Odes of Solomon

Harris1911 source page 161

THE ODES OF SOLOMON 117 a long discussion of the milk with which Christ's babes are nourished. Our nourishment, he says, is the Divine Word, it is ' the milk of the Father, by which only the babes are fed.' Through the Word ' we have believed in God, to whose care-allaying breast we have fled.' And again (p. 125) 'to the babes, who seek for the Word, the breasts of the Father's kindness supply the milk ' (to7s ^>?tovo-i vt^ttiois rw Aoyoc a\ TraTpLKoi 7:7? <f)L\avOpwTrLa<; Q-qXal ^opr]yovaL to ydAa). So Clement comes very near to the figurative language of the Ode, without its crudity of expression. The harshness of the figures employed and the tritheistic character of the theology may be paralleled in writers of the middle ages, whose repute in the Church is very wide. For is it not St Bernard who expounds the Evangelic statement that the beloved disciple leaned on Jesus' breast in the words ' hausit de sinu Unigeniti quod de paterno hauserat ille ' ? but if John imbibed from the breast of the Only-begotten what He had imbibed in like manner from the Father, we can only say that a very lofty theology is presented in a very harsh metaphor; but we cannot dismiss St Bernard as unworthy of further notice. And if it comes to tritheism, with which all the Christian Ages are more or less discoloured, where shall we find it more pronounced than in John Tauler's great sermon on the coming of the Bridegroom, where God the Father presides over the nuptials of Christ and the Church, and where the Holy Spirit acts as cup-bearer at the feast : a representation which is not so very remote from what we have in our Psalm, when wine has been substituted for milk. But I am afraid the matter is past apologetic. Further than this, we must admit that it is in many ways perplexing : the doctrine seems too highly evolved to allow us to reckon the Psalm to the same period of production as the rest of the book. When the writer speaks of milk from the two breasts of God, he evidently means the two covenants, or testaments. But that exegesis implies that the writer is no Marcionite rejecting an old covenant in the interests of a new, or else he wishes us to understand that he is no Jew, clmging to an old covenant to the neglect of the new covenant. And he seems to imply that the Christians whom he represents are distinguished from some other body of believers by being on the right hand of Christ. Is it the Jews from whom he wishes to be distinguished or is it the Marcionites? The Ode must be, at the earliest, a product of the second century. It is conceivable that the allusion to the Cup of Milk may cover an early Milk-Eucharist. Wine is nowhere mentioned in the religious language of our Psalter. Turn in the next place to the account of the Virgin Birth, which follows the parable of the cup of milk, and can almost be detached as a separate composition. It certainly presents the miraculous conception and birth in a form which has already undergone considerable development: that the birth was painless was a very