Thought this might be of interest but personally not familiar enough to have any meaningful comment.
“If you love only what cannot be snatched out of its lover’s hand, you undoubtedly remain unbeaten.” Augustine wrote these words in On Christian Belief to explain his faith in loving God over worldly goods. If one directs one’s love at what cannot be “snatched” away—at God and love itself—one will suffer neither longing nor loss. Thomas Aquinas, elaborating on the idea, held that the theological virtues of faith, hope and most of all charity direct humanity towards God, who is the one Good that can satisfy all needs and desires. With this, we may come to a sense of inner unity and peace.
Max Layton, the son of Cohen’s mentor, the poet Irving Layton, called Cohen “the greatest psalmist since King David.”Yet Cohen also saw that though we are made as covenantal creatures, dependent on bonds with God and other persons, we breach them and bolt. Inconstancy, betrayal, and abandonment are the human condition. “I made a date in Heaven,” Cohen wrote in “Got a Little Secret.” “Oh Lord but I've been keepin' it in Hell.”
Boring into this human condition, Cohen came to this theodical question: Why did God make us needy of him and others and yet founder in inconstancy? Why is it so difficult to sustain covenant, so easy to abandon, abuse and be left with gaping loss?
The problem of covenant unsustained is the theme of Cohen’s theodicy. Beneath each interrogation of why humanity fails covenant is the more anguished question of why God created us so prone to fail it. Cohen’s problem was not a crisis of faith—he never ceased believing in God—but the scandal that God makes it so hard for us to live by our beliefs.
If one promise of Judaism—indeed, the central promise at Sinai—is covenant with the God of grace and compassion (“el rachum v’chanun” Ex 34: 6), why are we so on our own to forsake and be forsaken? Why is each of us out there, dangling like “a bird on the wire,” trying to be “free,” having “torn everyone who reached out for me” (“Bird on a Wire.”1969)? In this song, Cohen says he’ll repent, “I swear by this song/ And by all that I have done wrong/ I will make it all up to thee.” Yet he breached this and so many promises over the next half century, each failure fueling the next song.
Cohen’s Jewish and Christian imagery
Cohen grew up in Montreal, which he called a “Catholic city.” His nanny was Catholic and took him to church. For his high school years, he went to a traditionally Christian school. The power of New Testament imagery and its weight in our cultural-emotional repertoire was, in Cohen’s view, unavoidable regardless of one’s religious beliefs. “From David to Jesus,” he said, “the idea of Law, of revelation, of a sacred life, or a messiah. All that poetry was at my fingertips.” While he comically ranted when Bob Dylan converted to Christianity, “I just don’t get it… I don’t get the Jesus part,” he also once commented that the “figure of Jesus is extremely attractive. It’s difficult not to fall in love with that person.”
The critic Northrop Frye observed that in Cohen, “The Christian myth is seen as an extension of the Jewish one, its central hanged god in the tradition of the martyred Jew.” Jewish and Christian images are thus often back-to-back or conflated in Cohen’s writing, not unlike the interwoven and conflated imagery that he used to evoke relationship with the divine and human loves. His 2014 song “Born in Chains,” for instance, though built on the Exodus narrative, nonetheless includes an image of the crucified Christ: “I was idled with my soul… But then you showed me where you had been wounded/In every atom broken is a name.”
The “wound” of the song may reference the wound of the biblical Jacob as he wrestled with God’s messenger and was so bound in covenant with God (Gn 32:22-31). Or it may be Christ’s wound in the Passion; or both at once. The wounded man, the scholar Peter Billingham notes, is a paradigm for Cohen, signifying the human condition of being broken off from the bonds we need. Woundedness is the plight of the first man, Adam (and so all humanity), who “inhabits,” Billingham writes, “an internal state of exile from a pre-Fall Paradise.” Woundedness is the plight, Billingham continues, of the Jesus-man, who restores “the wholeness (holiness) of humankind and creation.”
What, for Cohen, was the point? “Any guy,” he explained, “who says blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek, has got to be a figure of unparalleled generosity and insight and madness. A man who declared himself to stand among the thieves, the prostitutes and the homeless. He was a man of inhuman generosity, a generosity that would overthrow the world if it was embraced.” The point is the radical nature of seeing to, attending to, the other. In a word, covenantal love.
Moses and Jesus
Moses and Jesus: men of love and forbearance. What grabs Cohen about these two is that they—fully human, riddled with the same fears and temptations that filled him, forsaken by their people and at moments seemingly by God—abandon neither God nor people. They persist in commitment. Jesus, Cohen wrote, “was nailed to a human predicament, summoning the heart to comprehend its own suffering by dissolving itself in a radical confession of hospitality.” Suffering is turned to hospitality. Moses too extends seemingly infinite forbearance to the Hebrews even after the scandalous Golden Calf idolatry. Indeed, he has more patience than God is able to muster (Ex 32:9-14). Moses extends his patience and care repeatedly through the 40-year trek to Canaan, the subject of four of the five Pentateuch books.
Leonard Cohen’s Jewish and Christian imagery: ‘All that poetry was at my fingertips’ | America Magazine
“If you love only what cannot be snatched out of its lover’s hand, you undoubtedly remain unbeaten.” Augustine wrote these words in On Christian Belief to explain his faith in loving God over worldly goods. If one directs one’s love at what cannot be “snatched” away—at God and love itself—one will suffer neither longing nor loss. Thomas Aquinas, elaborating on the idea, held that the theological virtues of faith, hope and most of all charity direct humanity towards God, who is the one Good that can satisfy all needs and desires. With this, we may come to a sense of inner unity and peace.
Max Layton, the son of Cohen’s mentor, the poet Irving Layton, called Cohen “the greatest psalmist since King David.”Yet Cohen also saw that though we are made as covenantal creatures, dependent on bonds with God and other persons, we breach them and bolt. Inconstancy, betrayal, and abandonment are the human condition. “I made a date in Heaven,” Cohen wrote in “Got a Little Secret.” “Oh Lord but I've been keepin' it in Hell.”
Boring into this human condition, Cohen came to this theodical question: Why did God make us needy of him and others and yet founder in inconstancy? Why is it so difficult to sustain covenant, so easy to abandon, abuse and be left with gaping loss?
The problem of covenant unsustained is the theme of Cohen’s theodicy. Beneath each interrogation of why humanity fails covenant is the more anguished question of why God created us so prone to fail it. Cohen’s problem was not a crisis of faith—he never ceased believing in God—but the scandal that God makes it so hard for us to live by our beliefs.
If one promise of Judaism—indeed, the central promise at Sinai—is covenant with the God of grace and compassion (“el rachum v’chanun” Ex 34: 6), why are we so on our own to forsake and be forsaken? Why is each of us out there, dangling like “a bird on the wire,” trying to be “free,” having “torn everyone who reached out for me” (“Bird on a Wire.”1969)? In this song, Cohen says he’ll repent, “I swear by this song/ And by all that I have done wrong/ I will make it all up to thee.” Yet he breached this and so many promises over the next half century, each failure fueling the next song.
Cohen’s Jewish and Christian imagery
Cohen grew up in Montreal, which he called a “Catholic city.” His nanny was Catholic and took him to church. For his high school years, he went to a traditionally Christian school. The power of New Testament imagery and its weight in our cultural-emotional repertoire was, in Cohen’s view, unavoidable regardless of one’s religious beliefs. “From David to Jesus,” he said, “the idea of Law, of revelation, of a sacred life, or a messiah. All that poetry was at my fingertips.” While he comically ranted when Bob Dylan converted to Christianity, “I just don’t get it… I don’t get the Jesus part,” he also once commented that the “figure of Jesus is extremely attractive. It’s difficult not to fall in love with that person.”
The critic Northrop Frye observed that in Cohen, “The Christian myth is seen as an extension of the Jewish one, its central hanged god in the tradition of the martyred Jew.” Jewish and Christian images are thus often back-to-back or conflated in Cohen’s writing, not unlike the interwoven and conflated imagery that he used to evoke relationship with the divine and human loves. His 2014 song “Born in Chains,” for instance, though built on the Exodus narrative, nonetheless includes an image of the crucified Christ: “I was idled with my soul… But then you showed me where you had been wounded/In every atom broken is a name.”
The “wound” of the song may reference the wound of the biblical Jacob as he wrestled with God’s messenger and was so bound in covenant with God (Gn 32:22-31). Or it may be Christ’s wound in the Passion; or both at once. The wounded man, the scholar Peter Billingham notes, is a paradigm for Cohen, signifying the human condition of being broken off from the bonds we need. Woundedness is the plight of the first man, Adam (and so all humanity), who “inhabits,” Billingham writes, “an internal state of exile from a pre-Fall Paradise.” Woundedness is the plight, Billingham continues, of the Jesus-man, who restores “the wholeness (holiness) of humankind and creation.”
What, for Cohen, was the point? “Any guy,” he explained, “who says blessed are the poor, blessed are the meek, has got to be a figure of unparalleled generosity and insight and madness. A man who declared himself to stand among the thieves, the prostitutes and the homeless. He was a man of inhuman generosity, a generosity that would overthrow the world if it was embraced.” The point is the radical nature of seeing to, attending to, the other. In a word, covenantal love.
Moses and Jesus
Moses and Jesus: men of love and forbearance. What grabs Cohen about these two is that they—fully human, riddled with the same fears and temptations that filled him, forsaken by their people and at moments seemingly by God—abandon neither God nor people. They persist in commitment. Jesus, Cohen wrote, “was nailed to a human predicament, summoning the heart to comprehend its own suffering by dissolving itself in a radical confession of hospitality.” Suffering is turned to hospitality. Moses too extends seemingly infinite forbearance to the Hebrews even after the scandalous Golden Calf idolatry. Indeed, he has more patience than God is able to muster (Ex 32:9-14). Moses extends his patience and care repeatedly through the 40-year trek to Canaan, the subject of four of the five Pentateuch books.
Leonard Cohen’s Jewish and Christian imagery: ‘All that poetry was at my fingertips’ | America Magazine
