Sermons on the Song of Songs

“If thou know not thyself, O fairest of women, go forth and follow after the steps of the flocks, and feed thy kids beside the tents of the shepherds.”

“If thou know not thyself, go forth.” The Bridegroom, my brethren, is here administering a sharp and severe reprimand, inasmuch as He uses the expression “go forth.” Such a command servants are wont to hear from their masters when under the influence of excessive anger and indignation, and handmaidens from their mistresses whose deep displeasure they have incurred. “Get thee hence,” cries the wrathful lord or lady, “depart from my presence, get out of my sight, leave my house.” This, then, is the language, harsh and bitter enough, and conveying a stern reproof, in which the Bridegroom addresses His beloved. But He speaks conditionally, “if thou know not thyself.” And certainly He could not employ a more powerful or more efficacious means for inspiring her with terror than to threaten her thus with being sent forth. You will agree with me in this, my brethren, if you consider well whence she is bidden to go and whither. For what else is that change whereof she is here warned but the decline from the spirit to the flesh, from the goods of the soul to earthly desires, from interior peace and joy of heart to worldly tumult and the distractions of temporal cares? That is to say, the Spouse is bidden to go forth to things in which she shall find only labour and pain and affliction of spirit. For the soul that has once learned from the Lord and obtained the grace to enter into herself, and in her own interior to yearn for the presence of God and to “seek His Face at all times”—since “God is a Spirit,” and they that seek Him ought to “walk in the spirit and not in the flesh, so as to live according to the flesh”—such a soul, I say, would scarcely consider the endurance, for a time, of the pains of hell a more terrible and unbearable chastisement, than, after tasting the sweetness of this interior and spiritual life, to have to return to the pleasures, or rather to the troubles of the flesh, and to become again the slave of the insatiable appetite of the senses, of which Ecclesiastes says, “The eye is not filled with seeing nor the ear with hearing.” Attend to one who, learned by experience the truth of what I am saying. “The Lord,” exclaimed the Prophet Jeremias, “is good to them that hope in Him, to the soul that seeketh Him.” Should anyone endeavour to deprive the holy soul of this good which she enjoys in union with her God, I believe she would suffer quite as much as if she saw herself expelled from paradise and driven away from the very gates of glory. Listen to another Prophet speaking in the same sense. “My heart,” sings the Psalmist, “hath said to Thee: my face hath sought Thee; Thy Face, O Lord, will I still seek.” Hence he also says, “It is good for me to adhere to my God.” And again, addressing his soul, “Turn, O my soul, unto thy rest, for the Lord hath been bountiful to thee.” Hence, I say to you, there is nothing so dreaded by the soul that has once been raised to union with the heavenly Bridegroom as to be abandoned by grace and thus, in a manner, obliged to go forth again to the consolations, rather the desolations, of the flesh, and again to endure the distraction and turbulence of the bodily senses.

Therefore, my brethren, truly awful and terrifying is the threat conveyed in the words, “Go forth and feed thy kids.” As much as to say, “Know thyself to be undeserving of that sweet and familiar contemplation of things celestial, spiritual, and divine, which I have hitherto permitted thee. Wherefore, go forth from My sanctuary, which is thine own heart, where thou hast been accustomed to receive with rapture the hidden and holy impressions of wisdom and truth. And for the future, apply thyself to the task of satisfying and pleasing the senses of the flesh.” For by “kids”—which are symbolic of sin and on the Last Day are to stand on the Judge’s left—the Bridegroom means the wandering and wayward sensitive faculties, by which, as through windows, sin and death found entrance to the soul. With this interpretation the words which follow in our text—“beside the tents of the shepherds”—can be perfectly harmonised. For kids have their pasture not, like lambs, above, but beside the tents of the shepherds. That is to say, shepherds, who are truly such, although living in tabernacles on the earth and of the earth, viz., their mortal bodies, wherein they carry on their spiritual warfare, are nevertheless wont to feed the flocks of Christ, not on earthly but on heavenly pastures, since they direct them not according to their own, but according to their Master’s Will. But the kids, that is, the material senses, do not need such spiritual nourishment. “Beside the tents of the shepherds,” viz., amidst all the sensible goods of this world—in the world of bodies—they find wherewith—I will not say to appease but to provoke their desires.

What an ignominious change of occupation, my brethren! She whose only care heretofore was to nourish her soul, whilst a sojourner and an exile here on earth, with the heavenly food of holy meditations, to study the good pleasure of God and the mysterious dispositions of His sovereign Will, to penetrate the heavens by the fervour of her love, and to visit in fancy the abodes of the blessed, to salute the patriarchs and the prophets and the apostolic company, to admire the bands of triumphant martyrs, and to stand amazed before the magnificent choirs of the angels—she who was accustomed to be thus employed has now to renounce all this happiness and to engage herself to the dishonourable service of the earthly body. Henceforth it shall be her business to obey the flesh, to gratify the stomach and the palate, to beg through the world—through this world, the “fashion” whereof “passeth away”—the means of appeasing to some extent an ever ravenous appetite for pleasure. Send forth, O my eyes, send forth torrents of tears over the fate of such a soul, which, having been brought up in scarlet, now riots in filth! In the words of holy Job, “She hath fed the barren that beareth not, and to the widow she hath done no good.” And observe that it is not simply said to her “go forth”; but “go forth and follow after the steps of the flocks, and feed thy kids beside the tents of the shepherds.” By these words the Bridegroom, as it seems to me, intends to warn us about a matter of gravest import. Do you wish to know what it is? Alas! my brethren. It is that a creature noble by origin, but long since degraded to the level of the brute, and now going miserably from bad to worse, is not allowed even to keep her place amongst the flock, but is bidden to follow after. Now some one may ask, how can that be? It is only what we read in the psalms, “And man when he was in honour did not understand; he is compared to senseless beasts and is become like to them.” Behold how the noble creature is reduced to the level of the common brutes. And I suppose if these irrational animals were endowed with the faculty of speech, they would say. “Behold Adam is become as one of us.” “Man, when he was in honour.” Would you like to be told in what honour? He dwelt in paradise. His days were passed in a place of pleasure. Neither suffering nor want had any access to him. Surrounded with odoriferous apple trees, reclining on banks of flowers, crowned with honour and glory, and set over all the works of his Creator, he enjoyed the bliss and the companionship of the holy angels and of all the powers of the host of heaven. Yet his grandest prerogative was the glory of the divine image impressed upon his soul.