"Roomy Hearts" in a "More Spacious World": Origen of Alexandria and Ellen Davis on the Song of Songs

Convinced by these intertextual reasons that the Song must be read figuratively to some degree, Davis offers a reading that is innovative in the best sense. With church tradition, she argues that the Song is first a poem about the restoration of the "vertical" relationship between Israel and God. At the same time, she takes from modern interpreters the argument that the Song represents the restoration of the intimate mutuality between man and woman that was lost in the fall. If the Song is not only about sex, it is indeed alw about sex, pace a good deal of Jewish and Christian traditions. Davis argues that the Song represents Scriptures movement toward repair of that which was lost in the fall, a return to the egalitarianism of Eden itself. Only after the fall was Eve told her desire was to be for her husband in a way that would include his ruling over her. In the Song the bride boldly reverses this judgment when she exclaims "My darling is mine, and toward me is his desire!" (7:11). Davis also sees a third line of argumentation in the Song. For her, the Song represents a return to Eden in its depiction of a restored natural paradise, a sort of ecological eschaton. Though Adam was cursed to work the ground with much toil, in the Song the lovers luxuriate in a natural paradise, the laud of Israel blooming without effort as it did before our first sin.

"Roomy Hearts": Origen8

Perhaps it would be most helpful for our purposes to present Origen's understanding of Scripture, and of God's work through it of returning people to contemplation, in a way that highlights his differences from Davis. Thankfully we can rely here on the scholars in the last half-century who have done the work necessary to give a full account of Origen's theology and exegesis. These, for him, are not at all separated.

An appropriate place to begin is Origen's understanding of cosmology and the divine purpose for creation. The old question to ask of Driven is whether he is more Christian or more Platonist. For Peter Brown, Origin's motivating question is "the old Platonic problem" of how there could he such great diversity among acreated things.9 Origen explains the great disjunctions he observes in the world through an extraordinary account of a prehistoric fall: all creatures are as they are because they have fallen from an original contemplation of God to greater or lesser degrees. God then disciplined us humans by giving us bodies, which are both a punishment and also the very condition of the possibility of our return to God. We can now make definite spiritual progress in this life through ascetic purification of our souls on the way to indefinite growth in contemplation without possibility of any future cooling of ardor, such as that which occasioned the fall.10

For Rowan Williams, Origen's cosmology has its source in a peculiarly biblical problem. The Christian story is filled with "radically disruptive imagery," and yet Christianity also makes "a universalist claim and a claim to be the consummation of a history: continuities and unities must somehow be reinstituted if these claims are to make any sense."11 The Gnostic groups to which Origen was opposed take the disruptive imagery in Scripture to be the final word. In contrast, Origen sees the Christian exegete as one "who can make plain the hidden harmonies" of Scripture and the world.12 The work of both Brown and Williams shows the degree to which Origen has integrated his platonic and scriptural heritages, such that we no longer need to pit the one against the other. They both help us to see that Origen s particular combination of cosmology, askesis, and mystical progress all combine to explain his theology and exegesis of Scripture.