Three Philosophies Of Life

by Peter Kreeft

  So Dante is right. Beatrice really is a goddess. And so are Helen, and Mary, and Leslie, and Jo Ann, but they do not have Dante-like poets with X-ray vision to tell them that. Ah, but they do. Their poet speaks in Song of Songs. Their poet is God.

  What God says is true, and you had better believe it. What happens if you do? Suppose Robert Redford came up to you, who think of yourself as a Plain Jane, and said, “You are the woman I’ve been looking for all my life. You move me to tears, you are so beautiful. I want to marry you and make you happy forever.” Would you think of yourself a little differently? Well, if even Robert Redford can change your dull self-image, cannot God do it alsoDare you call yourself a Plain Jane if it means calling God a liar? One of you is wrong. You say you are ugly; God says you are beautiful. If you are right, God is wrong. That just cannot be. The alternative is that God is right and you are wrong. You are not ugly. You are beautiful. What God says is fact, objective truth, utter reality.

  But what about sin? Does God just hide his eyes? How can that be realism? God does not hide his eyes. Your eyes are hidden in time, hidden from your eternal destiny and identity. You see only the present crude sketch of yourself. He sees the i completed masterpiece, for he sees from eternity. Your life is like a string pulled taut. Like an ant, you crawl along the string of your lifetime, from one end (birth) to the other (death). But God sees the whole string end on, from the end. He blinks at nothing; he sees everything in its true perspective. He sees your whole life, but not as you do, piecemeal. He sees you whole, as you see a finished painting. And the judgment he pronounces on you is “perfect”.

  That is our destiny, according to Christ: “You must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The Christ who says this incredible thing is also the Christ who alone makes it happen, the Savior, the Way. The Way will have his way. We are to be “all fair” as he is all fair. Contentment with anything less than perfection is our way, perhaps, but not his. For he is love, and love (according to George Macdonald) is “easy to please but hard to satisfy”. Thank God for both of those facts!

  14. Love Is Simple

  The style of the poetry in Song of Songs is amazingly simple, even though the content suggested is amazingly complex. Though the greatest minds of theologians, saints, and mystics can explore the depths of this book for hundreds of pages without coming close to exhausting its riches, yet its point is so simple that only the simplest, haikulike poetry suffices:

  Behold, you are beautiful, my love,

  Behold, you are beautiful;

  Your eyes are doves.

  Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved,

  Truly lovely;

  Our couch is green (Song 1:15-16)

  To a nonlover this is supremely trite and boring. To a lover it is perfect, like a diamond. To a nonlover it is endless repetition. To a lover it can go on forever, like God himself, one, perfect, self-sufficient, “the one thing needful”.

  If you have ever fallen in love or had a friend who did, you know the difference between these two perspectives. The lover is totally engrossed in his love, or rather in his beloved. He is never bored. He could go on and on forever. The outside observer, however—the friend, roommate, or family member—finds the lover supremely boring, narrow, obsessed—exactly the opposite of what he is to himself.

  Imagine the nonlover as literary critic evaluating the little poem above. “Behold, you are beautiful, my love”—you cannot get more trite and clichéish than that. Totally unoriginal. You could not imagine a less imaginative sentence. “Behold, you are beautiful”—the second line is even less original than the first. Nothing but repetition. We already know she is beautiful; stop harping on it. “Your eyes are doves”—silly, simplistic image. Does not even fit. Oh, well: love is blind. Let us see what he says; maybe h is a better poet than she was, at least. “Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved.” Oh, no! Not more of the same! All he does is repeat her words. “Truly lovely”—again and again. Four out of five lines totally dispensable. “Our couch is green”—who cares? Certainly I do not. This is the silliest, simplest, tritest, most childish poem (if you dare dignify it by that name) I have ever read.

  But now listen to the real critics, the lovers themselves. “Behold”—how startling the vision of love is! What a surprise—like the Beatific Vision, like the Light of God suddenly appearing to human eyes! “You are beautiful, my love”— exactly right, true, essential. Nothing more need be said. This is heart’s desire; this is all the human heart hungers for. The very simplicity is perfect eloquence. “Behold, you are beautiful”—like the Word of God reflecting the Father perfectly, the second line reflects the first, and for the same reason: you cannot get any better than that. “Your eyes are doves”—a simple but mysterious fittingness to this image satisfies the heart even while the mind is puzzled. For only the heart can understand simple things; the mind plays another game, constructing truth laboriously out of concepts. “Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved”—she can do no better than perfection, so her response is in kind, reflective of the perfection and simplicity of his love. “Truly lovely”—how wonderful that she never gets tired of this central fact! “Our couch is green”—every detail of both art and nature is now newly lit up with the light and beauty of love. Every leaf, every bed, every bird sings the same song, the very song of God, the One, the single-minded Lover of the whole universe in all its wonderfully diverse parts. Why, a whole world view is implied in these lines!

  You see, though love is not content with anything less than perfection (as we saw in our last point) and with its own perfection, yet with that it is quite content and needs nothing more. And love experiences something of that heavenly perfection even now on earth, in prophetic form. Therefore it is content even now. Though the seed of love is not yet grown, it is already sown, and it is the best seed, the all-sufficient seed, the one and only perfect seed, “the pearl of great price” worth selling worlds for. We do right to be satisfied with it rather than looking for anything else.

  15. Love Is Individual

  The object of love is a person, and every person is an individual. No person is a class, a species, or a collection. There is no such thing as the love of humanity because there is no such thing as humanity. If your preachers or teachers have told you that the Bible teaches you to love humanity, they have told you a He. Not once does the Bible say that; not once does it even mention the word humanity. Jesus always commands us to love God and our neighbor instead.

  How comfortable “humanity” is! “Humanity” never shows up at your door at the most inconvenient time. “Humanity” is not quarrelsome, alcoholic, or fanatical. “Humanity” never has the wrong political, religious, and sexual opinions. “Humanity” is never slimy, swarmy, smarmy, smelly, or smutty. “Humanity” is so ideal that one could easily die for it. But to die for your neighbor, to die for Sam Slug or Mehetibel Crotchit—unthinkable. Except for love.

  One of the saints said that if you had been the only person God ever created, he would have gone to all the trouble he went to just to save you alone. When he died on the Cross, he did not die for humanity; he died for you. “Behold, I have called you by name”, he says. “I have engraven your name upon my pam.” When he welcomes you into your heavenly mansion, he will not address you as “comrade”. Lovers love to whisper each other’s names because the name stands for the person, the individual.

  Thus in Song of Songs the chorus of nonlovers wonders,

  What is your beloved more than another beloved,

  O fairest among women? (Song 5:9).

  And she replies,

  My beloved is all radiant and ruddy,

  Distinguished among ten thousand (Song 5:10).

  The same is true of her from his viewpoint:

  There are sixty queens and eighty concubines,

  and maidens without number.

  My dove, my perfect one, is only one (Song 6:8-9).

  God’s name is the uniquely individual word I (Ex 3:14). Go
d’s image in us is our I. That this private, unique, individual thing can be nevertheless shared is the apparent contradiction of love.

  The lover sees the beloved not as one among many but as the center of the universe; not as an ingredient but as a whole; not on the periphery of his mind’s circle but at the center, standing at the same place as himself, his own center, his own uniquely individual I. Love has two I’s; that is why it sees so well.

  Why did God create you? He created billions of other people; were they not enough for him? No, they were not. He had to have you. He will not rest until he has you home. Even if you arc the one sheep that is lost, he will leave the ninety-nine (or ninety-nine billion) others to seek you wherever you are. He will come into your thickets and your wilderness and your suffering and even, on the Cross, your sin. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). One of the splinters on the Cross that pierced his flesh was yours alone. And one of the gems in his crown will be yours alone. For here is how your divine lover sees you:

  As a lily among brambles

  So is my love among maidens (Song 2:2).

  And your response must be just as individual to him:

  As an apple tree among the trees of the wood,

  So is my beloved among young men (Song 2:3).

  That is what it means to obey “the first and greatest commandment”, to love the Lord your God with your whole heart. “For the Lord your God is a jealous God.” Love is jealous because love is individual. Love will not share the beloved with another, as if a heart could be divided into parts. That is why God must be infinite: so that he can give his whole heart to each of us without being divided. Only infinity can do that. We can give our whole heart only to one at a time: to one God, because there is only one, and to one spouse. Marriage is earth’s closest image for Heaven because it is all or nothing, forever—a leap of faith.

  16. Love Is All Conquering

  “Amor vincit omnia”, love conquers all, says the poet. No force on earth can withstand its power, for i power is divine. The mountains, scripturally symbolic of obstacles (see Is 40:4), are no obstacle to love in Song of Songs; the beloved “comes leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills” (Song 2:8). Like faith, love moves mountains (see Mt 17:20).

  In fact, the very obstacles in love’s way become transformed by love into a part of itself. Onerous tasks become opportunities for heroism. As the priest tells the marrying couple in the Catholic marriage ceremony, marriage is so high and holy, so demanding of self-sacrifice, that “only love can make it possible, and only perfect love can make it a joy”.

  Love’s enemies darken the horizon of our fallen world, and like the Old Testament prophet we naturally cry out in complaint to God. But he shows us here the vision, as he showed the prophet, of greater armies still, the armies of the Lord, bright with angelic clarity and charity, surrounding the dark host of Israel’s enemies that in turn surround little, beleaguered Israel. We arc never alone. “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world”—thus spoke the only one who ever truly said what all the Hitlers, Napoleons, Alexanders, and Caesars longed to say: “I have overcome the world” (Jn 16:33). They failed because their weapons were hate. He succeeded because his weapon was love. They slew their enemies; he let himself be slain. The Lamb conquered even the Dragon (in Revelation) by the blood of his love. The wounds of the sacred heart of Jesus are the most powerful force in the universe. If our love is united to his, if we are united to him, we and our love cannot fail.

  17. Love Is a Surprise

  Love is not calculated, controlled, predicted, or expected. Love is a “good catastrophe” (to use Tolkien’s neologism). It is the mark of God’s presence, and so it takes us by surprise, as he does. The God of the Bible, as distinct from any of the many gods of the human imagination, is not the point of any human triangle; we are the point of his triangle. He is not the target of the arrows of our spirit; we are the target of his arrows. The God of the philosophers is simply “Being”, but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob creeps up behind us and says, “Boo!”

  That is why the poet uses the strange-sounding image of the gazelle. God the gazelle? Yes. Have you ever seen a gazelle? He hops about with incredible lightness and unpredictability, like a magnified flea. His very standing there seems active, almost threatening—as if he is every moment threatening to leap at you. Thus the bride is suddenly surprised by his voice:

  The voice of my beloved!

  Behold, he comes,

  Leaping upon the mountains,

  Bounding over the hills.

  My beloved is like a gazelle,

  Or a young stag.

  Behold, there he stands

  Behind our wall,

  Gazing in at the windows,

  Looking through the lattice.

  My beloved speaks and says to me:

  Arise, my love, my fair one,

  And come away (Song 2:8-10).

  Love elopes. God calls us, as he called Abraham, away from the security we knew, out of our old, familiar, little room, down the ladder of faith and into his arms. Jesus called his disciples that way—just as a lover elopes with his beloved. Whenever we think we have got him planned, he blows away our plans like the clouds of smoke they are, and stands in front of us in place of our dreams, our cloudy expectations, and forces us to choose between him and ourselves, between the God of surprises and the idol of same old self, between God the gazelle and Self the slug. It is ultimately the choice between Heaven and Hell.

  18. Love Is Fearless

  “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear”, says John the evangelist (1 Jn 4:18). Solomon the evangelist says the same. Love and fear are like oil and water: they cannot occupy the same space, the same soul, at the same time. One casts out the other.

  In Song of Songs, the bride is hiding in the cleft of the rock (Song 2:14), fearful of meeting her beloved. This is not silly; indeed, the typically modern absence of fear is silly. It is simply not true that “there is nothing to fear but fear itself”. There is plenty to fear. There is evil, for one thing, and Hell, and Satan. And there is the wrath of God, which is not a crude, superstitious myth unless the Bible is a crude, superstitious myth. On a human level, there is the terrible but very real possibility that the beloved will not freely return our love. Love is terribly vulnerable, easily misunderstood or rejected. There is plenty to fear.

  Most of all, there is goodness to fear. God is perfect goodness, absolute holiness, perfect righteousness. Is that fearsome? It certainly is—to a soul not wholly in love with goodness, not wholly confirmed in righteousness, not 100 percent on the side of holiness. Would you feel quite comfortable meeting God right now, this very minute, face to face, with no hiding, no excuses, and nothing about you unrevealed? If you can answer Yes to that terrible invitation, you are either the world’s greatest saint or the world’s greatest fool.

  It is good that there be fear so that love can cast it out. If there is no fear for love to cast out, love falls on unprepared soil. If your concept of God lacks awe, circumspection, fear, and trembling, then your concept of love will also lack awe. If your soul is so small and arrogant that it feels comfortable and cuddly with God, then the only size love you will admit into your soul is a comfortable and cuddly love.

  But once the great and rightful fear is there, the great and rightful love takes its place. Fear is a bond, however childish, between the soul and God. Love is a more perfect and intimate bond. Nothing less than the greater bond should cast out the lesser bond. “Experts” in pastoral psychology and “religious education” should not be allowed to steal that precious seed, for when the seed of fear falls into the ground of love and dies, it brings forth much fruit.

  Love casts out fear because the kind of love we are talking about here is agape, not eros. Desire does not cast out fear, but agape does, because agape includes trust. Only trust, only faith, overcomes f
ear. If we think our love will be rejected, we fear. But if we trust our beloved to be also our lover, if we know our love will be reciprocated or even topped, we have no fear. “There is no fear in love”, only outside it.

  And God’s love is the only totally trustable love (thus the only love guaranteed to cast out fear) because only God totally knows, accepts, an affirms us. “Even if my mother and my father forsake me, the Lord will lift me up” (Ps 27:10).

  19. Love Is Exchange of Selves

  Something extremely simple yet incredibly mysterious is said in Song of Songs 2:16 and again at 7:10: “My beloved is mine and I am his.” Love exchanges selves. When I love you, I no longer possess myself; you do. I have given it away. But I possess your self. How can this be? How can the gift of the giver be the very giver? How can the hand that gives hold itself in itself as its own gift? The ordinary relationship between giver and gift, subject and object, cause and effect, is overcome here. The simple-sounding truism that in love you give your very self to your beloved is a high and holy mystery.

  Its ultimate explanation is an even higher and holier mystery, the Trinity itself. Lovers belong to each other because love is the nature of God, and the Persons in the Divine Trinity give themselves to each other. The Son is the very Word, or thought, or mind of the Father given so totally that he is another Person; and the Spirit is the very love between Father and Son given so totally that he too eternally becomes a Third Person.

  The image of this ultimate Fact in human love is that lovers can really give themselves to each other, so that “the two become one” without ceasing to be two. Already in human love the laws of mathematics are transcended: a powerful clue that we should not expect them to apply to divine love, a good piece of evidence that it would be arrogant folly to deny the doctrine of the Trinity because it does not make mathematical sense.