Published in Irenaeus and His Traditions (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 81-88. 1 IRENAEUS’ CONTRIBUTION TO EARLY CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION OF THE SONG OF SONGS KARL SHUVE The title of this paper may strike the reader as odd, for Irenaeus neither cited nor alluded to the Song of Songs – at least as far as our extant evidence goes. What I hope to demonstrate, however, is that the bishop of Lyons had an important role to play in establishing the contextual framework according to which the Song would be interpreted by subsequent Christian exegetes. In so doing, I am contesting a trend in contemporary scholarship that attributes the rise in early Christian interest in the Song, which began in the early third century, to a growing ascetic impulse that sought to erase, through various interpretive strategies, the literal force of Old Testament nuptial texts. 1 Through the first two centuries of the Common Era, the Song of Songs was not cited by any Christian authors. It is virtually alone among the biblical books in this regard. Beginning with a citation of a single verse (Song 4:8) in Tertullian’s Adversus Marcionem (4.11.8), the landscape begins to change as we approach the third century. Hippolytus is the first to write a commentary on the Song of Songs, although this survives complete only in two Georgian manuscripts, which are based upon an Armenian translation of the original Greek. 2 It is Origen, however, who, as he so often does, defines the terms according to which the Song will be read for centuries. He penned no less than three works on the subject – a lost commentary from his youth, and a commentary and two homilies dating to his time in Athens and Caesarea 3 – in each instance reading the Song as a dramatic enactment of the desirous longing of the corporate Church and individual soul for the saving union with the Word of God. 4 Victorinus of Poetovio is the only other third century writer to compose a commentary on 1 This theme is explored at length in Elizabeth A. Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 2 There is, additionally, a lengthy Armenian fragment of chapters 24 and 25 and several Greek fragments from a paraphrase of Hippolytus’ exegetical works. For a brief introduction and Latin translation, see Georges Garitte, Traités d’Hippolyte sur David et Goliath, sur le Cantique des cantiques et sur l’Antéchrist: version géorgienne (CSCO 263; Louvain, 1965), esp. pp. i-iv. 3 The evidence for an early work (or works) on the Song comes from a letter of Jerome and the Philocalia of Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa. There is, however, a slight discrepancy as to whether Origen composed one or two ‘tomes’: contrast Jerome’s ‘scripsit…in Canticum Canticorum libros X etalios tomos II, quos super scripsit in adulescentia’ (ep. 33.4; CSEL 54, p. 257) with the claim in the Philocalia, ‘e)k tou= ei)j to\ )=Asma mikrou= to/mou o(\n e)n th= neo/thti e)/grayen’ (7.1; SC 302, p. 326). The Commentary, so Eusebius tells us, is in ten books, with the first five written in Athens, and the remaining five completed upon his return to Caesarea (HE 6.32.1-2). This would place its composition around the years 245-7. Regarding the Homilies, Jerome had access to two alone, and there is no other mention of them in Antiquity that would indicate how many Origen delivered. It is traditionally estimated that they were delivered in the years following 245, on the basis of Eusebius’ remark that Origen did not allow his diale/ceij to be until he was older than sixty years of age (HE 6.36.1). J. Christopher King, Origen on the Song of Songs as the Spirit of Scripture: The Bridegroom’s Perfect Marriage Song (Oxford: OUP, 2005), 10-11, in my view, successfully refutes the equation of diale/ceij with homilies, and argues persuasively for placing his preaching on the Song several years before the composition of the Commentary, to the years 241-2. 4 Hom. In Cant. 1.1; Comm. In Cant. praef.