Every Thorn Has Its Rose: The Rose in Christian Mysticism (Part II of The Rose in Tattoos and Magic)
- nixievly
- 16 hours ago
- 4 min read
The rose entered the Western world via the same route as most western culture: through the back door of the East. She twined her way though the gardens of Persia and China, climbed over the oriental edge of the Roman Empire, and invaded the palaces of the elite. Always eager for more pleasure, the hedonistic Roman emperors embraced her with relish, installing rosewater-spouting fountains and piling the marble floors of their palaces with knee-deep rose petals. One particularly decadent Roman emperor allegedly arranged for a such a torrent of roses to be dropped from a false ceiling onto his guests that some of them smothered to death under it.
Early Christian ascetic Saint Clement of Alexandria (circa 150-215 AD) did not like this one bit. He recoiled at these orgies of fragrance and beauty, and turned his nose up at the rose- the flowering part, that is. Clement condemned the use of crowns of roses, popular at pagan festivals of fertility and abundance. He exhorted his readers to put aside the fleeting opulence of blossoms and to don, instead, a crown of thorns, putting penance (in the name of spiritual growth) before enjoyment.
Saint Cyprian of Carthage (200-258 AD) saw things differently when it came to roses. In a deft callback to the story of Aphrodite reddening roses with the blood of her pricked foot (Cyprian was learned in pagan mythology), he rewrote it so that the first red roses sprung from the blood of Christian martyrs. He also claimed that roses bloomed in abundance in the paradise that awaited those same martyrs after their bloody deaths.
A theme emerged: thorns before roses, suffering before pleasure. By its very botanical structure, the rose encapsulated the Christian ideal of intentional suffering and delayed gratification, developed so bloodily during the period when martyrdom was the only path to sainthood. Martyrs shrugged their shoulders in the face of torturous death, knowing that they would get their roses in heaven. Thorns were helpful reminders of this: while still in this world, Saint Benedict (420-574 AD) would strip naked and throw himself into the brambles whenever the roses of this life tempted him. The fate of the emperor’s rose-smothered guests, by contrast, was the perfect cautionary tale: this is what happens to those who take their roses up front. No thank you, said the penitents. Morticia Addams-like, they preferred to cast aside the flowers and adorn their lives with thorns, withholding pleasure until the hereafter.
The terrestrial rose, however, is a master of the long game when it comes to seduction. As she twined into Christendom through its eastern borderlands, she carried her association with the divine erotic deep in her DNA, even when her blooms were clipped. Ever the coquette, she deferred- temporarily- to the ascetic obsession with her thorns, knowing that her beauty could not be constrained forever. After all, every good gardener knows that the more a cultivar is trimmed back, the more enthusiastically it will blossom. And the monastics of medieval Europe were excellent gardeners.
Gardens, like roses, came from the East. There, and in the monastery, gardens functioned as botanical laboratories and factories, cultivating and pumping out spices and medicines. But the pleasure principle invades the most utilitarian of spaces.
Charlemagne, the emperor who in the 700s flipped western Christianity from a persecuted cult to the institutional religion, was responsible for the rose’s invclusion of the monastery garden. He demanded roses in the plans for his own, and the church, eager to imitate its most important supporter, followed suit. Suddenly, gardens were places not just to labor, but to dally among beautiful flowers, conscientiously praising the Creator who put them there so as to not get lost in their earthly charms. And the rose, after centuries of slumber, opened her blossoms once again within the confines of the sacred to find herself gazing into the face of an adoring monk. As it should be, she yawned.
She was at ease bathed in devotion. In her earlier incarnation as the dog rose- the Neandertal of the rose world- the Germanic pre-Christian pagans marked her as sacred to the goddess Freya, the Nordic answer to Aphrodite. Before that, the same rose, thorns and all, had been sacred to the Sumerian goddess Inanna. So she felt at home among the medieval monastics pausing to admire her while toiling in their gardens. They welcomed both the rose and the lily (another overwhelmingly fragrant flower formerly despised by the ascetic church fathers) into their garden borders, breaking up the pragmatic rows of herbs, spices, and medicinal plants with their exuberant sensuality.
Monastics are contemplative people, and, now knowing her charms firsthand, they contemplated the rose. Although celibate- perhaps BECAUSE they were celibate, and hence capable of experiencing the erotic in subtle forms- they finally saw love in the blossom of the rose, just as the eastern cultivators who became her willing slaves had three thousand years before.
Of course, as they were Christian monastics, the love they experienced through the rose was Christ’s love, so the association with pain and death remained. Christ, having died a thorny death, had given the rose its red color, according to Benedictine theologian (and avid gardener) Walafrid Strabo (808-849). He also associated roses with passion and lilies with purity, roses with war and lilies with peace. Upon the millennium, Saint Bernard expanded upon this idea, associating roses with not only the sufferings of Christ but those of Mary, white representing her purity and red her compassion.
Hence, little by little, the rose came to be associated with a transcendent love, a divine love for all humanity. The earthly rose receives all its vitality from the sun that beams down on her from the heavens, much like the Christ received his divinity from the Father God above (Christianity, after all, developed from the solar cult.) She opens and spreads her beauty and fragrance, awakened by the sun, throughout the terrestrial world, who can access the divinity of the sun through her.
Erotic love or divine love? Lust or theological inspiration?
What’s the difference, really?
We'll talk about Dante, rose windows, and rose-scented saints in future episodes.
Superb article, Nixie. Brilliantly researched! 🌹