by Peter Kreeft
Love is Gospel because love is alive. Love is not an abstract ideal; love is a wedding invitation. Love is not something for us to approach; it is something that approaches us. We do not turn it on; it turns us on as a lamplighter turns on a lamp.
7. Love Is Power
Closely connected with love’s livingness and love’s Gospelness is love’s power. The imagery in Song of Songs is startling. It is never weak and wimpy, sweet and swoony. The imagery is so strong and active that it is military. What woman has ever been flattered by her beloved’s comparing her to an army and a fortress? This one has: “You are beautiful as Tizrah, my love, comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners” (Song 6:4). “Who is this that looks forth like the dawn, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army with banners” (Song 6:10). It is the woman, not the man, who is being described here. The “terror” in “terrible” is not, of course, either the terror of disgust (as in “what a terrible rat-infested sewer!”) or the terror of servile fear (as in “what a terrible thing a concentration camp is!”) but the terror of awe (as in “Oz the Great and Terrible”).
There is no chauvinistic passivity here. The bride is not a shrinking violet, nor does the groom want her to be. She is as active as he is but in a totally feminine way. She is the dawn, and the dawn “comes up like thunder” here. When God our groom comes to us with his love, we are not flattened but straightened, not turned off but turned on, not made passive but made active. The singing of the second part in a duet is just as active as the singing of the first part. We play second fiddle to God, but that is no fiddlin’ around; that is fiddlin’ up a storm. As we shall see later, love’s power is so great that it is “strong as death” itself (Song 8:6).
8. Love Is Work
Love is not passive. Love is singing a duet, and that is work. Joyful work, but work nonetheless. Young lovers first fall in love passively, but if they are to stay in love they must actively work to keep it and grow it, like a seed that is first received into the ground but then must be tended and fertilized or it will die. Thus the bride sings, “I sought him whom my soul loves. . . . I will rise now and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares; I will seek him whom my soul loves” (Song 3:1-2). Life is a quest for love and a quest for God, and there is no car or plane for this trip. It is an old-fashioned quest made on our own two feet.
The most moving, beautiful, and enviable true-life love story I know in recent times is Sheldon Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy. The question he is most often asked by his readers is how he and his wife achieved such a beautiful, intimate, and total love. It seemed too good to be true. We do not see such loves around us anymore. The modern world, though it talks incessantly about love, has almost totally murdered love. A stable marriage, much less a happy one, even less a joyful one, is the rarity, the exception, not the rule. What was Vanauken’s secret?
His answer is surprisingly mundane: work. “We kept our love only because we worked at it.” Love will not grow in modern fields without constant work. The soil is no longer rich. Perhaps the soil was never rich, but people used to be prepared to work at it. In any case, love can never last today unless the lovers are prepared for lifelong work. And that necessarily involves sacrifice—at least sacrifice of all the other things that you could be doing instead.
Work also requires patience—an increasingly rare commodity in our fast-food, instant-replay, live-for-the-present age. You cannot grow any fruit without patience. There are no instant apples.
Freud says that the two most basic needs everyone has are “love and work”. That is a wise saying (though I think if he were asked to expand and explain it, Freud would not do so with equally wise sayings). And these two are one, for if work is to be fulfilling, it must be a work of love, and if love is to live, it must be a work. As Kierkegaard points out, love in Christianity is not a feeling, as it is for Romanticism; rather, “love is the works of love”. That is why Christ can command love. Only a fool tries to command a feeling.
The strangest thing of all, perhaps, about our work of love is that it is both work and rest, both weekday and sabbath. Jesus made this clear when the Pharisees got angry at him for his work of healing on the sabbath. His answer told them, in effect, that you could no more stop this work than you could stop the sun from shining, for it is the very life of the Father, which eternally reaches out from the sabbath of eternity into the work week of time, as he did at the Creation, Jesus’ answer to them was: “My Father is working still, and I am working” (Jn 5:17). What has this to do with us human lovers? Everything, for a Christian’s love is a participation in God’s love through Christ the Mediator. Like Father, like Son; and like Christ, like Christian. Our work of love participates in the dual nature of Christ: divine and human, eternal and temporal, sabbath rest and weekday work, Easter Sunday and Good Friday.
9. Love Is Desire and Fulfillment
Another paradox of love is that it is bittersweet. Its very sweetness is bitter, and its very bitterness is sweet. Both qualities are present in desire. Love’s desire, like all desire, is bitter and painful because it lacks what it wants. If it did not lack what it wanted, it would not be desiring it but would be enjoying it. But the very desire is also sweet, a joy, a fulfillment. Merely to long for God is better than to possess the whole world. This absence is better than any other presence; this desire is better, than every other fulfillment.
Thus the bride’s (the soul’s) yearnings are put into the subjective mood, the mood of contrary-to-fact wishing: “O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth, for your love is better than wine” (Song 1:2); “O that his left hand were under my head and that his right hand embraced me!” (Song 2:6). The desire is fulfilled only at the end of the poem (Song 8:5), but the desire itself is already a kind of fulfillment. The very longing for Heaven is Heaven.
Thus Dmitri Karamazov, in Dostoyevski’s novel, tells God that if he should put him in Hell, he would sing wood the hymn of joy even from Hell, “the hymn from the underground”. That would transform Hell (or the Siberian salt mines) into Heaven. The song of love makes Heaven. Heaven does not make God’s love lovely; God’s love makes Heaven heavenly.
No one has written about this longing better than C. S. Lewis, especially in Surprised by Joy and The Pilgrim’s Regress. Those are the books you should turn to if you want to explore deeper into this glorious, bottomless abyss.
10. Suffering Goes with Love
Love naturally suffers for the very obvious reason that it opens you up, exposes your tenderest, most vulnerable part, the quivering flesh of the heart, at the mercy of the beloved and of time and fate. If the beloved is human and not divine, you will always be betrayed. We always betray each other’s love, in some way. That is what Original Sin means. No one is totally reliable. Put divine expectations on any human shoulders, even the shoulders of a saint, and you will be bitterly disappointed. And not only the beloved—time and fate and life itself seem to participate in Original Sin and the Fall, so that if there is one thing we can predict with accuracy, it is that “the course of true love never did run smooth”. If you love, you will suffer. The only way to protect yourself against suffering is to protect yourself against love—and that is the greatest suffering of all, loneliness.
But in the very act of suffering, love can transform suffering, redeem it, and conquer it. Like a flood so powerful that no dam can stop it, like a flood that transforms the dam set up to stop its flow into a part of itself, as it carries the dam along downstream, so love transforms the suffering that at first seems set up against it into a part of itself. Thus in Song of Songs the bride refers to her suffering for love and the burn marks this suffering has made in her flesh as marks of beauty, not of ugliness:
I am very dark, but comely, O daughters of Jerusalem;
Like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon.
Do not gaze at me because I am swarthy,
Because the sun has scorched me (Song 1:5-6).
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nbsp; The wounds of the resurrected Christ were not ugly but beautiful, like badges of glory, as they are in the stigmatized saints. So too the bride of Christ—the soul, the Church, the martyr (all Christians are martyrs)—is beautiful in her very suffering, as Christ was. The wrinkles around Mother Teresa’s eyes are infinitely more beautiful than the makeup around a movie star’s. Mother Angelica is more beautiful than Charlie’s Angels.
Love increases the bride’s suffering. She says, “I am sick with love” (Song 2:5). But her suffering only increases her love. For only after she comes up out of the wilderness (symbolic of suffering) in the last chapter does she attain three things she previously only longed for: trust, actual contact, and the consummation of her marriage:
Who is that coming up from the wilderness,
Leaning upon her beloved?
Under the apple tree I awakened you (Song 8:5).
(“Awakened” is a Hebrew euphemism for first intercourse with a virgin bride.)
It is as in Hosea 2: only after the wilderness, after suffering,is love perfected. Not only does love transform and perfect suffering; suffering also transforms and perfects love. The two things that seem to be enemies turn out to be mutually reinforcing allies. For only in the silence of the wilderness do we hear God’s still, small voice whispering to the heart of our heart. C. S. Lewis says, in The Problem of Pain, “God whispers in our pleasures and shouts in our pains.” That is true, but sometimes the opposite is also true. (See Hosea 2.)
11. Love Is Free
We all know this: love must be freely given and freely accepted. “It takes two to tango”, and neither one can be pushed, pulled, dragged, or carried. There arc really only three methods of influencing other people, three techniques of “behavior modification”: pushing, carrying, or drawing. You can use force or fear to push people where you want them to go, against their will. Or you can carry them. Then they are passive and you do the job for them, like a parent for an infant. Finally, you can draw them, attract them, motivate them to move toward you by the magnetism of desire. That is what the bride asks the groom to do: “Draw me after you, let us make haste” (Song 1:4). She will not be his slave and be pushed, or his child and be carried, but his bride and be drawn. He has the initiative, but she responds with equal freedom and equal value. To be drawn is as free a choice as to draw. To come is as free as to say, “Come”.
Even God cannot change this, fork is the inner law of love’s nature, which is his own nature, and God cannot change his own nature. So even God cannot love and force at the same time. God cannot force us to love him. The one thing even God cannot give himself is our love. God can create a universe, but God cannot create love in us, only elicit it from us. For love is not a creature, a thing created, like a universe. A thing created is passive. The universe did nothing to help itself get created. But love is active, not passive; free, not forced; from within, not without. It grows like fruit, by its own inner mystery. Thus the groom says repeatedly throughout the poem,
I adjure you,
O daughter of Jerusalem,
By the gazelles
or the hinds of the field,
that you stir not up nor awaken love
until it please (Song 3:5).
It is the hardest thing in the world to be patient about, for it is the thing we need the most and desire the most. But it is also the most necessary thing in the world to be patient about, for if it is not free, it is not love.
People talk a lot about freedom today, much more so than in ancient times. Perhaps that is because they do not know love. For lovers do not talk about freedom: they are free already. They do not desire to be free; they desire to be bound forever to their beloved. To be free from love, free from God, is precisely Hell.
12. Love Is True to Reality
“Rightly do they love you” (Song 1:4), says the bride. Love is not only the supreme value but also the supreme truth. It is not only fulfilling to me but also fulfilling reality. Love is ontologically right. It is realistic; it is conformity to reality; it is living in the real world. We have this horrible habit of speaking as if love were a mere ideal and “reality” or “the real wold” were a loveless, ugly, hard-bitten thing—in other words, as if people determined reality, and the worst people at that. No, people do not determine reality; reality determines people. Reality is not simply what people make or do; reality is what God is and does. And God is love. Love is therefore the central law of reality, and when we love, we conform to reality.
This is especially true when we love God. This point refers to the bride’s (soul’s) love of the groom (God); that is the supreme realism. The next point will be much more surprising: that God’s love for us is also realism, in fact, perfect accuracy.
13. Love Is Accurate
Love is more accurate than mathematics. We think and say, in our shallowness, that “love is blind”. It is exactly the opposite: it is the supreme vision, the supreme wisdom, the supreme enlightenment. God is love, and God is not blind; therefore, love is not blind. If love is blind, then cither God is not love, or God is blind.
When we say “love is blind”, we may be thinking of selfish love, or animal love, or puppy love. That may be blind. But agape is not blind. We must be sure about this truth, because it will be severely tested by some startling verses in Song of Songs. When we read these verses, we will be tempted to jettison the whole symbolic interpretation, for it seems that the things the groom says to the bride could not possibly be said by God to the sinful human soul. For instance, he says in Song of Songs 4:7, “Behold, you are all fair, my love. There is no flaw in you.” But there are plenty of flaws in us, and we know that, and God says that in many other passages of Scripture. This sounds like a denial of sin. It sounds as if love is blind indeed.
In another passage, the groom addresses his blushing bride, who is hiding in a rock, probably because she is ashamed of her ugliness compared with his beauty. The groom says,
O my dove,
in the clefts of the rock,
in the covert of the cliff,
Let me see your face,
let me hear your voice.
For your voice is sweet
and your face is comely (Song 2:14).
She probably thinks her face is as comely as a barn door and her voice as sweet as a crow’s. The question is: Who is right? She thinks she is ugly; he thinks she is beautiful. If he is God, he must be right. “Let God be true and every man a liar” (Rom 3:4). But how can this be?
The world’s second greatest love poem poses the same problem. No woman has ever been so exalted in verse as Beatrice by Dante, especially in the “Vita Nuova”. Not Virgil, Dante’s ideal, the world’s greatest poet, but Beatrice leads Dante out of Purgatory in the Divine Comedy. Dante, like God, says to his beloved that she is all fair, that she is a goddess, that she is the glory of God shining on a human face, that she is not a thing in the world but a hole to another world through which Dante can see the divine light. God is the sun, and Beatrice is the moon. What is going on here?
The historian is tempted to reply to that question by doing some historical research into the “real” Beatrice. He would find out that Beatrice was a teenaged Florentine girl whom Dante knew from an early age, that she was the daughter of a merchant in town, that no one ever thought of her as remarkably beautiful, and that Dante just happened to see her passing under his window one day and suddenly was caught up in the vision, as if his life had turned a corner as Beatrice turned the corner of his street. “Here begins the new life”, Dante wrote. But all that happened was that he saw her face. As in the hokey old song “Stranger in Paradise”, Dante said, in effect,
I saw her face
and I ascended
Out of the commonplace
into the rare.
Somewhere in space
I hang suspended.
Is this sight or sickness? The psychologist, rushing to the aid of the historian, now chimes in, patronizingly, “We understand what is happ
ening here. It’s projection. Dante was in love with love, and Beatrice just happened by at the right time. Dante projected the depth and beauty of his own heart onto Beatrice. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, and Dante’s poetic eyes are full of beauty. Just as when you have yellow jaundice in your eye, the world looks yellow, so when you have Dante’s beauty, the first person to come into view looks beautiful. It’s not Beatrice that’s beautiful; it’s Dante.”
If Dante were to hear that, I think he would challenge both the historian and the psychologist to a duel to the death to defend the honor of his beloved Beatrice. But more importantly, supposing that they all survived the duel, he would challenge them to a debate. He would insist that his love had perfect accuracy, objectivity, and realism; that he was right and they were wrong; that he was not projecting at all; that it was Beatrice, not Dante, who was surpassingly beautiful; and that he, Dante, contributed only the receptors for this beauty. He is a great poet, and a great poet is a great seer. He sees what is. He has X-ray vision. The rest of the world may agree with the historian and the psychologist and see only ordinariness in Beatrice, but Dante sees beneath the caterpillar into the butterfly—the butterfly that is really there in Beatrice, the butterfly that is Beatrice.
Could Dante be right? Of course he is right, and you know it. Who knows you better, the world’s greatest psychologist who only wants to use you as a case study, or your best friend who is not very bright but cares about you deeply? It is no contest. Only love has eyes. To understand the world of things, you need science and suspicion and the method of doubt: accept nothing until it is proved. Every idea is guilty until proved innocent. But to know people, you need the opposite method: trust, love, openness. Persons are innocent until proved guilty. You cannot hear them unless that is your attitude. Suspicion never reaches the other’s heart.