82 Irenaeus: Life, Scripture, Legacyon the subject of Origen and sex requires little nuance or deftness of touch. What else,
other than an allegorical reading, would we expect from a man who, according to Euse-
bius, castrated himself in a youthful fit of piety?^8 As Stephen Moore has argued, “the Song
simply could not be what it seemed to be. That would have been unthinkable... .The
allegorical interpretations of the Song sprang from disinclination, discomfort, or down-
right disgust on the part of pious male exegetes.”^9 The growing ascetic majority, so the
argument goes, constructed a reading of the Song meant to undermine—rather than
uphold—the goodness of marriage and sexual union.
Origen—and, by extension, the tradition—has had his share of defenders. Most
recently, J. Christopher King has mounted an elaborate theological defense, focusing
upon Origen’s nuptial theology^10 and his hermeneutic of the “bodiless” text.^11 He pro-
poses that Origen maintains a “symbolic coherence” between earthly union and its
“corresponding spiritual reality.”^12 But lacking in King is any sort of historical defense
of allegorical exegesis of the Song.^13 That is, to what extent did allegorical readings arise
out of the matrix of first- and second-century Christian thought? What images might
have been conjured in the minds of early Christian readers (and hearers) by the story
of a courtship between a young king and his bride-to-be?
I argue that the early Christian allegorization of the Song is best understood as
emerging, quite organically, from a nuptial theological trajectory that affirms, rather
than denies, the value of the body and sexuality. I rely on David Dawson’s obser-
vation that the “plain” sense of a given text is not an objectively available level of
meaning but is rather a construct conditioned by the cultural expectations of the
community in which it is read, to argue that spiritual readings of the Song reflect a
deeply engrained understanding of the theological significance of nuptial imagery
and not a fear of the erotic.^14
In this account, Irenaeus can be said to make a significant contribution to the
patristic tradition of Song exegesis, even though he never cited the text and wrote his
Adversus haereses decades before the first commentaries were composed. From as early
as the deutero-Pauline epistle to the Ephesians (5:22-31), the union of Christ and the
church has been explained on analogy with the union of man and woman in marriage.
But it is not until Irenaeus, as we shall see, that the analogy of human marriage plays
a significant role in ecclesiological and soteriological discourse. Irenaeus, moreover,
is the first to provide a typological pattern according to which Old Testament nuptial
texts are read as a prophetic witness to Christ’s redemptive act toward a sinful people.
He does this not to repress or downplay the corporeal dimension of marriage, but quite
the opposite, to argue for the essential goodness of embodied existence against an anti-
material spirituality. We shall begin by examining the use of nuptial imagery in the
Apostolic Fathers and Justin Martyr, before turning to Irenaeus.
The Apostolic Fathers and Justin Martyr
We have only one rather elusive example in the Apostolic Fathers of nuptial theology,
in the pseudonymous 2 Clement.^15 This homily blends, rather awkwardly, two key (deu-
tero-)Pauline images—the church as the body of Christ and the male-female union as
sign of the union of Christ and the church: “I do not suppose that you are ignorant that