'You Hearted Me': Why love is both visceral and eternal

*Originally published on March 16, 2022.

On a damp night, after the theatres let out and the sidewalks fill up, Father Stephen Dowling, a young priest, meets two women on the street: Midge and Ronnie. They're sex workers — and he realizes that it is his mission to help them. 

"And in the morning he preached on the Song of Songs, only he made it a song of love that all people ought to have for one another. Words rolled out of him with passion, and his ardor was so great that many who listened felt uneasy. He had got thinner. His deep-set blue eyes were no longer mild, but full of defiance as he shouted out, 'Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.'" (Such is my Beloved, p. 96)

That's the beginning of Morley Callaghan's 1934 novel, Such is my Beloved, and it's the beginning of the end of Dowling's idealism. 

In helping the two women, he experiences a love he has never felt before. He is tempted overtly, at first, by Ronnie and Midge. Inwardly, he reflects on this feeling. It becomes clear to him that this love is agape — a sacrificial love. 

Torn between his desire to love as God does, and the obedience demanded by his Bishop, Father Dowling begins to unravel. He remembers the homily he gave about the Song of Songs, and he decides to revisit it.

"It seemed to Father Dowling as he sat at his desk with the city noises of that spring night coming through the window that he understood this love song as it had never been understood before. "I'll write a commentary on it verse by verse and show how human love may transcend all earthly things," he thought, and this resolution gave him joy and a kind of liberation from the small room." (Such is My Beloved, p. 166)

Origins

Such is my Beloved was the direct result of a friendship Callaghan struck up with the Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain, who was for a time a visiting professor at the University of Toronto. 

It seems as though the introduction of the Song of Songs into the narrative was Callaghan's idea, though, and it was a stroke of literary genius. No scriptural text has exploded the idea of love and sounded its depths quite like the Song of Songs.

Allegories of love

For the Rabbis of centuries past and present, it is a wondrous allegory of the love of God for God's people Israel, and an account of the history of this love.  

It is impossible to write down exactly why the Song of Songs possesses this endless power. But it is possible to climb inside its language and to examine the circumstances of its creation.

Until the day breathes and the shadows flee,

I will hasten to the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankincense. 

You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you. 

Come with me from Lebanon, my bride; come with me from Lebanon. (Song 4:6-8)

For poet and professor of English Jacqueline Osherow, the journey into the rich and complex Hebrew words of the Song of Songs began in her teenage years at Jewish summer camp. It was the first text she learned to chant. 

"[Y]ou have this extraordinary word livavtini, which translates as 'you have ravished my heart', 'you have captured my heart,'" Osherow says. 

"But it literally means, 'you hearted me,'" she adds.

Today, Osherow chants Torah at her synagogue in Salt Lake City. In every line of the Song of Songs there is powerful evidence for the argument that there are always some things that escape translation.

Different versions

At the same time, she recognizes the beauty of the English language's landmark attempt, the King James Version. Although allegorical translations of the Song might appear on the surface to be an attempt to de-eroticize the text, Osherow rejects that argument. 

"'Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine;'" translates as, 'teach me your innermost knowledge,'" she says. "I utterly discounted this for much of my life, as not wanting to [...] deal with the erotic nature of this poem — wrong." 

"If you respect this kind of religious longing as a real thing, you can see how this text can really describe it, because that's what poetry can do." 

For Carsten Wilke, who has studied the adaptive power of Jewish faith and culture across time and space, the Song is akin to Greek idylls of the third century BCE. 

In his 2015 book, Farewell to Shulamit, he argues that the lovers in the Song of Songs aren't just one couple, nor is the Song a mish-mash of assorted poetic fragments. It is of a piece, and it portrays a variety of loves, in a variety of spaces, from palace to pasture. 

"I divided the entire Song of Songs according to the spaces that are evoked. [...] I call them idylls [from] a poetic convention that was created by the Greek poetic school of Alexandria," Wilke says. 

"Poets wrote very short poems evoking certain landscapes with their respective personae in the form of small images, and idyll in Greek is a small image," he adds. 

"We have there in Greek poetry the same artful alternation between these four settings: the court, the city, the vineyard or the village, and the wilderness, the pastoral," he adds. "The Song of Songs is a parallel. It is also alternating between the settings."

For example, "Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men." Wilke says this is an important clue: 

"If you look at this metaphor that describes the neck of the beloved as a tower surrounded by the shields of mighty men, of warriors, you may ask yourself: 'where in the ancient Middle East have towers been round?'" he asks. 

"If you look at archeological excavations in Mesopotamia or in Palestine, all the towers are square," Wilke observes. "Until the third century BCE, when the catapult is invented, they need something else to defend themselves and suddenly all the towers are round." 

Far from robbing the Song of its power, though, he argues that this contextualization can enrich our own understanding of love, and bring us to meditate on just how our devotions might shape our world.

"We can only counter this enormous loss by showing that through the contextualization and through the division of the Song into different voices, we also gain something," he argues. 

We might say that we go deeper if we look at the human distinctions in terms of politics, of economy, of class, of ethnicity, also of psychology," he adds. "If we take them seriously, and if then we search: what might bridge them? Where is this spiritual dimension that connects us all in our difference?"

Together with the text, Osherow and Wilke help us triangulate our position with respect to love, as something that is both ineffable and irresistible — both delicious and painful, dangerous and redemptive. 

Choose your own two terms, and hold them in tension. The Song of Songs has managed it effortlessly for at least 23 centuries.

Guests in this episode

Jacqueline Osherow is an author of eight books of poetry, including My Lookalike at the Krishna Temple. She is also a Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Utah.

Carsten Wilke is a professor at Central European University, in Vienna. He has worked in Jewish studies, philosophy and romance languages in Germany, in Israel and in France. He is the author of Farewell to Shulamit.

* This episode was produced by Sean Foley