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Love is a widely discussed topic, and is perceived in different ways. Beauty is also often considered in the quest to decipher what love is. This is demonstrated in St. Augustine’s Confessions and Plato’s Symposium. Both describe the concepts of love and beauty, but each takes a different stance on it. Augustine wrote about wanting love passionately, as it were, but still not being able to see the thin, almost indiscernible line between that and lust. He also speaks of beauty of worldly things. In Symposium, Socrates relates a tale told to him by Diotima about what love is made of; it is not necessarily beautiful and good, but nevertheless it is still very important. Diotima also spoke of the different levels of beauty that must be realized before love can be understood.
In this book of St. Augustine’s Confessions, he writes of his adolescent years and his exploits with love, lust and beauty, which are irrevocably intertwined. Augustine spoke of love as being something that allowed for happiness, as demonstrated by “The single desire that dominated my search for delight was simply to love and be loved.” The only thing that Augustine wanted as a teenager to ensure his happiness – his delight – was love. But “the bubbling impulses of puberty” made it hard to “see the difference between love’s serenity and lust’s darkness.”
Love was something that was confusing to the sixteen-year-old, and this confusion led to acts that did not hold love in the highest regards. “Thorns of lust rose above [his] head,” and he realized that he could not be “content to confine sexual union to acts intended to procreate children.” But though he thought sexual thoughts, and desired to be thought of as promiscuous because it would bring him comfort and acceptance. “I used to pretend I had done things I had not done at all, so that my innocence should not lead my companions to scorn my lack of courage, and lest my chastity be taken as a mark of inferiority.” But he loved the pain, the desolation of his values, and as love was so important to him, something that could be loved was loved. “It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself.” But then, reflecting after the fact, Augustine realized that the only real love that is necessary is the love of the Lord. “I will love you, Lord, and I will give thanks and confession to your name because you have forgiven me such great evils and my nefarious deeds.”
As for beauty, Augustine describes beauty in physical objects, but nothing compares to the beauty he finds in God. “The life we live in this world has its attractiveness because of a certain measure in its beauty and its harmony with all these inferior objects that are beautiful.” He also comes to the conclusion that God’s love is the most satisfying love there can be, and “no object of love is more healthy than your truth, beautiful and luminous beyond all things.” Plato’s stories of love are told to Socrates by a woman named Diotima. She explains that love is not just beautiful and good – there are also bad parts – but it does not mean love is ugly and bad. To her, Love is a great spirit with the power to “ interpret and to ferry across to the gods things given by men, and to men things from the gods, from men petitions and sacrifices, from the gods commands and requitals in return; and being in the middle it completes them and binds all together into a whole.”
Love is described as being the child of Poverty and Plenty, and thus “Love is not in want or in wealth.” He seems to have parts of both worlds just enough to create something so unique that something loved is “beautiful and dainty and perfect and blessed.” Love has the ability to make something beautiful, but he who loves is still Poverty and Plenty.
Love is also described as “the love of having the good for oneself always.” So to be able to appreciate and understand love as fully as we, as mortals, are capable, first we must understand the levels of beauty and love. Diotima lays them out beautifully as follows:
For let me tell you, the right way to approach the things of love… is this: beginning from these beautiful things, to mount for that beauty’s sake ever upwards, as by a flight of steps, from one to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies, and from beautiful bodies to beautiful pursuits and practices, and from practices to beautiful learnings, so that from learnings he may come at last to that perfect learning which is the learning solely of beauty itself, and may know at last that which is the perfection of beauty. In this Diotima has also explained that beauty is intertwined with love – to approach “things of love” one must work their way up through the idea of the beauty staircase.
Both Plato and Augustine describe beauty as something that cannot be isolated – beauty and lust are both so mixed in with love that it cannot be salvaged. Augustine describes love as something bad, which leads to sins that tear him away from God. Plato on the other hand, describes love as more of something that is necessary. It is on neither end of the extremes: neither good nor bad, beautiful nor ugly, etc. But Plato also writes “one could not easily find a better helper for human nature than love.” Each author puts his own stance on the issue of love, but it is a part of existence that must be there, for we would not be able to appreciate the things around us.
