Diotima and the ladder of love: the birth of Platonic love

The philosophical heart of the Symposium is not spoken directly by Socrates. The philosopher says he is reporting what he was taught, as a young man, by Diotima of Mantinea, a woman learned in matters of love and in religious rites. Scholars debate whether she really existed or whether Plato invented her; in either case the choice to entrust the dialogue's highest doctrine to a woman is significant.

Eros, son of Poros and Penia

Diotima tells a myth. On the day of Aphrodite's birth the gods held a banquet; Penia, Poverty, came to beg, and lay with Poros, Resource, who had fallen asleep drunk on nectar in the garden of Zeus. From that union Eros was born, carrying the nature of both parents: he is always needy, barefoot and homeless, but also cunning, enterprising and a hunter of whatever is beautiful.

For this reason Eros is not a god but a daimon, an intermediate being between mortal and divine who brings the two worlds into contact. He is also a philosopher, because the philosopher stands halfway between wisdom and ignorance: he desires knowledge precisely because he knows he does not possess it. Love, in Diotima's speech, coincides with a conscious and fruitful lack.

Begetting in beauty

Diotima explains that love is the desire to possess the good for ever, and that this desire shows itself as a wish to beget in beauty. Bodies beget children, but souls can beget works, laws and virtues. Homer, Hesiod, Lycurgus and Solon, the priestess says, left offspring more lasting than those of flesh, because their verses and their institutions live on.

The rungs of the ladder

Then comes the famous ascent. Whoever is rightly guided begins by loving a single beautiful body, then understands that the beauty of all bodies is one; he passes next to the beauty of souls, then to that of practices and laws, then to that of the branches of knowledge. At last, suddenly, he beholds Beauty itself, eternal, which is neither born nor dies and is not beautiful in one respect and ugly in another.

This is not a matter of renouncing human love, but of passing through it. Each rung keeps something of the one before and goes beyond it. From here comes the expression Platonic love, which in everyday speech means an affection without physical desire, but which originally describes a path on which the attraction to beauty is gradually transformed into knowledge.

From Ficino to Bembo

The expression owes much to Marsilio Ficino, who in Florence translated the whole Platonic corpus into Latin and wrote a commentary on the Symposium, known as De amore, composed around 1469. Ficino set the work at a banquet held in the Medici villa at Careggi on 7 November, the day on which tradition placed Plato's birth and death, and reread the Greek speeches in a Christian key.

Love Neoplatonism spread throughout Renaissance culture. Pietro Bembo placed it at the centre of the Asolani, published in 1505, and Baldassare Castiglione closed the fourth book of The Courtier with a speech given to Bembo on the ascent of love from sensible beauty to divine beauty. Poets such as Michelangelo made it the subject of intense and tormented verse.

Diotima's speech is one of the most influential texts ever written on love. It gave European culture the idea that desire can be a form of knowledge, and that loving a beautiful person is the first step on a path towards something greater. The poets and theorists of the Renaissance, and through them much of modern poetry, move within this inheritance.