By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
When worldly ambition fails to validate us, we often turn to romantic love. We rely on another person to lend our life weight and meaning. First, we ask the crowd; then, we ask one person.
The Greeks had several words for love: eros, philia, storge, and agape. Eros is passionate love, philia friendship, storge familial love, and agape universal love. But we reduce all these types of love into just one word, which we associate with romantic love.
The Rise of Romantic Love
What we don’t realise is that romantic love, unlike passionate love, is a fairly modern concept. If you think about it, romantic love barely features in the 73 books of the Bible. The Bible’s greatest love stories are David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, and, above all the love of man for God. In the ancient world, passionate love was not seen as ennobling but as a dangerous affliction: think only of Helen and Paris, Dido and Aeneas, Antony and Cleopatra.
How, then, did this dangerous affliction become our highest ideal? As religion retreated, our need for religion remained. We still longed for meaning and transcendence. Gradually, the sacred seeped out of God and into romantic love. We stopped loving God and began loving love.
That’s why love speaks the language of religion: adoration, devotion, eternal union… We expect one person to provide us with everything: intimacy, friendship, intellectual stimulation—until death do us part.
What Love Really Is
But once a person is given the role of God, disappointment becomes inevitable. When things go wrong, we conclude that we chose the wrong person, or that love has died—not that we are asking far too much.
This brings us back to the original question: what is love? Beneath all its forms—philia, eros, storge, agape—love is a reaching out beyond ourselves towards someone or something that lends weight and meaning to our life. It is the force that enables us to cross the boundary between ourselves and the world—to shed our shell, like a lobster, and grow beyond it. That’s why people of little love are so small.
This definition of love is useful, in that it gives us a litmus test by which to distinguish love from mere dependency. We can ask: Is this person enlarging my world, or am I merely asking them to save me from myself? Are we growing together, or merely leaning against one another?
Continue Exploring
If this essay spoke to you, you might also look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, and Paul Rée in Lucerne, 1882.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, and Paul Rée had themselves photographed in a studio in Lucerne. Salomé stands behind a small cart, brandishing a whip, while the two philosophers are harnessed in front of her. It is the most famous photograph in all philosophy.
The photograph arose out of an extraordinary love triangle. Nietzsche and Rée had both proposed marriage to the 21-year-old Salomé, who rejected them both. Instead, she suggested that the three form a platonic ‘intellectual trinity’ and wander in search of a place in which to establish a commune of free spirits.
It did not end well. Within months, Salomé and Rée had vanished from Nietzsche’s life, leaving him devastated. But perhaps the most interesting thing about their failed experiment is not that it failed. It is that the arrangement Salomé proposed still strikes us as so strange.
We readily accept that a person can love several friends, several siblings, and several children. Why, when it comes to romantic love, must there be only one?
Why Romantic Love Is Exclusive
The answer has much more to do with paternity than with love. A man who wished to pass his name, status, and property to his own children needed some assurance that those children were indeed his. This created a powerful incentive to control female sexuality, and helps to explain two things: why polygamy is almost always polygyny, and why, historically, adultery and promiscuity have been judged much more severely in women than in men.
Romantic love, when it eventually arrived, became entangled in an older system of marriage and monogamy established to regulate sex and reproduction. This chronology raises the intriguing possibility that we have confused a precondition of marriage, exclusivity, with a precondition of love.
Can Love Be Divided?
To love more than one person is not necessarily to love each person less, just as to love two children is not necessarily to love each child less. ‘True love’, wrote PB Shelley (d. 1822), ‘in this differs from gold and clay / That to divide is not to take away.’ Love is not finite like money or time, or gold and clay, but grows in the giving.
If having a second child is not to betray the first, and taking on a new friendship is not to diminish our old friendships, why should romantic love alone obey a different arithmetic?
Love may not be finite, but time and attention are. Having a second child need not diminish our love for the first child, but it inevitably changes the distribution of our time and attention. And, you know what, maybe it does diminish our love for the first child. Maybe taking on a new friendship does diminish our old friendships. After all, firstborns and old friends often feel this way. Maybe things are more complicated than the binary truths we tell ourselves to simplify our lives.
Polyamory as an Experiment in Love
In 2006, the term polyamory (‘many loves’) made it into the Oxford English Dictionary. Polyamory is the philosophy or state of being romantically involved with more than one person at a time, with the knowledge and consent of all parties involved. The focus of polyamory is more on intimacy than on sex, and polyamorous relationships, while being romantic, need not be sexual.
Polyamory is not the same as polygamy, which, unlike polyamory, is culturally sanctioned and codified. And it is not the same as cheating, swinging, or free loving, since the focus is on intimacy and relationship building, with the knowledge and consent of all parties involved. While some people see their polyamory as an identity or orientation, others see it more in terms of an ethical alternative to infidelity.
Despite its ethical dimensions, polyamory is more heavily stigmatised than cheating: cheating may threaten the system, but at least operates from within it, whereas polyamory outright does away with it. Like a lie, which is defined in relation to the truth, cheating accepts the principle of romantic exclusivity even as it violates it.
Polyamory in Practice
Polyamory has long been recognised as an alternative lifestyle in gay subculture, and is becoming more and more mainstream, driven, among others, by feminism, gay emancipation, and the fragmentation of families and communities.
Polyamorous relationships can take many forms. They are often triads, or quads—maybe one couple with another. ‘Polyfidelity’ refers to a closed polyamorous relationship in which the parties agree to restrict themselves to one another, rather than take outside lovers. In some cases there may be a primary couple with one or more ‘secondary’ partners who are perhaps more distant or occasional. In other cases, one partner may have, or wish for, outside relationships, while the other may be content with just the primary relationship.
The partners of one partner, who are not also one’s partners, are referred to in the jargon as ‘metamours’, and it is in the spirit of polyamory that one treats them with courtesy and respect, as potential friends rather than rivals.
For some people, polyamory is experienced less as a lifestyle choice than as an orientation, leading to demands for legal recognition and protection for at least some forms of polyamorous relationships.
The Burden of the One
The modern romantic couple, closed as it is on itself, carries an extraordinary burden. One quite unqualified person may be expected to be lover, best friend, confidant, amanuensis, domestic partner, financial partner, co-parent… for decades and into old age. And when it transpires that this person is unable to meet all our needs, we may come to regard this as a failure of love.
Polyamory acknowledges that some people’s relational needs are best met by more than one person, and, conversely, relieves the pressure of having to meet all of another person’s needs. By creating more space around a tired, claustrophobic relationship, it can breathe new love and new life into the relationship.
Because polyamory is non-exclusive, existing relationships and friendships are less likely to be abandoned or neglected in favour of ‘the one’, leading to a larger and stronger social network with more resources, skills, and perspectives to draw upon.
Unlike with serial monogamy, there is less incentive to write off an older relationship—and, by extension, a part of our history and who we are—simply because a more exciting or practical one has come along.
Indeed, there is something particularly brutal, even unnatural, about how someone with whom we have shared the best years of our life can suddenly become not merely a stranger but persona non grata. Surely, we can be better than this.
Love, Jealousy, and Possession
Of course, polyamory, too, has drawbacks. From a young age, we are taught that true love is the love of just one person, and that that person will be able to meet all our needs. The princess awaits her prince, and, when he finds her, they live happily ever after. There is no question of another prince, and still less of a squire or lady-in-waiting. Given this state of affairs, and the stigma of polyamory, it may be hard to find people, or enough people, with whom to conduct polyamorous relationships. But this is more a criticism of society than of polyamory proper.
People are naturally prone to possessiveness and jealousy, even when they insist they aren’t. The princess does not await some prince, but her prince. A new relationship is full of enthusiasm and excitement, or, to give it its proper name, ‘New Relationship Energy’—which can be tough on an existing partner. Jealousy can be even more of an issue if half of a couple is polyamorous, while the other half merely tolerates, rather than embraces, it. Having someone else’s smell on your partner’s skin and in your bedsheets is more than just a little confusing.
Jealousy is often treated as childish possessiveness. But it is more complicated than that. It may express fear of abandonment, helplessness, inadequacy, threatened status, or the perfectly rational recognition that our partner is committing precious time and attention to another and, all the while, comparing us.
Constraints do not always impoverish us. Sometimes, by closing off possibilities, they enable other possibilities to develop more fully. Romantic exclusivity may constrain love, but it may also preserve and concentrate it.
Triangles Needing to Be Squared
Polyamory demands time, energy, security, self-knowledge, emotional intelligence, and communication skills. Things can get pretty complicated, which can undermine the quality of the relationships and the very viability of the enterprise. Many people may not have the time, energy, or skills to manage much more than one relationship, and, of course, may not feel a need for more than one partner, if even that. For many people, the ideal number of partners is not one or two, but one-third or half.
This brings us back to Nietzsche, Salomé, and Rée. Their difficulty was not simply that three people were involved, but that the three did not want the same thing. Salomé envisaged an intellectual trinity; Nietzsche wanted Salomé; Rée had also proposed to her. While Nietzsche and Rée had been friends, neither had a romantic interest in the other, but merely tolerated the arrangement for the sake of Salomé. Although in a love triangle, their desires were not triangular.
The Measure of Love
Polyamory is neither the solution to love nor the end of monogamy. If anything, thinking seriously about polyamory reveals why monogamy has proved so enduring. Love may not be finite, but we are; jealousy is not simply a social convention to be unlearnt; and constraints, far from merely constraining us, can preserve and concentrate what we value most.
But polyamory also reveals how much unnecessary baggage we have loaded onto monogamy. To love one person need not mean possessing that person, expecting them to meet our every need, neglecting our other relationships, or banishing former lovers from our lives. Nor need we mistake exclusivity, inherited from the institution of marriage, for the essence or measure of love.
There may be a time in our lives for polyamory. But even if we decide to outright reject it, there is much to be gained from adopting a more fluid, flexible, and forbearing approach to relationships—and stealing a bit more life from the closing jaws of death.
Continue Exploring
If this essay spoke to you, you might look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
The History and Psychology of Love—and What It Reveals About Love Itself
The Sacrifice of Isaac, by Caravaggio. Before romantic love, the highest form of love was directed not to another person, but to God.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Many of us expect romantic love to make us whole, tell us who we are, and even give our lives meaning. But these expectations are surprisingly recent—and may help explain why modern love so often disappoints us.
The meaning of love has changed over the centuries. Today, we tend to think about love primarily in terms of romantic love. But, if you consider it, the concept of romantic love barely features among the 66 books of the Bible. The two greatest ‘love’ stories in the Bible are not of husband and wife, nor even of man and woman, but of man and man, and woman and woman: David and Jonathan, and Ruth and Naomi.
When Love Belonged to God
Instead, all love in the Bible is directed at God, and the love for the spouse, and more generally for the other, is subsumed under the love of God, of which it is an expression. Thus, in the Sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham’s love for God trumps his love for his own longed-for son Isaac, whom he is willing to sacrifice for no other reason than that God commanded it.
In ancient times, people did sometimes fall in love, but they did not believe that their love might in some sense save them, as we tend to today.
When, in the Iliad, Helen eloped with Paris, sparking the Trojan War, neither she nor he (nor anyone else) conceived of their attraction as pure or ennobling or exalting. When, in the Aeneid, Dido fell in love with Aeneas, Virgil portrays her love as a kind of divine affliction that distracts both lovers from their duties and ends in ruin and death. One might also think of Phaedra and Hippolytus, Medea and Jason, and Antony and Cleopatra.
The Rise of Romantic Love
But over the centuries, the sacred seeped out of God and into romantic love, which came to take the place of the retreating religion in lending purpose, weight, and meaning to our lives. People had once loved God, but now they loved love: more than with their beloved, they fell in love with love itself.
Abraham had surrendered himself and Isaac out of love for God. But in the Romantic era, around the time of the French Revolution, love grew into quite the opposite: a means of finding and validating oneself, of lending texture, substance, and solidity to one’s life—as encapsulated by Sylvester’s 1978 hit, You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), the final kissing scene in Cinema Paradiso, the ‘You complete me’ scene in Jerry Maguire, and countless other popular songs and films.
In the time of God, ‘finding oneself’—or, more accurately, losing oneself in God—had demanded years of patient spiritual practice. But after the French Revolution, romantic love could come to the rescue of anyone, with very little effort or sacrifice on their part. Being saved became a simple matter of luck.
If love is a word with a meaning that has changed over time, it is also a word with multiple meanings, one that points at a diversity of distinct concepts with only a family resemblance between them.
What Is Love?
Unlike us, the Greeks had several words for love, enabling them to distinguish more clearly between the different types. For example, eros referred to sexual or passionate love; philia to friendship; storge to familial love; and agape to universal love, such as the love for strangers, nature, or God.
Having many more words for ‘love’ enables us to think and talk about love in new and different ways. For example, we might say that people in the early stages of a romantic relationship often expect unconditional storge, but find only the hunger and dependency of eros, and, if they are lucky, the maturity and fertility of philia. Or, like Plato, we might say that the best kind of philia is one that is born of eros, and that in turn feeds back into eros to strengthen and develop it, transforming it from a lust for possession into an impulse for philosophy.
But if we are to understand the deep meaning of the word ‘love’, then we need to uncover what all these different types of love have in common. In other words, what is it that unites eros, philia, storge, and agape? What is the common element that makes them all types of love?
What all these instances of love have in common, I think, is a reaching out beyond our own being to things that are able to lend purpose, weight, and meaning to our lives, even to the point of ingesting or incorporating those things into our inner being—whence the hug, the love bite, and the sacramental bread and wine of the Eucharist.
Love is the force of nature that enables us to cross the boundary between ourselves and the world, like the lobster, to shed our shell and grow beyond it—which is why people with little love are so small.
Romantic love can do this. But it can also do the opposite. If we ask it merely to complete us, validate us, or save us, it closes us in upon ourselves instead of opening us to the world. In that case, romantic love works against the very meaning of love.
The question each of us must ask is this: Am I loving another person—or am I asking them to save me?
Continue Exploring
If this essay spoke to you, you might also look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
Plato’s ladder of love: from the beauty of the body to Beauty itself.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 19 August 2026.
The Man Who Coined ‘Platonic Love’
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the knowledge of Greek was lost in the West. In around 321 CE, the philosopher Calcidius had published a Latin translation of the first part of Plato’s Timaeus, which for almost 800 years remained the only substantial section of Plato available to the Latin West.
Fortunately, the study of Plato continued in the Byzantine Empire and Islamic world. At the 1438-39 Council of Florence, the Byzantine scholar George Gemistos Plethon reintroduced Plato to the West as part of a failed attempt to repair the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western Church and present a united front to the Ottoman Empire (Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans in 1453).
While in Florence, Gemistos Plethon made an impression on the banker, politician, and patron of the arts Cosimo de’ Medici, who had, among others, commissioned the David of Donatello, the first freestanding male nude sculpture since antiquity. He persuaded Cosimo to establish an institute and informal discussion group, now known as the Platonic Academy of Florence, which, under Cosimo’s protégé Marsilio Ficino, went on to translate all of Plato’s extant works into Latin. This, in turn, ignited and inflamed the humanist Renaissance.
It is also Ficino who coined the term ‘Platonic love’ (amor platonicus), which first appears in a letter that he wrote to Alamanno Donati in 1476. In 1492, he published a series of Platonic love letters to Giovanni amico mio perfettissimo (‘Giovanni my most perfect friend’), the poet Giovanni Cavalcanti.
Today, ‘Platonic love’ means what Ficino, who lived in a much more closeted time, intended it to mean: a close relationship from which sex and sexual desire are absent, or not acted upon. Whatever it was, Ficino presented his love for Giovanni not as sexual but as elevating. But Plato’s vision of love is a lot more radical and ambitious than Ficino’s idea of it. We glimpse it in dialogues such as the Greater Alcibiades, in the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades, and in the Phaedrus, in the relationship between Socrates and Phaedrus. It also appears in other dialogues such as the Lysis, the Meno, and the Charmides, in which Socrates sees inside Charmides’ cloak and ‘catches fire’. Then, in the Symposium, Plato literally spells it out.
Socrates and Alcibiades
Socrates was remarkably full-blooded for an ascetic philosopher. In Xenophon’s Symposium, he says, ‘For myself I cannot name the time at which I have not been in love with someone.’ By all accounts, his greatest love was with the famously handsome Alcibiades (450-404 BCE), who was by some twenty years his junior.
In 432, Socrates and Alcibiades fought in the Battle of Potidaea, where the middle-aged plebeian and the young aristocrat became unlikely tent mates. In his Life of Alcibiades, Plutarch relates that ‘all were amazed to see [Alcibiades] eating, exercising, and tenting with Socrates, while he was harsh and stubborn with the rest of his lovers’. In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades reports that Socrates singlehandedly saved his life at Potidaea and, even after that, let him keep the prize for valour.
Plato’s Symposium is set in 416, some 16 years after the Battle of Potidaea, and just before the fateful Sicilian Expedition that led Alcibiades to defect to Sparta. The setting is a drinking party hosted by the playwright Agathon. After each of the guests, including Socrates, has made a speech in praise of love, a drunken Alcibiades stumbles in supported by a flute-girl. When Alcibiades entreats everyone to drink and match him in his drunkenness, the other guests object to ‘drinking as if we were thirsty’ and suggest that Alcibiades instead make a speech in praise of Socrates.
Alcibiades says that Socrates always makes him admit that he is wasting his time on his political career while neglecting his several shortcomings. So he tears himself away from him as from the song of a siren and once again lets his love of popularity get the better of him. Socrates may look like a satyr and pose as ignorant, but, like the busts of Silenus (the tutor of Dionysus), he hides bright and beautiful images of the gods within him. Attracted by his wisdom, he tried several times to seduce him, but each time without success. Eventually, he turned the tables round and began to chase the older man, inviting him to dinner and on one occasion persuading him to stay the night. He then lay beside him and put it to him that, of all his lovers, he was the only one worthy of him, and he would be a fool to refuse him any favours if only he could make him into a better man.
Socrates replied in his usual, ironical manner:
Alcibiades, my friend, you have indeed an elevated aim if what you say is true, and if there really is in me any power by which you may become better; truly you must see in me some rare beauty of a kind infinitely higher than any which I see in you. And therefore, if you mean to share with me and to exchange beauty for beauty, you will have greatly the advantage of me; you will gain true beauty in return for appearance—like Diomedes, gold in exchange for brass.
After this, Alcibiades crept under the older man’s threadbare cloak and held him all night in his arms—but in the morning arose ‘as from the couch of a father or an elder brother’.
All this, says Alcibiades, took place before Potidaea. But how much of his drunken account is true, and how much invented by Plato to rehabilitate the reputation of Socrates? Socrates—remember—was put to death, in part, for ‘corrupting the youth’.
In the little-known Alcibiades of Aeschines, Socrates relates a conversation that he once had with Alcibiades. Socrates tells his companion that, if he was at all able to improve Alcibiades, this was not through any knowledge or art that he possessed, but only by the force of the love (eros) that the enfant terrible had aroused in him.
The relationship turns the conventional hierarchy of beauty on its head. Alcibiades possesses youth and physical beauty, not to mention birth and position, but it is the old, ugly, and plebeian Socrates who possesses the inner beauty that Alcibiades, when he dares, most desires.
Socrates and Phaedrus
The ostensible theme of Plato’s Phaedrus is love and pederasty, and the dialogue is full of flirtatious banter and sexual innuendo. Socrates persuades the young Phaedrus to pull out the speech on love that he is hiding under his cloak… The grass on which they lie down to read the speech is ‘like a pillow gently sloping to the head’ … After Phaedrus has read the speech, Socrates says, ‘the effect on me was ravishing. And this I owe to you Phaedrus, for I observed you while reading to be in an ecstasy … and like you, my divine darling, I became inspired with a phrenzy.’
But although the Phaedrus appears, especially at first, to be about love, it is more properly about the education of the soul, which might be led to wisdom by the power of love or dialectic (reasoned discourse), although not, as Socrates argues, oratory (rhetoric) or the written word. Just as the Phaedo used to be called, On the Soul, so the Phaedrus might have been called, On the Education of the Soul.
Despite his emphasis on Apollonian reason, Plato recognises that the original impulse for philosophy arises out of something as irrational and Dionysian as love. However, this love, although most fertile, is not of the reproductive kind, and must be reined in if it is to serve its purpose. For Plato, the body with its needs and pleasures is a source of distraction and confusion that holds us back from wisdom. In particular, the needs and desires of the body are why we waste our substance going to work and to war, focussing always on particulars rather than the universals that are the objects of wisdom.
Although Socrates and Phaedrus openly flirt with each other, Plato has them sit beneath a chaste tree. According to Pliny the Elder, the matrons of Athens, at the time of the Thesmophoria (the festival of Demeter and Persephone), used to place the stems and leaves of the chaste in their bedding to temper their lust.
When, at the end of the dialogue, Socrates prays to the gods of the place, he calls himself ‘a temperate man’; and when he asks Phaedrus to complete the prayer, Phaedrus responds, ‘Ask the same for me, for friends have all things in common.’ Thus, it is not as pederastic lovers but as friends and equals that they leave.
The genius of Plato is that the relationship between Socrates and Phaedrus is the very embodiment of the pure, ameliorating, elevating love of which they speak. And if this love begins as lust, this lust can be refined and sublimed on the ladder of love.
The ladder of love is the heart of Plato’s theory of love. To learn what it is, we must return to the Symposium and Agathon’s drinking party.
Diotima and the Ladder of Love
After Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, and the host, Agathon, it is the turn of Socrates to speak in praise of love (at this point, Alcibiades has not yet barged in). Socrates slips into his famous dialectic mode and gets Agathon to agree that if love is not of nothing, then it must be of something, and if it is of something, then it must be of something that is desired, and therefore of something that is lacking.
Socrates then relates a conversation that he once had with a mysterious priestess, Diotima of Mantinea, who, he says, taught him the art of love. This Diotima (the name means, ‘Honoured by the gods’)—who may have been a foil for Aspasia of Miletus—told him that the something that Love lacks and desires consists of beautiful and good things, and especially of wisdom, which is both extremely good and extremely beautiful.
If Love lacks and desires beautiful and good things, and if all the gods are good and beautiful, Love cannot, as most people think, be a god. In truth, Love is the child of Poverty and Resource, always in need but always inventive. He is not a god, but a great spirit (daimon) who intermediates between gods and men. As such, he is neither mortal nor immortal, neither wise nor ignorant, but a lover of wisdom (philosophos).
No one who is wise wants to become wise, just as no one who is ignorant wants to become wise: ‘For herein lies the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself…’ The aim of loving beautiful and good things is to possess them, because the possession of good and beautiful things is called happiness, and happiness is an end in itself.
Love is rather like the philosopher himself: neither a god nor a mortal, but a channel between the two; neither wise nor wholly ignorant, but aware of his lack and driven by it. For Plato, desire and philosophy are aspects of one and the same impulse, one and the same love: the love that seeks to know.
Love and Immortality
Wild animals, said Diotima, enter into a state of love because they seek to reproduce and make themselves immortal. People too seek to make themselves immortal, and are prepared to take great risks, even to die, to attain fame and honour. Some people are pregnant in body and beget children who will preserve their memory, but a few are pregnant in soul and instead beget wisdom and virtue. As their children are more beautiful and more immortal, people who are pregnant in soul have more to share with one another, and a stronger bond of friendship between them.
Who when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary human ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them everlasting glory?
For Diotima as for Plato, love is something much larger than sexual or romantic attachment. It is the transcendent force that drives mortal beings to reach beyond their limited selves for the things they lack. It is the engine of art, philosophy, and, of course, of life itself.
The Ladder of Love
Diotima then told Socrates the proper way to learn to love beauty:
A youth should first be taught to love one beautiful body so that he comes to realize that this beautiful body shares beauty with every other beautiful body, and thus that it is foolish to love just one beautiful body. In loving all beautiful bodies, the youth begins to appreciate that the beauty of the soul is superior to the beauty of the body and begins to love those who are beautiful in soul, regardless of whether they are also beautiful in body.
Having thus transcended the physical, he gradually finds that beautiful practices and customs and the various kinds of knowledge also share in a common beauty.
Finally, on the highest rung of the ladder of love, he is able to experience Beauty itself, rather than its various apparitions. By exchanging the various apparitions of virtue for Virtue herself, he gains immortality and the love of the gods.
This is why love is so important, and why it deserves so much praise.
The beautiful youth is not the destination, but only the first rung of the ladder. He is only the apparition of beauty. But if we keep on climbing, we will arrive, first, at the Form of Beauty, and, finally, at the Form of the Good, which is the ultimate source of wisdom, virtue, and happiness. This close association of wisdom, virtue, and happiness is the seed of Aristotle’s virtue ethics.
How the Ladder of Love Changed Love
Before Plato, and for a long time after, people did, of course, fall in love, but they did not believe that this love might in some sense save them, as we tend to today. When, in the Iliad, Helen eloped with Paris, neither she nor he thought of their attraction as pure or noble or exalting. In the Odyssey, Penelope’s commitment to Odysseus is better understood in terms of dutiful love, or connubial fidelity, than modern, madcap romantic love. When, in the Aeneid, Dido falls in love with Aeneas, Virgil portrays her passion as a divine affliction that distracts both lovers from their duties and ends in ruin and death. Other models of love in antiquity include the ‘perfect friendship’ of Plato’s student Aristotle and the naturalism, or ‘beastliness’, of the Roman poets Lucretius and Ovid.
On the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, the Jewish and Christian models of love evolved alongside the Greco-Roman ones. In the Old Testament, God asks Abraham to sacrifice his precious son Isaac. But as Abraham is about to slay Isaac, an angel stays his hand. The Sacrifice of Isaac highlights that, although love and morality are important principles, unquestioning obedience to God is more important still, for God is morality, and God is love.
The New Testament, in contrast to the Old, elevates love for one another into the supreme virtue. More than a commandment, love becomes the royal road to redemption. One must even turn the other cheek to love one’s enemies. It is a far cry from the law of retaliation of the Old Testament: ‘…thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth…’
Even so, the Bible, which contains more named characters than Game of Thrones, contains not a single Bridget Jones story. Its greatest human love stories are between two women and two men: Ruth and Naomi, and David and Jonathan.
Jesus may have spoken Greek and might have come under the direct or indirect influence of Platonism. But even if he did not, the later Church sought to align Christian theology with classical philosophy—and Christian love, more properly called charity, and originally directed at God, began to blur with something much more individualistic.
The blending of Christian love with Platonism prepared the ground for the troubadour tradition that began in eleventh century Occitania (broadly, the southern half of France). A troubadour extolled refined or courtly love, which he directed at a married or otherwise unattainable lady, often of a superior rank, as a means of exalting himself and attaining to higher virtue. For the first time, love did not ultimately aim at, or depend on, God—and the Church duly condemned courtly love as a heresy. In a radical cultural reversal, the daughter of Eve turned from devilish temptress to sublime conduit of virtue, an earthly goddess in the place of God.
The troubadour tradition, which had remained an elite and minority movement, died out around the time of the Black Death in 1348, but prepared the ground for the modern conception of romantic love as the only thing left that might save us.
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If you enjoyed this essay, you might also look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
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