Long Stemmed Red Rose

rose(s) symbolize love, passion, femininity, romance, your faithfulness in love

Perhaps new love is about to enter you life.

Why did the Rose become a relatively important symbol through the Christian ages? Is there a Biblical foundation? Although wild roses grew in Palestine at the time of ancient Israel and of Jesus, the rose is mentioned neither in the Hebrew Bible nor in the New Testament.

In the Greco-Roman culture, the rose represented beauty, the season of spring, and love. It also spoke of the fleetness of time, and therefore inferred death and the next world. In Rome the feast called rosalia was a feast of the dead.

In Latin Christian iconography the first use of the rose appears in the scenes representing the next world, paradise, together with the lily and other flowers. These flowers also became symbols of virtues and of categories of the elect; for example, the red rose for martyrs, and the lily for virgins.

The rose as the queen of flowers was evidently a privileged symbol for Mary, Queen of heaven and earth. The rose is a symbol of Christ, too, as we see in the German Christmas song from a poem by Goethe, Es ist ein' Ros' entsprungen.

The Marian symbolism is well illustrated by Dante in his description of Paradise. His guide, Beatrice, invites him to contemplate among the heavenly inhabitants the beauty of Mary, the Mother of God:

"Why are you so enamored of my face that you do not turn your gaze to the beautiful garden which blossoms under the radiance of Christ? There is the Rose in which the Divine word became flesh: here are the lilies whose perfume guides you in the right ways." (Paradiso, 23, 71-75)

But Dante uses also a more general symbolism of the rose, that of the universe (Paradiso, 31, 1-3), like the lotus in Asia. Indeed, with its multiple petals the rose is a beautiful image of our expanding cosmos.

Wonderful examples of this symbolism are found in the gothic cathedrals and their rose windows, the circular, stained-glass windows that enhance the three entrances of these churches. These immense roses symbolize the world of salvation offered and revealed by God to our lost human race through the old and New Testaments.

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