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One fails to see the profoundly philosophic nature of the selection. The Song of Songs is a frankly erotic love poem, written with no other aim than is common to such poetry, and its spiritualisation is due to the same process of reinterpretation that is applied to other parts of the Bible in order to make them agreeable to modern thought.
But from the standpoint of theoretical logic it must be regarded as a prejudice, not as a well-grounded theory. With this proviso, I propose to continue yielding to the prejudice. It is clear that, if our analysis of physical objects has been valid, this way of defining sensations needs reinterpretation.
As already pointed out, Eucken believes in redemption. The past is capable of reinterpretation and transformation, because we can view our past actions in a new light and so change the whole, since the past is not a closed thing, definite in itself, but a part of an incomplete whole.
This combination was a good substitute for the old Chinese theory that the emperor was the Son of Heaven; it increased the prestige and the splendour of the dynasty. At the same time the old shamanism was legitimized under a Buddhist reinterpretation. Thus Buddhism became a sort of official religion.
There is no such strife between rationality and belief as has been supposed. But the confidence of that fact is still far from being shared by all Christians at the beginning of the twentieth century. The course in reinterpretation and readjustment of Christianity, which that calm conviction would imply, is still far from being the one taken by all of those who bear the Christian name.
But given this, and add thereto a sexual nature imperious in its demands and yet denied legitimate outlet, and we have the conditions present for its promptings being interpreted as the fruits of supernatural influence. It is not a reinterpretation of religion that is attempted, but a reinterpretation of phenomena that have been erroneously called religious.
Denominational exclusiveness becomes intolerable to the Christian who finds a whole world's redemption laid on his conscience. It demands a social reinterpretation of many of the Church's doctrines, a reinterpretation which gives them richer meaning.
For an ideal is not ideal if it is the ideal of nothing. In that case it is only a ghostly existence, with no more moral significance or authority in relation to the observer than has any happy creature which may happen to exist somewhere in the unknown reaches of the universe. Meantime, a second reinterpretation of mythology was attempted by the Stoics.
And on all sides the need for this reinterpretation is becoming clear.
The yoke of the law of Moses, sanctifying the life, had been broken; the fiat of popes and the decrees of synods were the saving beliefs which ensured the Kingdom of Heaven! Was it to this that the allegorizing of the law, the search for the spirit beneath the letter, the reinterpretation of the holy law of Moses in the light of philosophical reason, had brought Judaism?
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