For there is nothing to which love can be compared. On the contrary: love demands forgetting about, despising all other things in exchange for its self—surrender. The only thing that love seeks is the person who is trying to find it. This brings us again into the channels of logic and even –making an innocent play on words—of pure logic, because the logic of love is always more logical than strictly worldly logic. However, we are not really talking about two distinct logics, for, in the last analysis, the logic of love (or the logic of God) is the only true logic.  The fact that that usually it does not appear this way is not due to anything other than the corruption of nature, which is responsible for man’s not always perceiving the true nature of things with sufficient clarity and transparency. It must be admitted, however, that the presence of these two perspectives leads one to think at times that there are indeed two distinct and even opposed logics: that of love and that of the world.

Accordingly, love would be ruled by its own set of laws which are totally different from and incomprehensible to those that govern worldly wisdom.  And so the logic of love, compared with that of the world, seems to the latter to be illogical on two scores. In the first place, it seems to be a logic closed in on itself, because love has its own rules and seeks no justification other than its own. It is true that only love can understand love and in the last analysis one loves because one loves: Causa diligendi Deum Deus est, said St Bernard. There is every reason, then, for saying that, in this sense, if one really does not love, not only is love left without reasons to justify it, but itself actually becomes incomprehensible.

In saying this we do not imply that love is an irrational tendency; the whole thrust of this book goes in the opposite direction. What we mean here is that true love is grasped only by the person who loves. Indeed, it is worldly logic that regards true love as irrational. That is why it is only when the Church let herself be led astray by worldly ideologies that it became possible for so many Catholic Curias (diocesan and archdiocesan) to bring in de facto divorce, by granting virtually all annulment petitions submitted to them. In this way, although divorce is not recognized doctrinally, it is recognized in fact.

The basic problem stems from the fact that people no longer believe in the possibility of true love, a love capable of totality and an enduring love, a love that is ready to give itself entirely and forever. The wisdom of the world cannot understand the madness of the love of God. This in turn leads to the second aspect of love’s apparent lack of logic: love not only appears as something unjustifiable, it even seems absurd and preposterous, very close to madness: For since in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to the Gentiles (1 Cor 1: 21—23).

According to this, the natural logic of human wisdom, and even the logic of those miracles the world would like to witness, not only are not always identical with divine logic, they quite frequently have very little to do with it. The supreme act of love or the greatest which man has ever experienced –the death of Christ on a gibbet—was a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles.

That was what the world thought of the most extraordinary paradox that infinite Intelligence and Love could devise. However, in spite of everything, against everything worldly logic and wisdom might say, the Bible carefully, precisely, adds that the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men (1 Cor 1:25).

Translated from the book Comentarios al Cantar de los Cantares vol I (pp. 80 - 83)