Characteristics of Love
Peter Kreeft on what love is all about:
I begin with two preliminary considerations. One, I feel rather remiss in writing on a subject like this. I hardly see myself as being an exemplary paragon of love. But the author that I will soon quote from here said similar things when he discussed the topic, saying he was well out of his league on this. But that would be true of all of us Christians. We know about the overwhelming importance of love, but we too often do not properly experience it, live it, and demonstrate it.
Two, just the other day I wrote about love, featuring another very important author – C. S. Lewis. In it I discussed his book The Four Loves and looked at what he had said about one kind of love: friendship. https://billmuehlenberg.com/2026/09/21/on-friendship-and-c-s-lewis/
The author I appeal to and quote from today is the noted philosopher and Catholic thinker Peter Kreeft, and his book is Three Philosophies of Life (Ignatius, 1989). A few weeks ago I discussed one of those philosophies – life as suffering, from the book of Job: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2026/09/04/kreeft-job-and-the-meaning-of-life/
The other two he writes about are life as vanity from Ecclesiastes and life as love from the Song of Songs. It is the latter one I will now look at more closely. As mentioned, Kreeft begins his assessment by saying he may not be worthy to write on such things. But who really is?
He notes how God is not mentioned in this biblical book, but that “God is everywhere in this book, symbolically”. He goes on to say this:
It is also the hidden key to the rest of the Bible. The Bible is about real life, of course—it is the most realistic book ever written. And the point of the real story of life is love. 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.
It is a double love story, vertical and horizontal, divine and human. The two great commandments are to love God and to love neighbor. Thus this love poem is to be interpreted on two levels: divine and human…
The bulk of the chapter examines 26 characteristics of love that the poem implies. I list them all here in bullet point form, but will share more from a few of them:
- Love is a song
- Love is the greatest song
- Love is dialogue
- Love is synergistic
- Love is alive
- Love is gospel
- Love is power
- Love is work
- Love is desire and fulfillment
- Suffering goes with love
- Love is free
- Love is true to reality
- Love is accurate
- Love is simple
- Love is individual
- Love is all conquering
- Love is a surprise
- Love is fearless
- Love is exchange of selves
- Love is triumphalistic
- Love is natural
- Love is faithful
- Love is ready
- Love is all inclusive
- Love is “sexist”
- Love is as strong as death
Love is Gospel
Love is news, good news, Gospel. Love is promise of future bliss, hopeful of future reward, forward looking to future ratification. Its words always invite us forward. Even Freud perceived this: he divides the fundamental forces of the psyche into two: eros, the life force, drives us forward, while Thanatos, the death force, the death wish, pulls us backward into the womb. For Freud life is the battle between these two forces. This is the residue or relic in the thought of the atheist and immoralist of the great Mosaic vision of life as the battle between the forces of life and death, obedience and disobedience to God:
“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice, and cleaving to him (Dt 30:19-20)”
The drama of Song of Songs, as of life, is the drama of choice between eros and thanatos, life and death, Yes and No as the two possible responses to the Gospel of the beloved. That Gospel speaks wonderful and mysterious promises. Will the human bride believe them? Will she have faith in her divine bridegroom? Will she choose life?…
Love is Gospel because love is alive. Love is not an abstract ideal; love is a wedding invitation. Love is not something for us to approach; it is something that approaches us. We do not turn it on; it turns us on as a lamplighter turns on a lamp.
Suffering Goes with Love
Love naturally suffers for the very obvious reason that it opens you up, exposes your tenderest, most vulnerable part, the quivering flesh of the heart, at the mercy of the beloved and of time and fate. If the beloved is human and not divine, you will always be betrayed. We always betray each other’s love, in some way. That is what Original Sin means. No one is totally reliable. Put divine expectations on any human shoulders, even the shoulders of a saint, and you will be bitterly disappointed. And not only the beloved—time and fate and life itself seem to participate in Original Sin and the Fall, so that if there is one thing we can predict with accuracy, it is that “the course of true love never did run smooth”. 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.
But in the very act of suffering, love can transform suffering, redeem it, and conquer it. Like a flood so powerful that no dam can stop it, like a flood that transforms the dam set up to stop its flow into a part of itself, as it carries the dam along downstream, so love transforms the suffering that at first seems set up against it into a part of itself. Thus in Song of Songs the bride refers to her suffering for love and the burn marks this suffering has made in her flesh as marks of beauty, not of ugliness…
It is as in Hosea 2: only after the wilderness, after suffering, is love perfected. Not only does love transform and perfect suffering; suffering also transforms and perfects love. The two things that seem to be enemies turn out to be mutually reinforcing allies. For only in the silence of the wilderness do we hear God’s still, small voice whispering to the heart of our heart. C. S. Lewis says, in The Problem of Pain, “God whispers in our pleasures and shouts in our pains.” That is true, but sometimes the opposite is also true. (See Hosea 2.)
Love is All Conquering
“Amor vincit omnia”, love conquers all, says the poet. No force on earth can withstand its power, for its 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. 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 are 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.
Kreeft closes the chapter, and the book, quoting Revelation 21:1-6 about the free offer of eternal life:
Did you hear that? Without payment! Our only qualification is thirst. The incredible offer is repeated again in Revelation 22:17:
“The Spirit and the Bride [the Church] say, ‘Come.’ And let him who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let him who is thirsty come, let him who desires take the water of life without price.”
Eternal joy, marriage to God, is “without price” because Love has already paid the price, on Calvary.
Love, you see, can do anything. Love alone can fill Ecclesiastes’ emptiness—and yours. Love alone can satisfy Job’s quest—and yours.
[1580 words]
Pro 10:12 “Hatred stirs up fights, but love covers all sins.”
Of course it will need to.
Rev 1:5 “… even from Jesus Christ the faithful Witness, the First-born from the dead and the Ruler of the kings of the earth. To Him who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood…”