Three Philosophies Of Life

by Peter Kreeft

  It is also the hidden key to the rest of the Bible. The Bible is about real life, of course—it is the most realistic book ever written. And the point of the real story of life is love. The whole Bible is a love story because God, the author, is love. Behind the appearances of a war story, a detective story, a tragedy, a comedy, or a farce, life is a love story. Thus Song of Songs is the definitive answer to the question of Ecclesiastes and to the quest of Job.

  It is a double love story, vertical and horizontal, divine and human. The two great commandments are to love God and to love neighbor. Thus this love poem is to be interpreted on two levels, divine and human. The bridegroom symbolizes God, but he is also any man, literally; and the bride symbolizes the soul, but she is also every woman, literally. To interpret a book or a passage symbolically is not to abandon the literal interpretation. There is a ridiculous, indefensible prejudice among most Bible scholars, both professional and amateur, that we must choose between the symbolic and the literal interpretations of any given book or passage. Fundamentalists automatically bristle at the very word symbolic, and modernists automatically bristle at the word literal. I think it is high time we rediscovered the riches of the eminently sage and sane “fourfold method of exegesis” of Saint Thomas and the medievals and recapture the hermeneutical heights from which we have fallen.

  Song of Songs uses romantic love and marriage rather than any one of the many other human forms of love as its chosen symbol for the love of God because romantic love and marriage comprise the fullest and completest of all human loves. One of the things we shall see in our exploration of the text (point number 24) is just that: the inclusion of friendship, affection, desire, and charity in a rich blend, like a gourmet coffee.

  Husband and wife give to each other as much as it is humanly possible to give: their whole selves, body and soul, life, time, friends, world, possessions, children—nothing is to be held back. That is why the Church opposes artificial contraception: because it is the deliberate holding back of the pro-creative ingredient in marriage, just as test tube babies are the deliberate holding back of the unitive ingredient, and Victorian, puritanical fears hold back the joyful erotic ingredient. God designed all three to be one: unitive, procreative, and erotic, “two in one flesh” intimacy, third-party procreation, and first-party self-forgetful ecstasy. It is all here.

  This is the next step from Job, the step from Purgatory to Heaven. Ecclesiastes’ vanity was Hell on earth, Job’s suffering was Purgatory on earth, and Solomon’s love is Heaven on earth. Earth is a foretaste, or a foreplay. When death opens earth’s exit doors, and the edible light of God’s love streams over the astonished, longing eyes of the purified penitent in showers of gold, he is at that moment in Heaven even if he is also in Purgatory. The very washrooms of Heaven’s mansion are of gold; the very purgatorial showers that wash away sin’s last stains are the showers of God’s love. That is why the saints say there are both suffering and joy in Purgatory. Though the scabs tear and the dirt tries to cling against the golden onrush, we will not cringe in Purgatory’s shower but with upturned face will ask for more. That is exactly the position of Job when God comes to him. Though his feet are still on his dung heap, his head is in the glory.

  This is a parable of the position of every Christian. For Christ did not establish an immediate Heaven on earth. He did not set right all the ills of the world by his first coming; he only planted the seed of that universal redemption. The field of earth and of our human nature is now no longer barren but full of the seed of divine life. But it takes time for the seed to grow, for the Kingdom to come, and we are commanded to pray and work for that coming, that growth, even if we do not yet see the fruits, or even the blossoms, or even the leaves, or even the green growth visible above the ground of the supernatural plant God planted in the world by the Incarnation and in our souls by faith and baptism and the new birth.

  Song of Songs completes our Divine Comedy, but we must thank Ecclesiastes and Job, too, for it was b who brought us here, and it was Ecclesiastes who moved us to seek this “here”, this Heaven, through honesty about the awfulness of the alternative.

  Upon first reading Song of Songs, many modern readers are puzzled that anyone, much less most of the human race for centuries, would claim that this is the greatest of all love poems. Evidently there is more here than meets the unaided eye. If the eye is aided with the binocular vision of a lover’s lens and a poet’s lens, dimensions and depths can be seen that are startlingly beautiful. Here are a few of them—twenty-six characteristics of love, both human and divine, that the poem implies. For more, both in quantity and quality, go to the saints.

  1. Love Is a Song

  The first and most obvious thing Song of Songs says about love it says in its very title: that love is a song. Now this is an image or symbol, of course. Love is not a literal, physical song, though it naturally expresses itself in that form. What is suggested by this image?

  God is love, and music is the language of love; therefore, music is the language of God. Music is a language more profound than words. How often have you heard a great piece of music and felt that? Great music does not just make you feel good; great music suggests some profound truth or mysterious meaning that is objectively true but not translatable into words. Attempts to translate music’s meaning into words always fail. It is like trying to allegorize a symbol, trying to reduce to one literal, verbal meaning something that has many nonliteral, nonverbal meanings. Love fits this pattern: (1) it is not only subjective feeling but objective truth, (2) it is both mysterious and meaningful, and (3) its meaning is never reducible to words. The wooden trap of words can never capture the lobster of love, any more than a wooden “interpretation” of the meaning of a piece of music can capture the music itself.

  I think music was the language in which God created the world. Both C. S. Lewis (in The Magician’s Nephew) and J. R. R. Tolkien (in The Silmarillion) tell this story, and it goes back to a very old tradition, probably older than Pythagoras and his “music of the spheres”. We moderns usually think of music as a later ornament added on to speech, but I suspect it is the opposite: speech is a later development from music. Song is not fancified poetry and poetry fancified prose; prose is ossified poetry and poetry ossified song. The reason I think this is because (1) “In the beginning, God”, (2) “God is love”, and (3) love is not a speech. We do not ever speak of “love speeches”, only of “love songs”.

  Therefore, in the beginning was the Song of Songs. This book goes even farther back than Genesis, into the eternal heart of the Trinity.

  2. Love Is the Greatest Song

  Also in the title is the notion that love Is not only a song but also the “song of songs”, the greatest of songs. The Hebrew language has no superlative degree of comparison and uses instead this form: “greatest king” is “king of kings” and “greatest song” is “song of songs”.

  (“Song of Solomon” is not the original title but the invention of modern editors. The original title, in the Hebrew Scriptures, is always the first verse, for these writings were scrolls, not books, and had no separate covers or title pages.)

  What does it mean to call love the “greatest of songs”? Two things, at least. First, most obviously, it means love is the greatest in value. The poem itself says this, near the end: “If a man offered for love all the wealth of his house, it would be utterly scorned” (Song 8:7). Nothing can buy love because nothing is as precious as love; nothing can be exchanged for it. (This is also one reason why love must be free, as we will see later.) Song of Songs here anticipates 1 Corinthians 13: “The greatest of these is love.”

  But I think there is a second meaning implied, too: love is the greatest in size. The song of God that his creative love sings, that is, our lives, includes all other songs. Love is the meaning of the whole. We are all notes in God’s symphony. When we listen only to pur own note or to the few notes around us, it does not look like music or like love, but when we step back and look at
the whole, everything falls into place as great music. Of course we are in no position to do this “stepping back” on our own power. How could we possibly get the God’s-eye point of view? Only if God revealed it to us—as he has done here. Faith means believing this divine revelation. The man’s-eye sharing in the God’s-eye point of view is, precisely, the eye of faith.

  The practical difference this image makes is immense. If you think you are making only meaningless noise, you are in Ecclesiastes‘ “vanity”. If you think you are making music, you are in love. That is why Job is so dramatic: Job’s question is ultimately: Am I only making noise, or am I making music? Am I in vanity, or am I in love?

  A mythic image uses a part to symbolize the whole—for example, the earth is a great egg; the nine worlds grow from Yggdrasil, the cosmic ash tree; the world rests on the back of a giant turtle; life is a bowl of cherries—all these images seek to comprehend something of the whole by the symbolic use of the part. For we have no concept of the whole, of the meaning of everything, since concepts must always be defined and finite and set off from something else. The finite human mind can comprehend only finite concepts. But there is a way in which a finite, partial concept can mean or suggest the whole: by symbolism. The whole is something like an egg, or a tree, or a turtle, or a bowl of cherries. Thus Jesus constantly uses dramatic mythic images called parables to suggest the mysterious and indefinable but very real and definite “Kingdom of God”: it is like a mustard seed, like a fishnet, like a fine pearl, like a vineyard. A picture is worth a thousand words, especially if it is a moving picture, a story. Somehow, these pictorial symbols can suggest more than they can say.

  Now the fundamental question for Wisdom, for all three of the Wisdom books we are exploring, is: What is human life, human existence? Ecclesiastes’ answer was the dreaded word vanity, or nothingness, emptiness. Job knows life’s meaning as suffering—but to what end, he does not find until the end. The answer of Song of Songs is that all of life is a love song. Every subatomic particle, from the Big Bang to the senility of the sun, is a note in this incredibly complex symphony. Every event, everything that has ever happened, the fall of every hair and every sparrow, is a theme in the surpassingly perfect melody of this song. But we who are in it do not hear or know it unless we are told by the Singer, who is outside it and who alone can know the point of the whole. Just as Pythagoras said we did not hear the “music of the spheres” for the same reason the blacksmith did not hear the hammering on the anvil: because he is too close to it, too used to it—so we do not hear the whole until we are outside the whole, after death; until we are whole, after death. In Heaven we will hear ourselves singing, that is, we will hear what we have sung.

  3. Love Is Dialogue

  The poem is in dialogue form, bride and groom singing to each other antiphonally, because love is essentially dialogue, and the form of a perfect poem manifests the content; the medium manifests the message.

  There are only three ultimate messages, three possible philosophies of life. According to atheism, there is only the human monologue with no God to dialogue with. According to pantheism, there is only divine monologue with no created world of free souls for God to dialogue with. All is One. Only according to theism is there dialogue between Creator and creature. Only in theism does mankind confront an Other.

  Thus the dialogue between lovers manifests a whole philosophy of life. It is no accident that love poetry blossoms more in theistic cultures than in atheistic or pantheistic ones.

  The dialogue between male and female creatures reflects the dialogue within the Creator, the dialogue between Father and Son that eternally becomes the Holy Spirit. Life is dialogue ultimately because life is a reflection of God; and the very life of God, the eternal inner life of the Trinity, is the dialogue of love. We are meant to be with each other because God is eternally with-each-other; “each-otherness” reaches into the very heart of God. Otherness, plurality, individuality, society, and thus love arc as ultimate as oneness. That is the thing pantheism fails to see: that to-be-with is the very nature of to-be; that relationship is not an accidental category and external addition, like time and place; that we must include in our list of “transcendentals” or universal properties of all being not only oneness but also manyness, not only sameness but also otherness, and not only truth and goodness and beauty but also love, at least in its most rudimentary form of the inherent tendency to-be-toward-another. The simplest conversation manifests the highest mystery.

  4. Love Is Synergistic

  There is no physical perpetual motion machine, but there is a spiritual perpetual motion machine: love. Love is perpetually reinforcing: the more we love, the more we are loved, and the more we are loved, the more we love. There is no necessary limit to this process. Even human love is potentially infinite, and divine love is actually infinite. There is no upper limit, no wall, to love. And there is no drag, no gravity built into love. When love wears down that is due to external friction, not internal friction: love itself has no tendency to wear down, only to increase.

  We sec this in the poem in the progression of the lyrics. The more each is loved by the other, the more he or she responds with increased love, and vice versa. After he says she is “as a lily among brambles” (Song 2:2), she responds that he is “as an apple tree among the trees” (Song 2:3); and after he declares, “behold, you are beautiful, my love” (Song 1:15), she echoes, “behold, you are beautiful, my beloved” (Song 1:16). They keep capping each other’s lines because they keep reflecting each other’s loves.

  Love, being the fundamental spiritual force in the universe, transcends all other forces and their laws. It especially transcends the principle of physical entropy: its energy does not decrease but rather increases. That is why Heaven never gets boring. That is also the only way earth can conquer boredom, too.

  5. Love Is Alive

  We think of love as the product of things that are alie: love.e animals put forth animal loves, live human beings put forth human loves, and the living God puts forth divine love. Even on the animal level, love tends to produce litters of new lives, but love is not a living thing in itself. But in God it is. It is the Holy Spirit. The love between Father and Son is so alive that it lives as a life of its own, a Person in its own right, the Third Person of the Trinity.

  Now human loves resemble both the animal and the divine. To produce new living persons, our love needs the aid of biological reproduction, like the animals. But it also resembles the divine in that human love is alive. It is not literally another person, like the Holy Spirit, but it is more than a feeling in a person. We say we are “in love”, not that love is in us. Why? All the myths saw love as a god or goddess, a real, living entity who could come into you and take over your life. Why? If we are old enough to remember the old Hollywood cliché, we say of love, “It’s bigger than both of us.” Why? If love is only a feeling confined to one person, these spontaneous expressions in our language and our cultural history are unexplainable. But if love is a real, living force, not only within us but between us, if we really are in love rather than love in us, then it is explainable. Love lives.

  Thus all the images for love in the poem, as in most love poems, are images of living, growing things: a garden (Song 4:12, 16), a vineyard (Song 7:12; 8:11-12), a well of living water (Song 4:15). Love grows like a plant. It does not merely grow in us, with us, as a function of us; we grow in it, with it, as a function of it. It has a life of its own—ultimately because it is a seed of God planted in our lives. “He who lives in love, lives in God, and God in him” (1 Jn 4:16).

  6. Love Is Gospel

  Love is news, good news, Gospel. Love is promise of future bliss, hopeful of future reward, forward looking to future ratification. Its words always invite us forward. Even Freud perceived this: he divides the fundamental forces of the psyche into two: eros, the life force, drives us forward, while thanatos, the death force, the death wish, pulls us backward into the womb. For Freud life is the battle bet
ween these two forces. This is the residue or relic in the thought of the atheist and immoralist of the great Mosaic vision of life as the battle between the forces of life and death, obedience and disobedience to God:

  I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice, and cleaving to him (Dt 30:19-20).

  The drama of Song of Songs, as of life, is the drama of choice between eros and thanatos, life and death, Yes and No as the two possible responses to the Gospel of the beloved. That Gospel speaks wonderful and mysterious promises. Will the human bride believe them? Will she have faith in her divine bridegroom? Will she choose life?

  My beloved speaks and says to me,

  Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away;

  For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.

  The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come

  And the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.

  The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom,

  They give forth fragrance.

  Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away (Song 2:10-13).

  The response must be a “coming away” from the past, from death and darkness and the womb and sleep. In chapter 3, the bride is so sleepy that she does not respond to her beloved in time, and he leaves her to suffer and sorrow and search for him. Just as there is no sleep in Heaven (sleep being an image of death), there is no sleep in love. All the imagery in Song of Songs is morning imagery, not evening imagery: “The day breaks and the shadows flee away” (Song 2:17).