La ‘debolezza’ d’amore e il suo incantevole sogno nel Cantico

The Song of Songs is a marvelous poem celebrating the mystery of human love that conforms with the biblical milieu. The central theme concerns the weakness or sickness of love attributed to the woman in the text but it also involves the man. Human love is above all a continuous desire of love: its perpetual desirability is due to the contingency of created beings. The pseudo- Solomonic poem, therefore, is not a common erotic-love drama that is the attraction of love between a man and a woman, but a drama of immortal love that lies in the fragile conditions of human mortality. The desire for love is a spiritual tension due to human imperfection, but at the same time it is the only perfection of humanity itself. It involves two phases: 1) the kenosis of divine love; 2) the elevation of human desire in this divine love through means of experiences whether painful and psychologically inadequate. The temporal element of this phase of desiring love is a moment outside of time and the spatial element is the internal intimacy between two lovers. The Canticle does not actually laud any real love, but glorifies in a dramatic way the only true and real Story that Love universally assumes in itself when at the end it reveals all its divine wisdom and all its transcendent vitality in and through human images; even transfigured by oneiric imageries and which is expressed in a quasi “prelinguistic” language.