It used to be a proverb that Apollo created AEsculapius to heal the body and Plato to heal the soul.  Plato may have failed to do that.  But he heightened its stature.  It has been loftier since he taught.  In his teaching was the consummation of intellect.  His mind was sky-like, his speech perfection.  Antiquity that thought Zeus must have revealed himself to Pheidias, thought, too, that should the high god deign to speak to mortals, it would be in the nightingale tongue of refinement which Plato employed.  The beauty of it is not always apprehensible.  His views, also, are not always understood.  Yet an attempt must be made to supply some semblance of the latter because of the influence they have had.

“I know but one little thing,” said Socrates.  “It is love.”  Socrates was ironical.  That which it pleased him to call little, Plato regarded as a special form of the universal law of attraction.  His theories on the subject are contained in the Phaedrus and the Symposion, two poetically luxurious works produced by him in the violet-crowned city during the brilliant Athenian day, before Socrates had gone and Sparta had come.

The Symposion is a banquet.  A few friends, Phaedrus and Pausanias, men of letters; Eryximachus, a physician; Aristophanes, the poet; Socrates, the seer, have been supping at the house of Agathon.  By way of food for thought love is suggested.  Discussion regarding it follows, in which Socrates joins-a simple expedient that enabled Plato to put in his master’s mouth the aesthetic nectar of personal views of which the real Socrates never dreamed.

Among the first disputants is Phaedrus.  In his quality of man of letters he began with extravagant praise of Eros, whom he called the mightiest of all gods, the chief minister of happiness.

To this, Pausanias, also a literary man and therefore indisposed to agree with another, objected.  “Phaedrus would be right,” he said, “if there were but one Eros.  But there are two.  Love is inseparable from Aphrodite.  If there were only one Aphrodite there would be only one love.  But there are two Aphrodites.  Hence there must be two loves.  One Aphrodite is Urania or celestial, the other Pandemos or common.  The divinities should all be lauded.  Still there is a distinction between these two.  They vary as actions do.  Consider what we are now doing, drinking and talking.  These things in themselves are neither good nor evil.  They become one or the other in accordance with the way in which we do them.  In the same manner, not every love, but only that which is inherently altruistic, can be called divine.  The love inspired by Aphrodite Pandemos is essentially common.  It is such as appeals to vulgar natures.  It is of the senses, not of the soul.  Intemperate persons experience this love, which seeks only its own gross end.  Whereas the love that comes of Aphrodite Urania has for object the happiness and improvement of another.”

With all of which Eryximachus agreed.  Eryximachus was a physician, consequently more naturalistic, and in agreeing he extended the duality of love over all things, over plants and animals as well as over man, claiming for it a universal influence in nature, science, and the arts, expressing himself meanwhile substantially as follows: 

In the human body there are two loves, confessedly different, as such their desires are unlike, the desire of the healthy body being one thing, that of the unhealthy something else.  The skilful physician knows how to separate them, how to convert one into the other, and reconcile their hostile elements.  In music there is the same reconciliation of opposites.  This is demonstrable by rhythm, which is composed of elements short and long, and which, though differing, may be harmonized.  The course of the seasons is also an example of both principles.  When the opposing forces, sunlight and rain, heat and cold, blend harmoniously they bring fertility and health, precisely as their discord has a counter influence.  The knowledge of love in relation to the revolutions of the heavenly bodies is termed astronomy.  Lastly, religion, through the knowledge which it has of what is pious and what is impious, is love’s intermediary between men and gods.

Such is love’s universal sway.  The origin of its duality Aristophanes then explained.  Sages, neighbors of the gods, of whom Empedocles was the last representative, had supposed, that in the beginning of things, those that loved were one.  Later they were separated.  Thereafter they sought the better half which they had lost.  This tradition, possibly Orphic, Aristophanes took for text and embroidered it with his usual grotesqueness.  But beneath the humor of his illustrations there was an idea less profound perhaps than delicate.  Love, however regarded, may not improperly be defined as the union of two beings who complete each other and who, from the stand-point of the Orphic tradition, reciprocally discover in each other what individually they once had and since have lacked.  On the other hand, it may be that in the symbolism which Aristophanes employed was an attempt to apply to humanity the theory which Eryximachus had set forth.  At the origin of all things is unity, which divides and becomes multiple only to return to its primal shape.  Human nature, as masculinely and femininely exemplified, is primitive unity after division has come, and love is the return to that unity which in itself is of all things the compelling law.  In other words, one is many, and, love aiding, many are one.

But whatever Aristophanes may have meant, his views were subsidiary.  It was to Socrates that Plato reserved the privilege of penetrating into the essence of love and of displaying its progressus and consummation.  “How many things that I never thought of,” Socrates on reading his own discourse, exclaimed, “this young man has made me say.”

Among them was an exposition of the fundamental law of human nature, the universal desire for happiness.  In the demonstrations that followed good was shown to be a means to happiness; consequently, every one, loving happiness, loves good also.  In this sense love belongs to all.  Every one, in loving happiness, loves good and craves a perpetual possession of both.  But different minds have different ways of attaining the same end.  One man aspires to happiness through wealth, another through place, a third through philosophy.  These are uninfluenced by Eros.  The influence of Eros is exerted when the perpetual possession of happiness is sought in immortality.

But life itself comports no continuity.  Life is but a succession of phenomena, of which one departs as another appears, and of which each, created by what has gone before, creates that which ensues, the result being that, though from womb to tomb a man be called the same, never, either mentally or physically, is he.  The constant disintegration and renovation of tissues correspond with the constant flux and reflux of sensations, emotions, thoughts.  The man of this instant perishes.  He is replaced by a new one during the next.  That proposition true of the individual is equally true of the species, continuance of either being secured only through reproduction.  The love of immortality manifests itself therefore through the reproductive impulse.  Beauty, in another, exercises an attractive force that enables a gratification of the impulse which ugliness arrests.  Hence comes the love of beauty.  In some, it stimulates the body, attracting them to women and inducing them to perpetuate themselves through the production of children.  In others, it stimulates the mind, inducing the creation of children such as Lycurgus left to Sparta, Solon to Athens, Homer and Hesiod to humanity, children that built them temples which women-born offspring could not erect.

These are the lesser mysteries of love.  The higher mysteries, then unveiled, disclose a dialectic ladder of which the first rung touches earth, the last the divine.  To mount from one to the other, love should rise as does the mind which from hypothesis to hypothesis reaches truth.  In like manner, love, mounting from form to form, reaches the primordial principle from which all beauty proceeds.  The rightful order of going consists in using earthly beauties as ascending steps, passing from one fair form to all fair forms, from fair forms to beautiful deeds, from beautiful deeds to beautiful conceptions, until from beautiful conceptions comes the knowledge of beauty supreme.

“There,” Socrates continued, “is the home of every science and of all philosophy.  It is not, though, initiation’s final stage.  The heart requires more.  Drawn by the power of love, it cannot rest in a sphere of abstraction.  It must go higher, higher yet, still higher to the ultimate degree where it unites with beauty divine.”

That union which is the true life is not, Socrates explained, annihilation, nor is it unity, or at least not unity which excludes division.  The lover and the beloved are distinct.  They are two and yet but one, wedded in immaculate beauty.

“If anything,” Socrates concluded, “can lend value to life it is the spectacle of that beauty, pure, unique, aloof from earthly attributes, free from the vanities of the world.  It is a spectacle which, apprehensible to the mind alone, enables the beholder to create, not phantoms, but verities, and in so doing, to merit immortality, if mortal may.”

Socrates, who had been leaning against the table, lay back on his couch.  The grave discourse was ended.  Aristophanes was preparing to reply.  Suddenly there was violent knocking at the door without.  A little later the voice of Alcibiades was heard resounding through the court.  In a state of great intoxication he was roaring and shouting “Agathon!  Where is Agathon?  Lead me to Agathon.”  Then at once, massively crowned with flowers, half supported by a flute girl, Alcibiades, ribald and importunate, staggered in.  The grave discourse was ended, the banquet as well.

There is an Orphic fragment which runs:  The innumerable souls that are precipitated from the great heart of the universe swarms as birds swarm.  They flutter and sink.  From sphere to sphere they fall and in falling weep.  They are thy tears, Dionysos.  O Liberator divine, resummon thy children to thy breast of light.

In the Épiphanies at Eleusis the doctrine disclosed was demonstrative of that conception.  The initiate learned the theosophy of the soul, its cycles and career.  In that career the soul’s primal home was color, its sustenance light.  From beatitude to beatitude it floated, blissfully, in ethereal evolutions, until, attracted by the forms of matter, it sank lower, still lower, to awake in the senses of man.

The theory detained Plato.  In the Phaedrus, which is the supplement of the Symposion, he made it refract something approaching the splendor of truth revealed.  With Socrates again for mouthpiece, he declared that in anterior existence we all stood a constant witness of the beautiful and the true, adding that, if now the presence of any shape of earthly loveliness evokes a sense of astonishment and delight, the effect is due to reminiscences of what we once beheld when we were other than what we are.

“It seems, then,” Plato noted, “as though we had found again some object, very precious, which, once ours, had vanished.  The impression is not illusory.  Beauty is really a belonging which we formerly possessed.  Mingling in the choir of the elect our souls anteriorly contemplated the eternal essences among which beauty shone.  Fallen to this earth we recognize it by the intermediary of the most luminous of our senses.  Sight, though the subtlest of the organs, does not perceive wisdom.  Beauty is more apparent.  At the sight of a face lit with its rays, memory returns, emotions recur, we think love is born in us and it is, yet it is but born anew.”

There is a Persian manuscript which, read one way, is an invocation to love in verse, and which, read backward, is an essay on mathematics in prose.  Love is both a poem and a treatise.  It was in that aspect Plato regarded it.  It had grown since Homer.  It had developed since the Song of Songs.  With Plato it attained a height which it never exceeded until Plato himself revived with the Renaissance.  In the interim it wavered and diminished.  There came periods when it passed completely away.  Whether Plato foresaw that evaporation, is conjectural.  But his projection of the drunken Alcibiades into the gravity of the Banquet is significant.  The dissolute, entering suddenly there, routed beauty and was, it may be, but an unconscious prefigurement of the coming orgy in which love also disappeared.