06/27/2025 – Day 341 – Song of Songs – Chapters 1 and 2 / “Three Philosophies of Life” by Peter Kreeft / pg 103: “(1) In the beginning, God”, (2) “God is love”,… Therefore, in the beginning was the Song of Songs. This book goes even farther back than Genesis, into the eternal heart of the Trinity.”
The Three Philosophies in Kreeft’s book: (1) Ecclesiastes: Life as Vanity ; (2) Job: Life as Suffering; (3) Song of Songs: Life as Love. Personally, a good place to start back in our 24 day stretch run, after a 10 day timeout, as I recall an inklings type study of this book with an old friend a few years ago.
On pg. 99, Kreeft introduces Song of Songs with: “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.
In introducing the 26 characteristics of love in this third section, he notes: “Song of Songs completes our Divine Comedy, but we must thank Ecclesiastes and Job too, for it was Job 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…
Characteristic #1: Love is a Song: He ends this section with: “Therefore, in the beginning was the Song of Songs. This book goes even further back than Genesis, into the eternal heart of the Trinity.”
#2. Love is the Greatest Song : “… 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.”… We are all notes in God’s symphony. When we listen only to our won 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.”
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#9. Love is Desire and Fulfillment: … Heaven does not make God’s love lovely; God’s love makes Heaven heavenly…
#10. Suffering Goes with Love: … 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.”
#13. Love is Accurate: …”Your eyes are hidden in time, hidden from your eternal destiny and identity.”…
#16. Love is Individual: … 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…
#18. Love is Fearless: “…If your concept of God lacks awe, circumspection, fear, and trembling, then your concept of love will also lack awe…
#19 Live is Exchange of Selves: … The image of this ultimate Face 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 law 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.”
#21. Love is Natural: “… ‘For I am the Lord your God am a jealous God’ (Exodus 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 side of the same profitless coin, and ‘what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ “
Soli Deo Gloria!