Godly Bridegroom and Human Bride

Chapter 9 Godly Bridegroom and Human Bride

Andrew Galloway

A long Judeo-Christian tradition defines the relation of God to the human be- ings who serve and love him as a marriage: a human wife (sponsa) and divine bridegroom (Sponsus). Initially, and to some extent fundamentally throughout, this figure expresses the commitment of a chosen people to God, an en- during covenant on both sides, although at a level of emotional intensity far beyond the Abrahamic covenant. The simile or metaphor is well established already by the time of the Masoretic Hebrew Bible, wherein the people of Is- rael are a “wife” to God, either faithful (as in Hosea 2:22-33) or erring and adul- terous (as in Jeremiah 3:8), sometimes called back to her proper husband “as a woman forsaken and mourning in spirit” (Isaiah 54:6). Early Christian writings adopted this allegory of a chosen but erring people in a range of ways. Primary was the analogy of Christ’s love for the church to a marriage, as in Ephesians 5:22-33: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ also loved the church and de- livered himself up for it.” More allegorical or enigmatic senses appear as well. In the gospel of John, John the Baptist declares that “he that has the bride is the bridegroom; but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices with joy because of the bridegroom’s voice” (John 3:29). This, the only New Testament passage using the word ‘bride’ in this connection (sponsa, in the Latin Vulgate, νύμϕη, ‘newlywed bride’ in the NT Greek), leaves unclear just who the “bride” is, as distinct from the “friend of the bridegroom” who rejoices more fully in the bridegroom’s voice. Other New Testament passages mention Jesus as the “bridegroom,” thus imply but do not identify a “bride” (Matt. 9:15, Mark 2:19, Luke 5:34). The idea of loving and marrying a personified “wisdom” (sapientia, in the Vulgate Bible) appears in the book of Wisdom, in terms that Christians trans- lated easily into humanity’s marriage to Jesus (called “Wisdom” in many Chris- tian Trinitarian contexts): “Her [Sapientia] have I loved, and have sought her out from my youth, and have desired to take her for my spouse: and I became a lover of her beauty” (8:2). Most gloriously poetic and erotic, however, and a central witness to the interpretive network from which all these early usages derive, is the Song of Songs, whose inclusion in the Hebrew and Chris- tian Bibles suggest a deep tradition of allegorical interpretation (whether it originated as courtly epithalamion or religious song remains an open ques-

© KoninklijkeBrillNV,Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004409422_011 190 Galloway tion). With its exotic imagery and sensuous but poignant narrative, the Song of Songs more than any other work suggests that the “marriage” between God and humanity could be a mutually desirous relationship, whose elements of longing, seduction, and delight, amid choruses of others’ celebration of that union, define the couple’s relationship as neither simply erotic love nor religious commitment in any law-driven or covenantal sense, but as long-sought consummation of mutual desire. The Song of Songs’ obscure but hauntingly beautiful similes offer this idea as a mystery, and it became a central one in the Christian tradition, opening into further intimacy with Christianity’s focus on the individual soul’s devotion to God. The purpose of this chapter is to indicate the outlines and something of the complexity of this tradition in medieval Christian literary and religious culture. Examples are chosen mainly from European and, especially, English settings, to show both key developments in the Christian west and the tradition’s capacity to metamorphose into other ideas and images, including some featuring rather different relations between God and the church or soul. For instance, the human worshipper is sometimes granted an infant’s intimacy with a maternal lactating Bridegroom; the believer’s growth of faith can be figured as a kind of gestation; defining the church that encompasses such rela- tionships is a further challenge. But the main focus here is on the marriage of God and humanity, since this is so significant yet so alien a concept to modern outlooks that we can easily overlook it, misunderstanding the texts and images or underestimating their sophistication and self-consciousness. And although the idea of an intimate “marriage” with Christ is perhaps most familiar to modern readers through the narratives or images of women mystics or visionaries, nonetheless, this chapter will not focus simply on those, since to do so would isolate them from the larger traditions they use and obscure the many texts and outlooks that constitute the full scope of this idea. To appreciate the many works, images, and perspectives in medieval Christianity developing the idea of the godly Bridegroom and the human bride requires a wide and adventur- ous surveying, even if that must leave readers to locate for themselves most instances of and responses to this tradition.

1 The Church as Spouse

The idea of the church as “spouse” of God remained prominent throughout the medieval period (and beyond: some Puritans advanced this view). The feminine Ecclesia is a nubile figure in many an image from late Antiquity on. Straight-forward as that notion might seem, it could become complex. In the