Symposium
hiccough, which is appropriately cured by his substitute, the physician
Eryximachus. To Eryximachus Love is the good physician; he sees
everything as an intelligent physicist, and, like many professors of his
art in modern times, attempts to reduce the moral to the physical; or
recognises one law of love which pervades them both. There are loves
and strifes of the body as well as of the mind. Like Hippocrates the
Asclepiad, he is a disciple of Heracleitus, whose conception of the
harmony of opposites he explains in a new way as the harmony after
discord; to his common sense, as to that of many moderns as well as
ancients, the identity of contradictories is an absurdity. His notion of
love may be summed up as the harmony of man with himself in soul as well
as body, and of all things in heaven and earth with one another.
Aristophanes is ready to laugh and make laugh before he opens his mouth,
just as Socrates, true to his character, is ready to argue before he
begins to speak. He expresses the very genius of the old comedy, its
coarse and forcible imagery, and the licence of its language in speaking
about the gods. He has no sophistical notions about love, which
is brought back by him to its common-sense meaning of love between
intelligent beings. His account of the origin of the sexes has the
greatest (comic) probability and verisimilitude. Nothing in Aristophanes
is more truly Aristophanic than the description of the human monster
whirling round on four arms and four legs, eight in all, with incredible
rapidity. Yet there is a mixture of earnestness in this jest; three
serious principles seem to be insinuated:--first, that man cannot exist
in isolation; he must be reunited if he is to be perfected: secondly,
that love is the mediator and reconciler of poor, divided human nature:
thirdly, that the loves of this world are an indistinct anticipation of
an ideal union which is not yet realized.
The speech of Agathon is conceived in a higher strain, and receives the
real, if half-ironical, approval of Socrates. It is the speech of the
tragic poet and a sort of poem, like tragedy, moving among the gods of
Olympus, and not among the elder or Orphic deities. In the idea of the
antiquity of love he cannot agree; love is not of the olden time, but
present and youthful ever. The speech may be compared with that speech
of Socrates in the Phaedrus in which he describes himself as talking
dithyrambs. It is at once a preparation for Socrates and a foil to him.
The rhetoric of Agathon elevates the soul to 'sunlit heights,' but at
the same time contrasts with the natural and necessary eloquence of
Socrates. Agathon contributes the distinction between love and the works
of love, and also hints incidentally that love is always of beauty,
which Socrates afterwards raises into a principle. While the
consciousness of discord is stronger in the comic poet Aristophanes,
Agathon, the tragic poet, has a deeper sense of harmony and
reconciliation, and speaks of Love as the creator and artist.
All the earlier speeches embody common opinions coloured with a tinge of
philosophy. They furnish the material out of which Socrates proceeds to
form his discourse, starting, as in other places, from mythology and
the opinions of men. From Phaedrus he takes the thought that love is
stronger than death; from Pausanias, that the true love is akin to
intellect and political activity; from Eryximachus, that love is a
universal phenomenon and the great power of nature; from Aristophanes,
that love is the child of want, and is not merely the love of the
congenial or of the whole, but (as he adds) of the good; from Agathon,
that love is of beauty, not however of beauty only, but of birth
in beauty. As it would be out of character for Socrates to make a
lengthened harangue, the speech takes the form of a dialogue between
Socrates and a mysterious woman of foreign extraction. She elicits the
final truth from one who knows nothing, and who, speaking by the lips
of another, and himself a despiser of rhetoric, is proved also to be the
most consummate of rhetoricians (compare Menexenus).
The last of the six discourses begins with a short argument which
overthrows not only Agathon but all the preceding speakers by the help
of a distinction which has escaped them. Extravagant praises have been
ascribed to Love as the author of every good; no sort of encomium was
too high for him, whether deserved and true or not. But Socrates has no
talent for speaking anything but the truth, and if he is to speak the
truth of Love he must honestly confess that he is not a good at all: for
love is of the good, and no man can desire that which he has. This
piece of dialectics is ascribed to Diotima, who has already urged
upon Socrates the argument which he urges against Agathon. That the
distinction is a fallacy is obvious; it is almost acknowledged to be so
by Socrates himself. For he who has beauty or good may desire more of
them; and he who has beauty or good in himself may desire beauty and
good in others. The fallacy seems to arise out of a confusion between
the abstract ideas of good and beauty, which do not admit of degrees,
and their partial realization in individuals.
But Diotima, the prophetess of Mantineia, whose sacred and superhuman
character raises her above the ordinary proprieties of women, has taught
Socrates far more than this about the art and mystery of love. She has
taught him that love is another aspect of philosophy. The same want in
the human soul which is satisfied in the vulgar by the procreation of
children, may become the highest aspiration of intellectual desire.
As the Christian might speak of hungering and thirsting after
righteousness; or of divine loves under the figure of human (compare
Eph. 'This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the
church'); as the mediaeval saint might speak of the 'fruitio Dei;' as
Dante saw all things contained in his love of Beatrice, so Plato would
have us absorb all other loves and desires in the love of knowledge.
Here is the beginning of Neoplatonism, or rather, perhaps, a proof (of
which there are many) that the so-called mysticism of the East was
not strange to the Greek of the fifth century before Christ. The first
tumult of the affections was not wholly subdued; there were longings of
a creature moving about in worlds not realized, which no art could
satisfy. To most men reason and passion appear to be antagonistic both
in idea and fact. The union of the greatest comprehension of knowledge
and the burning intensity of love is a contradiction in nature, which
may have existed in a far-off primeval age in the mind of some Hebrew
prophet or other Eastern sage, but has now become an imagination only.
Yet this 'passion of the reason' is the theme of the Symposium of Plato.
And as there is no impossibility in supposing that 'one king, or son of
a king, may be a philosopher,' so also there is a probability that there
may be some few--perhaps one or two in a whole generation--in whom the
light of truth may not lack the warmth of desire. And if there be such
natures, no one will be disposed to deny that 'from them flow most of
the benefits of individuals and states;' and even from imperfect
combinations of the two elements in teachers or statesmen great good may
often arise.
Yet there is a higher region in which love is not only felt, but
satisfied, in the perfect beauty of eternal knowledge, beginning with
the beauty of earthly things, and at last reaching a beauty in which
all existence is seen to be harmonious and one. The limited affection
is enlarged, and enabled to behold the ideal of all things. And here the
highest summit which is reached in the Symposium is seen also to be the
highest summit which is attained in the Republic, but approached from
another side; and there is 'a way upwards and downwards,' which is the
same and not the same in both. The ideal beauty of the one is the ideal
good of the other; regarded not with the eye of knowledge, but of faith
and desire; and they are respectively the source of beauty and the
source of good in all other things. And by the steps of a 'ladder
reaching to heaven' we pass from images of visible beauty (Greek), and
from the hypotheses of the Mathematical sciences, which are not yet
based upon the idea of good, through the concrete to the abstract, and,
by different paths arriving, behold the vision of the eternal (compare
Symp. (Greek) Republic (Greek) also Phaedrus). Under one aspect 'the
idea is love'; under another, 'truth.' In both the lover of wisdom is
the 'spectator of all time and of all existence.' This is a 'mystery'
in which Plato also obscurely intimates the union of the spiritual and
fleshly, the interpenetration of the moral and intellectual faculties.
The divine image of beauty which resides within Socrates has been
revealed; the Silenus, or outward man, has now to be exhibited.
The description of Socrates follows immediately after the speech of
Socrates; one is the complement of the other. At the height of divine
inspiration, when the force of nature can no further go, by way of
contrast to this extreme idealism, Alcibiades, accompanied by a troop of
revellers and a flute-girl, staggers in, and being drunk is able to tell
of things which he would have been ashamed to make known if he had been
sober. The state of his affections towards Socrates, unintelligible to
us and perverted as they appear, affords an illustration of the power
ascribed to the loves of man in the speech of Pausanias. He does not
suppose his feelings to be peculiar to himself: there are several other
persons in the company who have been equally in love with Socrates,
and like himself have been deceived by him. The singular part of this
confession is the combination of the most degrading passion with the
desire of virtue and improvement. Such an union is not wholly untrue to
human nature, which is capable of combining good and evil in a degree
beyond what we can easily conceive. In imaginative persons, especially,
the God and beast in man seem to part asunder more than is natural in
a well-regulated mind. The Platonic Socrates (for of the real Socrates
this may be doubted: compare his public rebuke of Critias for his
shameful love of Euthydemus in Xenophon, Memorabilia) does not regard
the greatest evil of Greek life as a thing not to be spoken of; but it
has a ridiculous element (Plato's Symp.), and is a subject for irony, no
less than for moral reprobation (compare Plato's Symp.). It is also used
as a figure of speech which no one interpreted literally (compare Xen.
Symp.). Nor does Plato feel any repugnance, such as would be felt in
modern times, at bringing his great master and hero into connexion with
nameless crimes. He is contented with representing him as a saint, who
has won 'the Olympian victory' over the temptations of human nature. The
fault of taste, which to us is so glaring and which was recognized
by the Greeks of a later age (Athenaeus), was not perceived by Plato
himself. We are still more surprised to find that the philosopher is
incited to take the first step in his upward progress (Symp.) by the
beauty of young men and boys, which was alone capable of inspiring the
modern feeling of romance in the Greek mind. The passion of love took
the spurious form of an enthusiasm for the ideal of beauty--a worship
as of some godlike image of an Apollo or Antinous. But the love of youth
when not depraved was a love of virtue and modesty as well as of beauty,
the one being the expression of the other; and in certain Greek states,
especially at Sparta and Thebes, the honourable attachment of a youth to
an elder man was a part of his education. The 'army of lovers and their
beloved who would be invincible if they could be united by such a tie'