Your Custom Text Here
Jacques Fénoux as Hippolytus in the Comédie-Française production of Phèdre. Photograph by Atelier Nadar. Pubic Domain courtesy of wikimedia commons.
Theramenes’ advice (above) is —like most folly— spun in threads of silvery truths. He is encouraging his master, Hippolytus, to follow his growing affection for Aricia, the foreign princess which his father (king Theseus) holds captive in the palace.
Hippolytus has grown to love her and she him, though their peoples are at war. One can imagine a montage in which the two of them sing “…there may be something there that wasn’t there before…” from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991).
Read more
p/c Ahmed Galal via unsplash
There is a warning in the Song of Solomon: “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles and by the does of the field, do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires” (Songs 2:7).
If we are not careful it is easy to render these words of counsel from the bride as a warning, “be careful!… not too much love now… take it easy before you commit…. romantic desire is a hazardous thing… ‘kiss dating goodbye’” …etc.
And while there is certainly wisdom in not being reckless in romance…
Read more
p/c Santa Caterina del Sasso, by Wolfgang Sauber via wikimedia commons
In chapter two of the Song of Solomon the Beloved compares his Love to a lily among thorns. The language of the Vulgate, owing a bit to the idioms of Latin, is a bit stronger: lilium inter spinas. She is a lily set in a nest of spines. One cannot get at her without getting into the spines. Towards the end of the chapter the Lover says of her Beloved that they belong each to the other and that he willingly pastures, or “browses”, among the lilies which means also among the thorns.
What’s going-on? Why make this comparison? What’s more —what do the lovers of the Song mean by this?
Read more
The immature and self-orienting love of Romeo and Juliet leads them to a tomb, and later their kinsfolk join their corpses in the crypt and weep. Thier unbridled affection has dealt more death than all the ancient duels between Montague and Capulet. It ends both family lines by cutting off both house’s heirs. Though it had promised to endure forever, worldly love leads us to the grave.
Read more
Immature lovers say in the fever of early attraction: “I wish this moment could last forever.”
Read more
What is hospitality if not the act of getting the lives of other people all over your own? …
Read more
It is because, in thinking that Love is the kind of thing that wealth can buy, that person reveals they do not in fact value love as highly as they appear.
Read more
Leaving behind us for a moment all of the wearied and wheel-rutted arguments for and against “modesty” and all of the recent condemnations of “purity culture” I want to consider, if only in passing on this Monday morning, the nature of “the veil” —by which I mean here anything drawn across the body in order to give it a glory and a covering.
Read more
The singers of the Song of Solomon proclaim that “love is stronger than death” (Songs 8:6). It is precisely this quality that makes love what it is. Love is the things that is capable of laying-down its life for the beloved and then rising again.
Read more
Christ calls his disciples “friends” and astounds them, for the power relations are steep (Jn. 15:14).
Read more
Quisque iaculis facilisis lacinia. Mauris euismod pellentesque tellus sit amet mollis.