Message #133862

[April Kincaid]

particularly true of both the Phædrus and the Symposium. The lesson which both essays seem intended to inculcate is this: love, like poetry and prophecy, is a divine gift, which diverts men from the common current of their lives; but in the right use of this gift lies the secret of all human excellence. The passion which grovels in the filth of sensual grossness may be transformed into a glorious enthusiasm, a winged splendour, capable of soaring to the contemplation of eternal verities. How strange will it be, when once those heights of intellectual intuition have been scaled, to look down again to earth and view the Meirakidia in whom the soul first recognised the form of beauty! 1 There is a deeply rooted mysticism, an impenetrable soofyism, in the Socratic doctrine of Erôs.

In the Phædrus, the Symposium, the Charmides, the Lysis, and the Republic, Plato dramatised the real Socrates, while he gave liberal scope to his own personal sympathy for paiderastia. 2 In the Laws, if we accept this treatise as the work of his old age, he discarded the Socratic mask, and wrote a kind of palinode, which indicates more moral growth than pure disapprobation of the paiderastic passion. I have already tried to show that the point of view in the Laws is still Greek: that their author has not passed beyond the sphere of Hellenic ethics. He has only become more ascetic in his rule of conduct as the years advanced, importing the rumores senum severiorum into his discourse, and recognising the imperfection of that halting-point between the two logical extremes of Pagan license and monastic asceticism which in the fervour of his greener age he advocated. As a young man, Plato felt sympathy for love so long as it was paiderastic and not spent on women; he even condoned a lapse through warmth of feeling into self-indulgence. As an old man, he denounced carnal pleasure of all kinds, and sought to limit the amative instincts to the one sole end of procreation.

It has so happened that Plato's name is still connected with the ideal of passion purged from sensuality. Much might be written about the parallel between the mania of the Phædrus and the joy of medieval amorists. Nor would it be unprofitable



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to trace the points of contact between the love described by Dante in the Vita Nuova and the paiderastia exalted to the heavens by Plato. 1 The spiritual passion for Beatrice which raised the Florentine poet above vile things, and led him by the philosophic paths of the Convito to the beatific vision of the Paradiso, bears no slight resemblance to the Erôs of the Symposium. Yet we know that Dante could not have studied Plato's works; and the specific love which Plato praised he sternly stigmatised. The harmony between Greek and mediæval mysticism in this matter of the emotions rests on something permanent in human nature, common alike to paiderastia and to chivalrous enthusiasm for woman.

It would be well worth raising here the question whether there was not something special both in the Greek consciousness itself and also in the conditions under which it reached maturity, which justified the Socratic attempt to idealise paiderastia. Placed upon the borderland of barbarism, divided from the Asiatic races by an acute but narrow line of demarcation, the Greeks had arrived at the first free notion of the spirit in its disentanglement from matter and from symbolism. But this notion of the spirit was still æsthetic, rather than strictly ethical or rigorously scientific. In the Greek gods intelligence is perfected and character is well defined; but these gods are always concrete persons, with corporeal forms adapted to their spiritual essence. The interpenetration of spiritual and corporeal elements in a complete personality, the transfusion of intellectual and emotional faculties throughout a physical organism exactly suited to their adequate expression, marks Greek religion and Greek art. What the Greeks worshipped in their ritual, what they represented in their sculpture, was always personality--the spirit and the flesh in amity and mutual correspondence; the spirit burning through the flesh and moulding it to individual forms; the flesh providing a fit dwelling for the spirit which controlled and fashioned it. Only philosophers among the Greeks attempted to abstract the spirit as a self-sufficient, independent, conscious entity; and these philosophers were few, and what they wrote or spoke had little direct influence upon the people. This being the mental attitude of the Greek race, it followed as a necessity that their highest emotional aspirations, their purest personal service, should be devoted to clear and radiant incarnations of the spirit in a living person. They had never been taught to regard the body with a sense of shame, but rather to admire it as the temple of the spirit, and to accept its


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needs and instincts with natural acquiescence. Male beauty disengaged for them the passion it inspired from service of domestic, social, civic duties. The female form aroused desire, but it also suggested maternity and obligations of the household. The male form was the most perfect image of the deity, self-contained, subject to no necessities of impregnation, determined in its action only by the laws of its own reason and its own volition.

Quite a different order of ideas governed the ideal adopted by mediæval chivalry, The spirit in its self-sufficingness, detached from the body, antagonistic to the body, had been divinised by Christianity. Woman regarded as a virgin and at the same time a mother, the maiden-mother of God made man, had been exalted to the throne of heaven. The worship of woman became, by a natural and logical process, the correlative in actual human life for that worship of the incarnate Deity which was the essence of religion. A remarkable point in mediæval love is that the sensual appetites were, theoretically at least, excluded from the homage paid to woman. It was not the wife or the mistress, but the lady, who inspired the knight. Dante had children by Gemma, Petrarch had children by an unknown concubine, but it was the sainted Beatrice, it was the unattainable Laura, who received the homage of Dante and of Petrarch.