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The
Brownstone Journal >>
Issues >> Vol.
X Spring 2001
The Book Of Love: Foreshadowings of
Christianity in Plato’s Symposium
Zachary Bos (CAS XX) is a sophomore
in the College of Arts and Sciences, majoring in English with
a minor in advertising. He plans to continue his editorial work
with The Brownstone Journal during next academic year.
Plato’s Symposium describes the nature of love
as a state achieved through careful cultivation of the self,
albeit cultivation during the avoidance of carnal distraction.
This definition of love leaves allowance in the pagan philosophy
for foreshadowing of ideas that later would become the Christian
love ethic. Plato may not have professed faith in a singular
deity, Christian or otherwise, unless Knowledge may be called
a deity, but he nonetheless read the world in a way compatible
with Christianity. The ties between platonic insight and Christian
theology can be categorized in three ways: the nature of Love,
the act of Love, and the way toward Love. These three categories
overlap and absolute differentiation of one from another is
impossible. Therefore, only examination of the general theme
of love is valid when exploring the relationship between Symposium
and biblical texts. Plato did not prognosticate Christian doctrine:
the relationship rather reflects a common recognition of a universal
theme.
Love, as described and exemplified by Socrates, is not erotic
(though the strained use of the word eros suggests otherwise).
Alcibiades’ beratement of his lover, “...isn’t he like Silenus?”
(S. 126a), demonstrates the extent to which eroticism has no
pull on Socrates, for whom intellectual affections are much
more important. The body, to him, was an obstacle to thought.
If he enjoyed at all the pleasure of having beautiful men attracted
to him, it was only to marvel in an intellectual manner at their
lust. He himself could not be bothered with affairs of the flesh.
A similar rhetoric of dismissing the flesh as impermanent frequently
occurs in the Bible:
He remembered that they were but flesh, a passing breeze that
does not return.
Psalm 78:39
Here, the flux of time devalues corporeality. Material things
do not last, and so cannot represent something as eternal as
love:
For everything in the world – the cravings of sinful man, the
lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does –
comes not from the Father but from the world.
John 2:16
Paul More’s The Religion of Plato echoes the distant separation
between the material and the spiritual:
Neoplatonism undertakes to account for the evil negatively
by means of successive emanations, or expansions, from a metaphysical
Unity of an Extreme type. Theoretically, evil, as mere distance
from, or Diminution of, Being, per se does not exist, is not-being.
More 236
Speaking through Diotima, Plato uses a similarly graduated
separation when he outlines the Ladder of Love as a series of
successive steps from the base, eros, to the Divine.
During the Symposium, Socrates, in his typically argumentative
role, uses dialectic to illustrate the invalidity of others’
arguments while forcing the men to agree with his own assertions.
He relates his theory of love in an anecdotal conversation between
himself and Diotima. The ladder of love constructed in this
story depends on the lover’s recognition that all sorts of beauty
“are closely related to each other” (S. 210c). Once a universal
form of beauty becomes evident, one can remove oneself from
attachments to particular individuals and forms. By moving from
bodies to forms, to practices, and then to forms of leaning
(S. 211c), less and less of sensual reality is involved in appreciating
beauty, until finally the prepared, rational mind is elevated
to concurrence with Beauty itself (Republic, 490b; 518-519b).
Plato, crudely distilled, says that love drives us toward perfect
wisdom. However, without perfect wisdom, we cannot be motivated
by love alone. Love held in a state of imperfection would bring
with it the corruption of satisfaction. The mind, distracted
by lower forms of love, carnal and sensual, maintains an imperfect
awareness and is forever ignorant of the notion of higher forms
of love. Therefore, if it is to act as a motivator, “love” must
be external to the human. Here a problem of definition arises;
within the human heart, love would be left as a disembodied
emotion, a thoroughly absurd character. Emotion is the sensation
of virtue by the mind and physiological responses associated
with that sensation. Without a body, there is no emotion. Love
must be external, and love thus externalized must also be independent
of love the emotion. Therefore Plato’s love, which is the motivation
to search higher for a more perfect wisdom, can only be–to the
Christian–a benevolent God. Love must be a being whose presence
can be described simultaneously as independent of the flesh,
and as a fulfillment of the potential we recognize when we are
moved by “love.”
The mythical story of two-headed beings split by the gods into
human-halves calls into question the priority that Christian
spirituality demands over personal fulfillment. Should God be
the object of his people’s love, or should they dedicate themselves
to finding their original partners and finding a more physical
completion that way? Is there an “innate desire of each other”
(S. 191d)? If seen as an allegory for man’s spiritual relationship
with God, Plato’s fictional account of the cause of loneliness
has a deeper meaner. If the splitting of the conjoined beings
represents the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, then their
search for the lost half resembles the quest to reconcile oneself
with God. “Our human race can only achieve happiness if love
reaches its conclusion and each of us finds his love one and
restores his original nature” (S. 193c).
Love has been defined in two ways: as non-sensual, and as external
from humanity. How, then, to embrace something that is wholly
metaphysical? One solution is to worship; Plato would have said
the only thing to be done is to educate oneself. By using discipline
to examine one’s relationship with divinity, one can understand
how to attune his or her spirituality to God and the church.
Time is also a problem: Diotima logically states that “love”
must desire a state of perpetual goodness. The only way for
inconstant humans to remain immortal is to procreate.
By simultaneously criticizing shallow sexual acts and elevating
the importance of reproduction, Plato encourages the Christian
idea of intercourse only for reproduction. Diotima’s conclusions
that the object of love is actually “reproduction and birth
in beauty” (S. 206e) suppresses the idea that intercourse is
a sinless act. Only when moved toward procreation can two persons
share an act of love, rather than one of carnal indulgence.
“Procreation,” says F.M. Cornford, “is the divine attribute
in the mortal animal” (Cornford, 124).
In the Symposium, Plato outlines a theory that equates love
with perpetual Beauty, Knowledge, and Form, following his philosophy
of Ideas. By making love external, eternal and ethereal, he
approaches naming the embodiment of Love as God. He falls short,
though, by not applying an entity to his ideal. Seeing this
weakness in Plato’s philosophy, Dante gives these words to his
guide Virgil, who understands that the Pilgrim with faith can
go farther than the pagan can go without it: “I have led thee
hither with intelligence and art; henceforth take thine own
pleasure for guide; thou hast come forth of the steep and narrow
ways.” TBJ
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alighieri, Dante. Dante’s Divine Comedy: the Purgatorio. Tr.
William Stratford Dugale, Ed. Brunone Bianchi. London: George
Bell & Sons, 1883.
Cornford, F.M. “The Doctrine of Eros in Plato’s Symposium.”
The Unwritten Philosophy and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1950. 68-80.
More, P.E. The Religion of Plato. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1921.
Plato. Commentaire sur la Republique. Tr., ed. A.J. Festugliere.
Paris: J. Vrin, 1970.
Plato. Symposium. Tr. Stanley Rosen. St. Augustine: St. Augustine
Press, 1999.
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