A Charles Wesley stanza from 1742:
O Love divine, what has thou done!
The immortal God hath died for me!
The Father’s coeternal Son
bore all my sins upon the tree.
Th’ immortal God for me hath died:
My Lord, my Love, is crucified!
Somewhere around the end of the first century (98? 117?), Ignatius of Antioch was martyred. In his letter to the Christians at Rome, this Syrian bishop exclaimed that as his death approached, he no longer desired any earthly thing: “My love is crucified!”
This was a shocking thing for him to say. Ignatius knew the writings of the New Testament (he quotes several of them), and he knew that the normal greek word for “love” in Christian conversation was already the word agape (uh, goppy). But Ignatius instead used the word eros: “My eros is crucified.”
When the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew into Greek, the legendary team of seventy translators had to decide how to translate Hebrew words about love into Greek, a language which had by definition spent much of its history saying pagan things about love. Eros in particular was a hot word, and by “hot” I mean sexually charged. The Septuagint translators couldn’t quite make themselves call the love of Yahweh for Israel, or the love of the Psalmist for his God, eros. So they opted for a less colorful word, agape. It didn’t mean much at the time, but at least it didn’t bring in eros with its orgiastic pagan connotations. And once agape was employed in the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures, and made its way into the New Testament, it took on all the power of the Gospel message as a linguistic carrier of the message: agape is patient, agape is kind, God is agape, the Son of God had agape for me, and gave himself for me.
The along comes Ignatius of Antioch: “My eros is crucified!” Here was a statement that made even Origen blush. Eros, the fire of desire, passionate affection? Origen ended up using the term, and even found it helpful in making pious sense out of the Song of Solomon.
And what exactly does Ignatius mean by it? Charles Williams, typically, makes it something spooky and esoteric, finding “depths below depths of meaning” in it. I can see two immediately. One: Ignatius is saying that with martyrdom approaching, his burning desire for anything whatsoever has been replaced by something else, an emotion at the border of human possibility. Heaven is near, and eros is dead. The world, to paraphrase Paul as Ignatius did often, is crucified to him, and he to the world. Two: He could be using eros in the sense of “darling,” and calling Jesus his heart’s desire. This is actually the sense Origen assumed, and he thought it was over the line as language about a savior.
That brings us back to Charles Wesley, who certainly knew his early Christian writings and was pretty likely (though I can’t prove it) consciously quoting Ignatius. He’s built a short hymn around the line, “my love is crucified,” expanding it to show that “my Lord” equals “my Love,” and beginning the first stanza by calling on “Love divine.” He works the text so intensely, and balances it so strongly, that (to my ear at least) the song directly calls Jesus Christ “My Love” without succumbing to sentimentality or a too-familiar cloying, romanticized sweetness.
How many “depths below depths” (so Williams) of meaning are supposed to be echoing in Wesley’s hymn I do not know. The greatness of the hymn, as with so many of Charles Wesley’s hymns, is its simplicity. You don’t have to know that there are sixteen centuries of Christian thought buried here to sing with Charles Wesley:
O Love divine, what has thou done!
The immortal God hath died for me!
The Father’s coeternal Son
bore all my sins upon the tree.
Th’ immortal God for me hath died:
My Lord, my Love, is crucified!Is crucified for me and you,
to bring us rebels back to God.
Believe, believe the record true,
ye all are bought with Jesus’ blood.
Pardon for all flows from his side:
My Lord, my Love, is crucified!Behold him, all ye that pass by,
the bleeding Prince of life and peace!
Come, sinners, see your Savior die,
and say, “Was ever grief like his?”
Come, feel with me his blood applied:
My Lord, my Love, is crucified!
