Three Philosophies Of Life

by Peter Kreeft

  In the Trinity, God eternally becomes one by knowing and loving himself. It is the union among the three Persons that is God’s highest unity, not the mathematical oneness or identity of his essence. That is why among us, too, as his image, the unity between lover and beloved is closer than the unity between the lover and himself. He is more one with his beloved; he finds his oneness, his unique selfhood, his identity, more in her than in himself; he “identifies” more with her than with himself.

  And as the Persons of the Trinity become one and as husband and wife become one, so God and man become one, too, in Christ. God’s love exchanges his self with our self. He puts us into his own mystical Body. He puts his own Spirit into us. He is in us, and we are in him. Someone said that if theologians only fully understood the word in, they would have solved all mysteries.

  Mystery though this is, it is not remote. Any lover knows it. Slaves belong to their masters out of force and convention, and yuppies belong only to themselves, but lovers belong to each other. Thus, if I love you, wherever you are, I am, for I am more with you than with myself. Whatever happens to you happens to me; thus it happens to you twice: to you in you and to you in me. That is why a loving father who spanks his deserving child speaks literal truth when he says, “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” And perhaps that is also how it is when God punishes us.

  20. Love Is Triumphalistic

  Much of the imagery in the Song of Songs does not appeal to modern sensibilities because it is old-fashionedly triumphalistic, ceremonial, formal, even military. For instance,

  What is that coming up from the wilderness,

  like a column of smoke,

  perfumed with myrrh and frankincense,

  with all the fragrant powders of the merchant?

  Behold, it is the litter of Solomon!

  About it are sixty mighty men of the mighty men of Israel,

  all girt with swords

  and experts in war,

  each with his sword at his thigh,

  against alarms by night.

  King Solomon made himself a palanquin

  from the wood of Lebanon.

  He made its posts of silver,

  its back of gold, its seat of purple;

  it was lovingly wrought within

  by the daughters of Jerusalem.

  Go forth, O daughters of Zion,

  and behold King Solomon,

  with the crown with which his mother crowned him

  on the day of his wedding,

  on the day of the gladness of his heart (Song 3:6-11).

  This impresses us much less than it did the ancients because we live in a flat world, an egalitarian world, while the ancients lived in a world full of spiritual heights and hierarchies, a world of spires and turrets. But our hearts protest against our flatland and yearn for their true country, their true dimension of verticality. Love is, simply, superior. It belongs on a throne. It rightly brags, praises, exults, celebrates, sings its Song of Songs, its nonordinary song, its Greatest Song. It deserves silver and gold and robes and crowns. Heaven will be full of it (if the symbolism in Revelation means anything at all); had we not better practice living with it?

  21. Love Is Natural

  Love is supernatural, but love is also natural—like Christ, who is both fully God and fully man. Love is not only natural, the fulfillment of human nature, the point of the divine design for man; love is also the fundamental force in nature. Gravity is only love turned inside out, love on a physical plane. Love “moves the sun and all the stars”, as Dante and the ancients knew. Love is the leitmotif of nature’s symphonic suite, the theme of nature’s song.

  That is why the poet of Song of Songs, like all traditional love poets, finds and uses analogies throughout nature for human love. If love were not already the guiding thread of nature, it would be artificial and an act of spiritual violence to use natural images for it.

  Modern sensibilities are more materialistic than those of the ancients, however, and so we need to be reeducated into at least one crucial feature of traditional imagery. These images are often based not on an empirical, visible likeness but on an emotional likeness. Consider the following passage, for instance. Not one of the seven natural images is one of visible resemblance, except very remotely. If the reader thinks the writer is attempting that, the spell of the poetry not only will not work but also will work a counterspell of scorn and laughterBut if the reader understands that subtle and multiple storys of emotional equivalence are built onto only a small foundation of visible equivalence, he will be able to enter into the poet’s secret world of fittingness.

  Your eyes are doves

  behind your veil.

  You hair is like a flock of goats,

  moving down the slopes of Gilead.

  Your teeth are like a flock of shorn ewes

  that have come up from the washing,

  all of which bear twins,

  and not one among them is bereaved.

  Your lips are like a scarlet thread,

  and your mouth is lovely.

  You cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate

  behind your veil.

  Your neck is like the tower of David,

  built for an arsenal,

  whereon hang a thousand bucklers,

  all of them shields for warriors.

  Your breasts arc like two fawns,

  twins of a gazelle,

  that feed among the lilies (Song 4:1-5).

  Just how it is fitting to compare breasts to lily-feeding fawns is much harder to analyze and explain than to intuit; but that it is fitting, that there is a natural fit between what love sees in the beloved and in nature, is the more important point. Nature imagery is everywhere in love poetry because love is everywhere in nature. Everything in nature can symbolize love because everything in nature was designed and created to manifest the God of love. “The heavens are telling the glory of God and the firmament proclaims his handiwork” (Ps 19:1). Every blade of grass is a blade of grace, a grace note in God’s single Song. Nature is not blind and dumb. Nature is eloquent. Human science is blind and dumb if it does not hear this eloquence.

  22. Love Is Faithful

  Each of the Ten Commandments is a specification of love: love does not steal, love takes a sabbath, love does not bear false witness, and so on. The one exception seems to be adultery. But it is not love that commits adultery against itself. Love does not adulterate itself. Love needs no external law to force it to be faithful; true love is naturally true. Love wants to be faithful. It wants to give all of itself to one, not to disperse and divide itself upon many.

  Thus, “a garden locked is my sister, my bride; a garden locked, a fountain sealed” (Song 4:12). Love is sealed against intruders: “Set me as a seal upon your heart” (Song 8:6).

  It is impossible to give the whole of your self to more than one person, for you can give the whole only to the whole, and only an individual person is a whole. A group is not a whole. You cannot give the whole of yourself to a group of two or more. If you multiply the recipient, you divide the gift—and the giver. And a divided giver, a divided lf, is a terrible thing, like a split personality. Only God can give the whole of himself to more than one, to each one of us, one at a time, because God is in eternity and has all of time at his disposal. No one can give all to more than one at a time, but we are in time, and God is not.

  Though God loves each of us, his love for each one is just as jealous and sealed and faithful as ours. The divine husband will no more share his bride, your soul, with others than a human husband will. Instead, he will “husband” his resource, his possession, to himself. “For I the Lord your God am a jealous God” (Ex 20:5). Surely there is a connection between modernity’s scorn of this “jealousy” in God and its scorn of fidelity in marriage. We have exchanged the “narrow way” of Christ for an ecumenical orgy, a “group grope” among gods; and we have exchanged the unadulterated, undivorceable “what God has joined together, let not man put
asunder” for history’s most catastrophic breakdown of mankind’s most fundamental institution. The two exchanges are two sides of the same profitless coin, and “what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”

  23. Love Is Ready

  When the angel appeared to Mary, she was ready with her response: Yes, Fiat, let it be, “Be it done unto me according to your word.” That is why Mary is the perfect saint: a perfect saint has perfect love, and perfect love is perfectly ready with its simple Yes.

  But the bride in Song of Songs, like our own soul, is not perfectly ready. She makes excuses, and because of this fear, withdrawal, or double-mindedness, the longed-for consummation of their love is postponed, and she suffers immeasurably:

  I slept, but my heart was awake.

  Hark! My beloved is knocking.

  “Open to me, my sister, my love,

  my dove, my perfect one;

  for my head is wet with dew,

  my locks with the drops of the night.”

  I had put off my garment,

  how could I put it on?

  I had bathed my feet,

  how could I soil them?

  My beloved put his hand to the latch,

  and my heart was thrilled within me.

  I arose to open to my beloved,

  and my hands dripped with myrrh,

  my fingers with liquid myrrh,

  upon the handles of the bolt.

  I opened to my beloved,

  but my beloved had turned and gone.

  My soul failed me when he spoke.

  I sought him, but found him not;

  I called him, but he gave no answer.

  The watchmen found me,

  as they,

  they beat me, they wounded me,

  they took away my mantle,

  those watchmen of the walls.

  I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem,

  if you find my beloved,

  that you tell him

  I am sick with love (Song 5:2-8).

  We are always doing that with God. The divinely whispered invitation to turn immediately to him, to follow the first breath of his Spirit, is seldom heeded. When we have more time, when we are in a better mood, when these Martha-like many things are taken care of, then we can attend to the Mary thing, the “one thing needful”. But tomorrow never comes, and if we do not turn today we simply do not turn, for today is the only time there ever is. “Now is the time of salvation.” In postponing the soul’s simple, central sacrifice of all else and turning to God with open eyes, open heart, and open hands, we postpone the fullness of salvation. For that is what salvation is: receiving God into our soul, our will, in the living present. The living God does not enter into anything dead. The past is dead, and the future is not yet born. God lives in the present and enters the present only.

  Did you ever realize how hard it is to do the thing so many popular psychologies tell you so glibly to do: to live in the present? I will show you how hard this is. I dare you to stop reading right now, to stop hoping for something valuable to come to you in the next sentence, and to turn to God immediately and tell him how you love him and let him tell you how he loves you—right now. Be wiser than the bride in the Song.

  Are you back? Was that not the best part of the book?

  Or did you cheat and just think about doing it? You had better not plan on getting to Heaven that way: by thinking about it.

  24. Love Is All Inclusive

  The love this Song sings is inclusive of all loves. All four of “the four loves” are here. (For an excellent introduction to the four loves, see C. S. Lewis’ book by that title.) For in that most complete and most intimate of all human relationships, marriage as God planned it, there are all four loves; and in the marriage between God and the soul there are also all four loves. Neither the earthly nor the heavenly marriage is an alternative to other loves, exclusive of other loves. Both are all inclusive. Thus Saint Augustine says in the Confessions that he who has God has everything, and he who has God and nothing else lacks nothing, and he who has God and everything else does not have anything more than he who has God alone.

  We find first of all eros, or desire, in Song of Songs. In fact, we find ravishment—but the deeper and more passionate ravishment of the heart, which is capable of much more passion, intimacy, and joy than the flesh only: “You have ravished my heart, my sister, my bride, you have ravished my heart with a glance of your eyes” (Song 4:9). “Under the apple tree I awakened you” (Song 8:5)—desire is consummated. “Its flashes are flashes of fire, a most vehement flame” (Song 8:6).

  We find also affection here. In fact, we find this most tender and comfortable love juxtaposed with the most passionate love in Song of Songs 4:9, where the bride is addressed as both “my sister” and “my bride”. The juxtaposition continues in Song of Songs 4:10, 4:12, and 5:1. A marriage made wholly of the fire of eros with none of the surrounding walls of affection would not be livable for long.

  Third, we find here also friendship: “This is my beloved and this is my friend” (Song 5:16). (Friendship differs from affection in that it is freely entered into and deliberate, while affection is a spontaneous feeling. Also, affection does not require equality; friendship does.)

  Finally, we find charity and self-giving: “I am my beloved’s” (Song 7:10); “My beloved is mine and I am his” (Song 2:16). If any one of these four love ingredients is missing in marriage, the marriage is not only incomplete but also endangered. All four are also present in and perfected by the divine marriage, for nature reflects grace, and grace perfects and redeems nature rather than abolishing her. The horizontal marriage between groom and bride reflects the principles of the vertical marriage between grace and nature. That is the deep mystery of marriage Saint Paul reveals in Ephesians 5:21-33.

  25. Love Is “Sexist”

  The very word sexist is a bad word, both because it is prejudicial (confusing a description with a value judgment) and because it implies a confusion between “inherently different” and “inherently superior”. My friend Sheldon Vanauken claims to have been the inventor of the word during his “silly sixties” phase, for which he now feels deep regret. (See Under the Mercy.) Perhaps this paragraph can do a tiny bit to shorten his Purgatory. Love contains an inherent polarity and differentiation between the sexes but not an inherent chauvinism. That is how love is “sexist”, and it is reflected throughout the Song of Songs.

  The mystics say that to God all souls are feminine. Not female but feminine. Male and female are confined to the biological, but masculine and feminine extend further, into souls as well as bodies. Here is the proof. Only a Cartesian dualist could deny the soul-body unity, and no one could deny that bodies are inherently male or female. Put these two premises together, and you get the conclusion that something parallel to male and female is to be expected in the soul: masculine and feminine. To each other, we arc masculine or feminine. To God we arc all feminine. The very word for “soul” is feminine in every major Western language except English, which alone is “desexed”, that is, has nouns without gender.

  In the Song of Songs it must be the groom and not the bride who symbolizes God, the bride and not the groom who symbolizes the soul. The reason for this “sexism” is not that male is superior but that when God touches us he performs the male, not the female, function, analogically: he impregnates the soul, not vice versa. That is the deepest reason why throughout the Bible the human image for God is male, never female. It is only an image, of course, and not literal; God has no body and thus no biological sex at all. But the image images something, and that something is the relationship that the inventors of these images experienced: they all experienced God as the husband of the soul. The fact that God spiritually impregnates us and not vice versa, the fact that God creates new life in us and not vice versa, and the fact that God comes into us and not vice versa, cannot be changed any more than the fact that a man impregnates a woman and not vice versa can be ch
anged. No matter how much we rant and rave, we cannot change the essential, eternal laws of the very structure of reality to conform to our latest ideological fashions and fancies.

  26. Love Is as Strong as Death

  Finally, love cannot be defeated even by death. Love is the only thing that can stand up to death. Death removes everything else. Even the stars are subject to death. But billions of years from now, when all the stars in the universe have died, love will still be alive, and if we live in love, if we identify ourselves with love, if we pin our hopes of eternal survival to love, if we glue our spirits to love, we too shall still be alive and eternally young, like love itself. For love is the very stuff of God. That is why it lasts forever (1 Cor 13:8). When death destroys the destructible, the indestructible remains. That is the point of Hebrews 12:26-28. In this passage, “what is shaken” refers to the entire created universe, and the “kingdom that cannot be shaken” refers to the love of God:

  His voice then shook the earth; but now he has promised, ‘Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heaven.’ This phrase, ‘Yet once more’, indicates the removal of what is shaken, as of what has been made, in order that what cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe; for our God is a consuming fire.

  The fire is love. Love, like fire, destroys all its enemies, including “the last enemy” (1 Cor 15:26), death.