‘Eat, Friends, Drink. Be Drunk With Love' [Song of Songs 5:2] — A Reflection

The biblical base for the celibate life is traditionally, and ironically, understood as the Song of Songs. The Bride of Christ is encouraged to seek total union with him in a mystical marriage such as that spoken of by Bernard of Clairvaux. For Bernard, the Song of Songs is the greatest biblical revelation of divine love but not one of mutual love. Women have, under the guise of desire, been encouraged to deny the physical nature of that desire and become domesticated through chaste reflections on the object of their love. A reversal has taken place, whereas the Song of Songs clearly shows the body as a medium of divine/human expression and creativity, celibacy has, as defined over the centuries since Origen tended to close people down. The Christian tradition has used this text to underpin its dualistic and hierarchical rhetoric about the sustaining power of the mystical marriage as opposed to the fleeting and shallow pleasures of sexual love.