If Music be the Food of Love, Play On

Whitehead, Shakespeare, and the Eucharist
​
​

‘If music be the food of love, play on.’ The opening line of Twelfth Night, or, What You Will makes clear that this is a play all about desire. The central protagonists all yearn, deliciously, for the unattainable. Orsino desires Olivia, Olivia desires Cesario; Malvolio desires Olivia, Olivia desires Sebastian; Orsino desires Cesario; Viola desires Orsino.

Emma Smith on the characters in Twelfth Night in This is Shakespeare

---

He is the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire - the initial object of desire.

Alfred North Whitehead on God in ​Process and Reality

​Tasting the Infinite Deliciously

​

'If music be the food of love, play on.” 

The opening line of Twelfth Night, or What You Will makes clear that this is a play all about desire. As Oxford Renaissance literature scholar Emma Smith notes, the central protagonists “yearn, deliciously, for the unattainable.” Orsino desires Olivia, Olivia desires Cesario; Malvolio desires Olivia, Olivia desires Sebastian; Orsino desires Cesario; Viola desires Orsino.

You don’t need to know very much about Twelfth Night to feel the truth in Smith’s insight. There is something in the human heart that yearns in this way—seeking not just an encounter with the unattainable, but a taste of it.

The idea of tasting is apt. We do not merely want to know the unattainable, as if intellectual apprehension, from a respectable distance, would satisfy us. No—we want to touch it in a more palpable way. With the lips. So that it might become part of our innermost bodily essence. We want to taste it.

But what is the unattainable? Is it simply another person—whose soul, whose inner life, remains forever unpossessable, no matter how much we might long to be with them? Is this what attainment means--possession?

​Or is it something deeper and wider still?

Perhaps it is something infinite. Something whose radiant light might shine through another person or object of desire, but which is not reducible to that person or object. Something that reveals itself in the eyes of another, in a piece of music, in a moment of connection—but always slips just beyond reach.

Is this God?

God as Object of Desire

I am reminded of Alfred North Whitehead’s observation that God is the “initial object of desire.” He writes:

“He is the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire. His particular relevance to each creative act, as it arises from its own conditioned standpoint in the world, constitutes him the initial ‘object of desire.’” (Process and Reality, p. 344)

In Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, each moment of experience is a creative act, guided not by static ideals or laws, but by a divine presence that beckons us toward richness of experience. God is not an external force controlling the world, but an inward lure—the sacred whisper that invites every entity to seek intensity, beauty, and harmony.

​Desire, then, is not incidental. It is the heartbeat of reality. We are creatures who yearn because the universe itself yearns. We long for what is just beyond the edge of what we can hold, because the cosmos is lured toward the more-than, the not-yet. This unattainable, delicious longing may pass through the faces and bodies of others—but its ultimate source is deeper still. It is the holy presence that shimmers in every moment of love and every ache of absence.

“If music be the food of love, play on”—not because music will ever satisfy our desire, but because it keeps us longing, keeps us reaching. And in that reaching, perhaps, we draw near to the mystery we most hunger for.

The Eucharist

This yearning to taste the unattainable—to bring what is beyond us into our very bodies—is not only a theme in Twelfth Night, nor merely an insight from process philosophy. It lies at the heart of Christian sacramental life, especially in the Eucharist.

In the Eucharist, we do not simply think about Christ. We do not merely remember him as an idea or admire him from afar. We taste him. We take him into our mouths and bodies. The Word becomes flesh—and then bread and wine—so that love might be consumed. This is not possession in the sense of control; it is communion. It is an intimacy that does not exhaust the mystery but deepens it.

And yet even in this sacred meal, the unattainability remains. Christ is present, yes—but not captured. The bread is real, and the wine is real, and yet they point beyond themselves to a love more radiant, more infinite, than any one act can contain. Like Orsino’s desire, or Viola’s, our Eucharistic yearning is both fulfilled and deepened in the tasting. We are fed, but we remain hungry. And that is as it should be.

Whitehead’s phrase—God as “the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire”—helps us see the Eucharist not only as a memory of a past event, but as a participation in the deepest rhythm of the cosmos: the movement of love seeking embodiment, again and again. The Eucharist is a microcosm of the universe’s own longing for beauty, communion, and creative fulfillment. It is the eternal yearning of God meeting the yearning of the world, in a morsel of bread, in a sip of wine.

“If music be the food of love, play on,” says Orsino.
“Take, eat; this is my body,” says Christ.
​
Both speak to the mystery of a love we cannot fully possess, but which we can taste. And in tasting, we are drawn into something more than satisfaction—we are drawn into a divine process, a sacred becoming, where desire itself is holy.

Music

And yet, not all accept this understanding of the Eucharist. Many do not share the sacramental imagination that sees the divine offered in bread and wine. But the hunger remains. The yearning persists. For even those who do not kneel at the altar, there is still the ache for communion—for something more, something luminous, something beyond the self that can be tasted in a moment of beauty or truth.

Music offers such a taste.

When Orsino pleads, “If music be the food of love, play on,” he gives voice to this secular-sacred longing. Music, like the Eucharist, is not a possession. It cannot be held, fixed, or consumed in the ordinary sense. It happens in time, disappears even as it is heard, and yet it feeds something in us that is more than hunger. Music pierces and surrounds, carries and opens. It touches the lips of the soul.

In this way, music can become Eucharistic—even outside the church. It, too, is a food of love. It awakens the same desire for the unattainable, the same ache for what lies just beyond reach, the same longing to taste what is most real and most beautiful. For some, a symphony may do what the sacrament does for others: invite them to communion with the infinite. The Spirit, after all, is not confined to chalice and paten. The divine lure plays in many keys.
​
We may not all interpret the meaning of bread or melody in the same way, but the appetite is shared. The yearning for more—more love, more presence, more being—is the music beneath all our hungers. Whether in chapel or concert hall, in silence or in sound, we reach and are reached by something holy.