Love as Strong as Death
Photo by Mihail Macri on Unsplash
Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
passion fierce as the grave.
- Song of Songs 8:6
There are many motifs, both in nature, art and pop culture, that link love, sex and death. A male praying mantis gets eaten by its mate after coitus. A male marsupial called antechinus will end up dying after mating for fourteen hours, literally…mating…itself to death.
In Romeo & Juliet, a powerful and passionate love culminates in the deaths of the two star crossed youths. In our postmodern age, we see an explicit link made in certain fetishistic subcultures that link expressions of love with acts of inflicting pain, a dalliance with death that does not quite reach its culmination.
In the loftier realms of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud wrote in his “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” that every person carries within themselves a struggle, comprising of an “opposition between the ego or death instincts and the sexual or life instincts”.
The list goes on, but you get the idea…
Now, what if I said that from the Christian tradition draws an almost similar nexus between love and death?
The heart of this claim is the passion of Jesus Christ, who in the Gospels described himself both as a victim of execution as well as a bridegroom (Mark 2:19). In a tantalising but often overlooked detail in the Gospels, we see Jesus’ feet being anointed with nard (John 12:3) - an ointment used for weddings - only a short time before he undergoes his crucifixion. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the crucifixion is the nuptial moment whereby the bridegroom cleaves to his wife.
The only difference here is that though a link is made between love and death, the Gospels do not culminate the story in death. Rather, death is only the prelude to the resurrection, where new life emerges out of death. Thus, in Christ, the nexus between love, sex and death is given a new dimension, in which new life is the culmination.
Note, however, that it is in Christ’s giving of himself that transforms the logic of the nexus that a sin-stained nature would otherwise be locked in. For in our sin, the world does not give of itself to find love, but rather takes. In this drive to take for ourselves as a criterion of feeling loved, we end up turning living realities into static objects. When we do this, we do so to retain our control over things and people, with an aim to freeze the objects of our love and keep their expressions of love for us exactly where and how we want them.
This objectification is particularly acute in the times of our lives when we feel vulnerable, and especially desperate for love. In so objectifying things and people, we end up sucking the dynamism out of these realities like vampires, rendering them not as real agents of love, but as corpses.
We see a vivid display of this in Massive Attack’s music video The Spoils. The video begins with the live face of actress Cate Blanchett, and the entirety of the video keeps a focused gaze on her while Hope Sandoval sings of a love that has died that she wants to keep alive, but knows she cannot.
Sandoval sings in the refrain:
But I somehow slowly love you
And wanna keep you the same
Well, I somehow slowly know you
And wanna keep you away
Sandoval realises the paradox, the more she tries to hold onto this non-existent love, the more she puts a distance between her and the object of her love. As she sings this, we see the toll this takes on the living visage of Blanchett, as bit by bit we see her face becoming measured, cast in latex, anatomically scanned, and finally, ossified into the bleached remains of a bust.
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