The Soul as Honeycomb: Isocrates and Gregory of Nyssa Walk into a Meadow
“Or go to the bee, and learn how industrious she is and how seriously she performs her work whose products kings and commoners use for their health. Yes, she is desired by all and honored. Although she is physically weak, by honoring wisdom she was promoted.”
Proverbs 6:8a–c LXX (NETS)
Recently, a peer drew my attention to Gregory of Nyssa’s Homily 9 on Song of Songs. As Gregory begins to interpret Song 4:11, with its imagery of honeyed lips, mouth, and tongue, he reflects at length on Proverbs 6. I have reproduced the relevant selection, taken from this edition published by SBL:
Proverbs, after all, desires the disciple of Wisdom to resort for instruction to the bee—and you are perfectly well aware, on the basis of what you have learned, of the identity of this teacher. It says to the lovers of Wisdom: “Make your way to the bee, and learn that she is a worker and makes a serious business of her labors; and both kings and simple folk consume what she produces for their health’s sake.” It also says that she is “sought after” and “of high repute,” weak in body to be sure but one who honors Wisdom and is therefore brought forward as an example to the virtuous, for it says, “Having honored Wisdom, she has been brought to honor.” In these words Proverbs counsels that one should not depart from any of the good teachings but, flying to the grassy meadow of the inspired words, should suck from each of them something that assists the acquisition of Wisdom and make oneself into a honeycomb, storing the fruit of this labor in one’s heart as in some beehive, fashioning for the manifold teachings separate storage places in the memory, like the hollow cells in a honeycomb. In this way one will make a business of this noble work of the virtues, in imitation of that wise bee, whose honeycomb is sweet and whose sting does not wound. For the person who exchanges hard work here for eternal goods, and who dispenses the fruit of his own labors to kings and to common folk alike for the sake of their souls’ health, truly obtains a reward, so that a soul of this sort becomes an object of the Bridegroom’s desire and glorious in the sight of the angels, because she has made “strength perfect in weakness” by giving honor to Wisdom.
As I read this passage, it felt strikingly similar to Isocrates’s paraenetic literature, especially the letter To Demonicus. At To Demonicus 5, Isocrates describes his work an act of paraenesis (παραίνεσιν γράψαντες) through which he hopes to counsel (συμβουλεύειν) the young Demonicus in how he ought to live. The language of “counsel” is prominent throughout the letter, and it is common trope within the paraenetic form that Isocrates refines and formalizes.
Later, at To Demonicus 44, Isocrates says he has intentionally chosen to store all his counsel for Demonicus into a single work (διὰ τῆς αὐτῆς πραγματείας), so that it might provide guidance not only for the present moment but also instruction for the future (παράγγελμα τοῦ μέλλοντος χρόνου). Because Isocrates has done so, Demonicus can draw from the letter as a treasury or storehouse (ἀλλ᾿ ἐντεῦθεν ὥσπερ ἐκ ταμιείου προφέρῃς), even while continuing to learn from others. In his closing words (To Demonicus 51–52), Isocrates famously employs the image of the bee, which settles on the all the flowers and takes the best from each so that they may gather useful knowledge from all sources. This is a charge to learn widely and prudently.
Set alongside Homily 9, the overlap is hard to miss. Gregory suggests that Proverbs 6 “counsels” (συμβουλεύει) the reader “to abstain from none of the good branches of learning” (μηδενὸς ἀπέχεσθαι τῶν ἀγαθῶν μαθημάτων). Even more fully, in the same way that the bee flutters over the meadow to pluck or cull (ἀπανθίζω) from the flowers, so the reader of Proverbs 6 should seek Wisdom and store its fruits within their honeycomb-like treasury. At Homily 9.269, Gregory employs the same bee metaphor to describe the soul’s labor of learning. Just as a bee constructs a honeycomb, the reader is counseled to internalize this and make oneself a honeycomb, wherein they may store “the fruit of this labor in one’s heart as in some beehive, fashioning for the manifold teachings separate storage places in the memory” (κηροπλαστεῖν ἑαυτῷ τὸ κηρίον . . . ἀσυγχύτους ἐν τῇ μνήμῃ τὰς θήκας δημιουργήσαντα). Gregory suggests that it is through compiling a good learning by culling the meadows of the Logos that one may develop a many-learned disposition that matches the bee’s formation and hard work (παιδεύσεως καὶ φιλοπονίας).
What fascinates me about this is not the way that Gregory adopts a classical trope, or even the way he mimics an ancient genre of paraenetic literature. Instead, I am stunned by the way that Gregory is able to internalize the metaphor of the bee. What functions in To Demonicus as an image for selective appropriation becomes, in Gregory, a vision of the soul’s interior life: wisdom is gathered from disparate sources, safeguarded in the heart and memory, and transformed into a honeycomb-like treasury of virtue.
By meeting Isocrates in Gregory of Nyssa’s Homily 9, we are able to see one example of how educated readers of Christian antiquity transformed classical tropes and reappropriated them in service of the Word and its exposition. What a perceptive reminder that the whole world is a meadow from which we may cull and organize genuine theological reflection.