Song of Songs and particularity
/I’m finally finishing Peter Kreeft’s Three Philosophies of Life, the final section of which is a 26-point meditation on love as described in Song of Songs. Here, Kreeft considers the particularity or specificity of love:
“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 lie. 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.”
If, as I’ve often argued here, particularity is the key to good literature, it is fundamental in love. Sine qua non. If it’s not particular, it’s not love.
Particularity is also important philosophically, as Kreeft makes clear in the next paragraph:
“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.”
To paraphrase Edmund Burke: Abstract humanity is not to be found; “humanity” inheres in specific people. Each of whom is more important than the abstract category, I would add.
Compare the people who talk a lot about “the planet” or “our species” but not about our families, friends, neighbors, communities, hometowns, countries, and nations. The people who love those things love them very specifically for themselves, flaws and all, and not because they are part of a whole too big for any honest person to grasp. Abstractions, “thinking in categories” as Malcolm Muggeridge put it, are dodges—or, increasingly, solvent.
The one spot where I’ll disagree with Kreeft—provided he isn’t being ironic, and I’m more inclined to think so the more I reread this passage—is when he calls humanity an abstraction “so ideal that one could easily die for it.” I’m not sure that actually happens. Soldiers, famously, die for each other far more readily than for democracy or freedom or big-picture geopolitical objectives. (See the Chesterton quotations here.) Likewise martyrs, whether religious or political. Stories of far-seeing men approaching the gallows with the class struggle on their lips smack of Soviet propaganda, not reality.
No, your neighbor—whether the person singing off-key in church or the dipstick you have to share a foxhole with—are easier to die for than “humanity.” Because they’re easier to love. After all, we’ve been commanded to. ‘humanity’
Here’s some of what Kreeft had to say about Job in the middle section of this book. I’ve written about particularity in storytelling several times: with regard to John Gardner here, in a short note on what novels are for here, in much more detail with regard to James Bond and Honeychile Rider in Dr No here, and in memory of Cormac McCarthy here.
