Flora Unveiled

280 i Flora Unveiled

The moral to this parable is summarized in the title:  “It Is Obligatory to Follow the
Prophet (May Peace Be upon Him) in All Matters Pertaining to Religion, But One Is Free
to Act on One’s Own Opinion in Matters which Pertain to Technical Skill.” Thus medi-
eval Islam seems to have been unique among the three Abrahamic religions in making an
explicit distinction between sacred writ and “technical skill” (science).

The Hortus Conclusus: Women as Walled Gardens

The metaphor of the virginal young woman as a walled garden^32 had existed in the poetic
tradition of the Near East since the Bronze Age. We encounter it most familiarly in the
biblical “Song of Songs,” as discussed in Chapter 5, in which the erotic descriptions of the
hortus conclusus,^33 or “enclosed garden,” celebrate the sensuality of love between a man and
a woman, and God is never mentioned. To both Jewish and Christian theologians, such
lyrical celebrations of sexuality smacked of paganism and were therefore unacceptable. As
mentioned earlier, the first- century ce Jewish philosopher Philo’s solution to this problem
was to declare that all scripture, especially those passages dealing with romance and nup-
tials, must be interpreted allegorically. For Philo, the underlying meaning of the “Song of
Songs” was the love of God for his Chosen People, an interpretation with which rabbis and
the devout could feel comfortable.
Early Christian theologians, such as Origen, adopted the Jewish solution of interpret-
ing the “Song of Songs” allegorically, but instead of God’s love for his Chosen People, the
allegory became the love of Christ for his Church. However, the metaphor of the Church
as a bride in an enclosed garden (hortus conclusus) was apparently a difficult abstraction
for ordinary people to grasp, and it required endless exegeses. Bishop Ambrose of Milan’s
labored attempt at an explanation probably went over the heads of the average church- goer:

So the holy church, ignorant of wedlock, but fertile in bearing, is in chastity a virgin,

yet a mother in offspring. She, a virgin, bears us her children, not by a human father,

but by the Spirit. ... She, a virgin, feeds us, not with milk of the body, but with that

of the Apostle.^34

According to Bishop Ambrose, the hortus conclusus clearly symbolizes virginity and
chastit y, not female sensuality as a naïve reading of the “Song of Songs” might lead one to
assume. The Church was like a virgin because it was sealed off from worldly affairs (“wed-
lock”), yet at the same time it was “fertile in bearing.” The plants of the hortus conclusus
produced fruit by the “Spirit” alone, without sexuality or a “human father” (a gardener).
The substitution of a cold abstraction (God’s love of the Church) for the flesh and blood
woman in the hortus conclusus may have satisfied the puritanical scruples of theologians,
but it robbed the poem of its vitality and popular appeal. Perhaps sensing this loss, Bishop
Methodius of Olympus in his parable The Banquet of the Ten Virgins found a way to rein-
state the feminine presence by replacing the bride of the “Song of Songs” with a group of
ten nuns in a Paradise Garden belonging to the Greek goddess Arete, the personification of
Virtue. Methodius wrote that the garden contained: