the ruptures in the human community itself.) He
notes:
When we do acknowledge and recognize one another in love…we are
actually sharing in the divine life — we are more adequately
reflecting the image of God. For God is himself a recognizer [and
namer.]
Given what Harvey, Hardy and Quash have said, it is difficult to
imagine the task of repair and healing taking place apart from a
communal effort. Ford sees the communal
efforts to grapple with the issues raised by reflections on the Song of
Songs as a potential model of what might be possible in the future:
Those 'bewildered by the effusion of the Divine love' might resonate
both with Davis' lovers of God who 'fall silent, or babble more or less
incoherently' (15) and also with Goshen-Gottstein himself 'on the brink
of assenting to a given interpretation of the Song' while 'hopelessly
struggling to locate a core of meaning with which I could resonate
religiously.' (12) We may be able, through an Abrahamic collegiality
whose heart and hope is friendship, to unite love and wisdom in ways
that help to serve the healing and flourishing of ourselves, our
religious communities, our societies — and even our academic
disciplines and institutions. Maybe.
In light of the intensity and the extensity of the discussion that
the papers by Goshen-Gottstein, Davis and Safi/Huda produced, the
"maybe" might be more than a far off hope — it may be a real
possibility.
In summary, one of the themes that was detailed by a number of the
commentators on this year's topic of the "theologies of love" was that
rupture and separation are not intrinsically tragic, they are
potentially creative. Another theme that was detailed in some of the
commentaries was that that which is broken or ruptured contains the
resources for repair and healing within itself. Related to both of
these themes was that the activity of repair and healing is a communal
activity that involves a community of inquirers brought together from a
variety of places and ages. While the three themes may seem to be
unrelated, none of the three are possible or comprehendible in the
absence of love — this is the one element that holds these three
seemingly disparate themes (and everything else in the world)
together.
© 2003, Society for Scriptural
Reasoning
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