The Name seals the heart with a flame of love stronger than death, a flame of Yah consuming confusion and diffusing division at the heart of the Burning Bush. The seal’s transfiguring flame purifies desire of all that usurps God, illumining the heart by unveiling divine desire, embracing a glorified earth with heaven’s ineffable wisdom. Earthly loves are completed when passionate heavenly love descends to raise their ascending energy to heaven. The flame of the Name always exceeds what is possible, always transcends what is conventionally assimilable as it imagines glory anew. The Song of Songs gives voice to the wisdom of the descending Shulammite in dialogue with the ascending voice of Solomon, transfiguring passions in a reign of peace with a conjugal wisdom and glory that together communicate love’s flame hidden at the heart of the Name. Shulammite peace, Shalom, conceals its divine-human love dance that can never be confined by the warring conventions of divisive intentionality, but breaks out into ecstatic expressions of consummating completeness. The kiss of peace is God’s intimate unveiling of his Name, God’s ‘mouth to mouth’ communication of his Spirit as the breath of life. The Name’s kiss of peace is a kiss of uncreated love, a mystery which reveals the Holy of Holies unveiled at the heart of the Song of Songs. Poetic prophecy falls silent at this point, not because love’s intensity is extinguished but because it is transfigured into consummate completeness, ineffably fulfilled.
The flame of the Name is a kiss of peace that proves to be a kiss of death to addictive temporal incompleteness as well as a kiss of life unveiling the grace of glory’s timeless completeness. Wisdom and glory transcend objective gender whilst opening gendered loves to mysteries of conjugal union, mysteries of communion unveiling wisdom beyond wisdom and glory beyond glory. Love puts death to death here as the flame of the Name, consuming death by revealing death to be a living flame of love. A crown of glory is death’s flame of the Name, transfiguring passive receptivity into co-creative activity. Divine descent co-inheres with human ascent as uncreated divine-human creativity, unveiling the Name not only as a crown of glory but as a throne of grace. Intoxicated by love, the Name unveils joy in crowns through thrones, because the union of wisdom and glory is unveiled in every divine name, manifesting the unification of the Name through the unification of all divine names. The kiss of peace is therefore God’s communion with God reverberating on earth as it reverberates in heaven, the Name being a crown of glory above and a throne of grace below.
The flame of the Name may be at first a binary via negativa, but when lived and known, turns out also to be a via eminentia of names in the Name that transforms union by negation into co-inherent communion, a consummated union, negating negation. Ascetical renunciation is ultimately eschatological fulfilment, transcending every divisive dualism between this world and the next. Having renounced desire, desire enters into God, giving way to God’s desire, returning through God, generating the mysteries of glorification. For the Patristic Tradition, the Song of Solomon was always a glorifying wisdom text, read in the light of Plato’s Symposium, purifying and illumining our loves, because experienced as the grace of a kiss of peace. Hesychast wisdom sings rather than argues, is enchanted rather than just chants, as the Spirit breathes divine life through a kiss, God’s kiss of God awakening in the midst, which is the hallowed Name. Divine-human union entails a mysterious exchange whereby the human is deified and the divine is humanised, confirming the co-inherent oneness of incarnation and deification. If there is desire that longs for death, it is death that dies into love, dies into God, fulfilling desire with transfiguring completeness. Desire for God dies to death by completing desire, by dying into God who fulfils and completes every desire. The flame of the Name dies to desire as a flame of love, stronger than death, conjoining heaven and earth in the Holy of Holies with a kiss of peace.