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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 5h

ah, yes, Origen is still up to his old shenanigans, I see...

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 5h

oh no, I've fallen back into my old evening ways
(sipping whiskey, reading patristic commentaries)

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 15h

lol!!

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 16h

In a certain, harsh light, it looks like medieval excess, the kind that would have exasperated Luther when he read Nicholas.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 16h

Sadly, I do NOT have time to go down this rabbit hole, haha!

But, I am very grateful to know about the reference.

I do find it interesting that it's not until Nicholas of Lyra's late, compiling era that this theme gets picked up!

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Reposted by Steven Rodriguez

Marguerite @margueritek.bsky.social · 18h

Song of Songs is very Advent, imo.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 18h

1. you are AMAZING
2. thank you!

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 19h

If anyone has evidence that contradicts this, please correct me!

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 19h

Kind of shocking to me that, as far as I can tell, no early Christian commentators (or even Medieval readers) interpreted Song of Songs 8:5 as a figure of Mary/Jesus:

"There your mother was in labor with you; there she who bore you was in labor."

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 19h

Very interesting parallel between Virgil's Eclogues and Song of Songs:

Both collections of poems have fraught, ambiguous relationships to the paradigmatic warlords of their context—Mark Antony and Octavian for Virgil and Solomon for Song of Songs.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 20h

The Idylls of Theocritus, the Eclogues of Virgil—these pastoral poems are self-evidently fantasy. They are not even trying to hide that they are the projections of urbane and cynical city folk onto a lost rustic ideal.

So what about Song of Songs?

Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 20h

Outside of our industrialized, bourgeois comfort, the vision of Song of Songs—of a land at peace and flourishing—could only be delusional fantasy or eschatological hope.

Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 20h

Perhaps the biggest obstacle for Americans reading Song of Songs is not our specific cultural weirdness about sex.

Perhaps it is that we have not personally experienced famine, civil war, conquest, or exile.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 20h

Which series should I preach for Advent?

Songs of Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, and Song of Songs

or

4 weeks from Song of Songs?

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 20h

...and if I crack open my volumes of Bernard of Clairvaux, he's gonna show me a dozen MORE potential sermons from Song of Songs...

Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 20h

The problem with planning to preach one sermon from Song of Songs for Advent is that I am quickly seeing a half dozen Advent sermons in Song of Songs.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 20h

It's that time, happens every time, the time to read the end of the Aeneid and get angry

Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 1d

Keeping alive the Homeric “skill” of insulting your opponents, among his many insults, Virgil has Turnus call Aeneas a “Phrygian eunuch.”

Is there a precedent for this in Homer?

Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 1d

In this context, the nonviolent imagery of Song of Songs—in this case, a stag running free instead of dying in a pool of blood—really stands out. END

Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 1d

But in the ancient world, sex and violence *were* often linked. If all you had was Homer, it would be very hard to imagine a world where they were not inseparably linked.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 1d

It may be too much to say that the poem is deliberately subverting the hunting-as-sex metaphor, but the contrast is still there.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 1d

So it is quite striking to come back to the Biblical book of Song of Songs and see that the hunting-as-sex metaphor is not there. In fact, the groom is likened to a stag who must keep running, seemingly to stay alive.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 1d

The Gawain author picks up this Virgilian juxtaposition and turns it into the interwoven twin plots of the lord of the house hunting animals and the lady of the house seducing Gawain.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 1d

There is a tradition thematically linking hunting and sex. It's so obvious that it's kind of a cliche. In Book 4 of the Aeneid, Virgil juxtaposes a hunting party with Dido and Aeneas having sex in the cave.

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Steven Rodriguez @smarcorodriguez.bsky.social · 2d

Ticket to Ride, Philosophy Edition: THE GREAT TRAIN OF BEING

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