Irenaeus

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Chapter Six

Irenaeus’s Contribution to Early Christian

Interpretation of the Song of Songs

Karl Shuve

T

he title of this chapter 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 nup-

tial texts.^1

The Rise of Song Interpretation
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 Mar-
cionem (IV.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 Arme-
nian 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 fewer 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 Vic-
torinus of Poetovio is the only other third-century writer to compose a commentary
on the Song,^5 but he is followed in the fourth and fifth centuries by Gregory of Nyssa,
Nilus of Ancyra, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Gregory of Elvira, and Apponius.^6
How can this increase in the prominence of the Song in early Christian discourse
be explained? Much of the attention has, unsurprisingly, focused on Origen. And, again
unsurprisingly, much of it has been critical and tinged with cynicism.^7 Indeed, remarking