Aponius

Aponius wrote one book, and it is a big one: a commentary on the Song of Songs in twelve volumes. He appears to have been a Latin writer working in Italy, probably at Rome, and the work is generally dated to the first decades of the fifth century, though some scholars place it later. Nothing else about him is known, not his office, not his city, not the year he died.

The Song of Songs is a book of love poetry, and the early church had to decide what to do with it. Aponius took the road most of the fathers took: he read the bride and the bridegroom as the church and Christ. But he does not treat the poem as a code to be cracked. He reads it warmly and at length, following the movement of desire, absence, searching and reunion through the whole story of salvation, from Adam, through Israel, to the incarnation, to the church gathered from the nations, to the end.

The scale is what sets him apart. Where earlier Latin writers had left brief notes on the Song, Aponius wrote a sustained exposition long enough to become a quarry for everyone after him. He works verse by verse and lets the text set the pace.

His reach is remarkable for a man nobody can name. Gregory the Great knew the work. Bede knew it and used it. In the ninth century it was condensed into a set of twelve homilies, and in that shorter form it circulated widely through the medieval monasteries; the Irish exegetical tradition drew on him as well. Much of the tender, bridal language that later Christian devotion attached to the Song, running through Bernard of Clairvaux and far beyond, has an ancestor in this anonymous Latin commentator.

The full text was largely lost to modern readers until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when editors began recovering the twelve books from manuscripts; a critical edition appeared only in the twentieth century.

What he leaves is a demonstration that the early church did not find the Song of Songs embarrassing. It found in it the most direct language Scripture gives for the love between Christ and his people, and it spent twelve books on it.

Sources: Aponius, Expositio in Canticum Canticorum (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 19); Bede's use of Aponius in his own commentary on the Song of Songs; Johannes Quasten, Patrology, vol. IV.