Divine Madness: Plato on Love and Beauty, part 2

For the sake of comparison, the speech of Diotima with the myth of Eros in Symposium (200-212) will be considered as a later stage in the redemptive process of love and beauty (after the soul’s initial incarnation). While the Phaedrus could be said to emphasize a primordial phase in ethical purification, the Symposium can be considered to elaborate a later, more intellectual process of salvation through love (a phase where the ascent occurs after many incarnations). Since the speech of Diotima has been amply summarized, commentary will be limited to certain comparative considerations.

In the ascent to the contemplation of absolute beauty, there are certain intellectual strategies that can be noticed:
1-An inductive movement from multiplicity to simplicity – observing many beautiful bodies before choosing a single representative example of beauty (210b).

2-A deductive movement from particular to general – the essential qualities of the ideal example of beauty are applied to all examples of beautiful bodies (210b).The first two phases apply to visible, concrete beauty. The next two phases are applied to a consideration of conceptual, abstract beauty.

3-A deductive process where the universal notions of concrete beauty are applied to concepts and values. The beauty of virtues, of ideas, sciences (210c).

4-An inductive process of contemplating various instances of conceptual beauty to arrive at an understanding of absolute, essential beauty, which is the source of the previous forms of beauty. (211a-b)

The notion of regeneration of wings in the Phaedrus corresponds to the notion of pregnancy in the Symposium: Growing wings can be related to giving birth to intellectual creations. Moreover the notion of ascension by growing wings corresponds with ascension via climbing a ladder in the Symposium The role of eros is related to the intermediary position of the soul; the daimon communicates between the divine and material worlds.

The emphasis on the cosmic role of beauty in the process of generation of the cosmos in the　Phaedrus is shifted to the role of beauty in human procreation and artistic and intellectual creativity. Plato makes an interesting connection between the sexual function and the artistic function; Artistic creation is related to physical procreation. The sensual role of beauty of the body is considered in a more positive light. In the Phaedrus (and the Phaedo), the body is considered as a prison and a serious impediment to intellectual activity, to be suppressed and overcome. In the Phaedrus, physical love is not considered redemptive; in the Symposium it is granted that coition represents a desire for immortality and the desire to create beauty. This desire for immortality seems to be a more attenuated form of his theory of recollection of the Phaedrus. (1)(2) In both dialogues, beauty plays a role of catalyst to salvation.(3)

Both dialogues portray the lover’s beauty as a basis for appreciating higher forms of beauty such as moral or intellectual beauty. The Symposium emphasizes a more active process of the role of beauty in a romantic relationship. Beauty inspires the philosopher to educate the lover to be more virtuous. Romantic love is considered to be part of a complex psychological process; the love a soul mate is not absolute; the love is not entirely for one's partner, the love is a desire for absolute goodness, or the desire to become one with the absolute good. Ultimately it is a love for one’s higher self; (4) a metaphysical self-centered love similar to Aristotle's notion of philia in book seven of the Nichomachean Ethics, in the sense that friendship is essentially achieved by becoming a good person.

Interestingly, Blavatsky's definition of the Sanskrit term Kama in the Theosophical Glossary (p. 171-72) has certain similarities with Plato's notions of a higher and lower Eros:

As the Eros of Hesiod, degraded into Cupid by exoteric law, and still more degraded by a later popular sense attributed to the term, so is Kama a most mysterious and metaphysical subject. The earlier Vedic description of Kama alone gives the key-note to what he emblematizes. Kama is the first conscious, all embracing desire for universal good, love, and for all that lives and feels, needs help and kindness, the first feeling of infinite tender compassion and mercy that arose in the consciousness of the creative ONE Force, as soon as it came into life and being as a ray from the ABSOLUTE. Says the Rig Veda, “Desire first arose in IT, which was the primal germ of mind, and which Sages, searching with their intellect, have discovered in their heart to be the bond which connects Entity with non-Entity”, or Manas with pure Atma-Buddhi. There is no idea of sexual love in the conception. Kama is pre-eminently the divine desire of creating happiness and love; and it is only ages later, as mankind began to materialize by anthropomorphization its grandest ideals into cut and dried dogmas, that Kama became the power that gratifies desire on the animal plane.

(1) According to Robin,"Recollection of essential reality is replaced with the notion of the innate desire of immortality"(181).

(2) Plotinus distinguishes two levels of inspiration from beauty, one which provokes recollection, and a lower, less conscious level: "There are souls to whom earthly beauty is a leading to the memory of that in the higher realm and these love the earthly as an image; those that have not attained to this memory do not understand what is happening within them, and take the image for the reality. Once there is perfect self-control, it is no fault to enjoy the beauty of earth; where appreciation degenerates into carnality, there is sin. (Plotinus, III, 5, 1)

(3) Plutarch calls it a refraction: "But the noble and self-controlled lover has a different bent. His regard is refracted to the other　world, to Beauty divine and intelligible" (Plutarch 409, Amatorius 766B).

(4) "All that one sees as a spectacle is still external; one must bring the vision within and see no longer in that mode of separation but as we know ourselves; thus a man filled with a god – possessed by Apollo or by one of the Muses – need no longer look　outside for his vision of the divine being; it is but finding the strength to see the divinity within" (Plotinus, V, 8, 10).

References:

Besant, Annie, ed. Letters from the Masters of the Wisdom, Vol. 2, 1925

Blavatsky, H. P. The Theosophical Glossary, 1893

Plato. The Banquet. Percy Byshe Shelley, transl. Provincetown : Pagan Press, 2001. Print.

- - -. Phaedrus. J. H. Nichols Jr., transl. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1998. Print.
Plotinus. Enneads V. A.H. Armstrong, transl. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Print.
Plutarch.  Moralia IX ‘’The Dialogue on Love’’ transl. W. C. Helmbold: Harvard University Press, 1967. 302-441. Print.

Robin, Léon. La Théorie Platonicienne de L’Amour . Paris : Presses Universitaires de France.1933. Print.

Sandford, Stella. "'Sexually Ambiguous. Eros and Sexuality in Plato and Freud' Journal of thetheoretical humanities 109 (2006) 11 3 43 — 59 28 Mar. 2011 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09697250601048507>.

 

Part 1

Divine Madness: Plato on Love and Beauty, part 1

Letter 19 from the Letters of the Masters of the Wisdom, second series, is quite intriguing:

Know, O Brother mine, that where a truly spiritual love seeks to consolidate itself doubly by a pure, permanent union of the two, in its earthly sense, it commits no sin, no crime in the eyes of the great Ain-Soph, for it is but the divine repetition of the Male and Female Principles-the microcosmal reflection of the first condition of Creation. On such a union angels may well smile! But they are rare, Brother mine, and can only be created under the wise and loving supervision of the Lodge, in order that the sons and daughters of clay might not be utterly degenerated, and the Divine Love of the Inhabitants of Higher Spheres (Angels) towards the daughters of Adam be repeated. But even such must suffer, before they are rewarded. Man's Atma may remain pure and as highly spiritual while it is united with its material body; why should not two souls in two bodies remain as pure and uncontaminated notwithstanding the earthly passing union of the latter two.

 

It sounds like an esoteric version of Platonic love, and so that will be the topic of today’s post:

In the Phaedrus, Plato describes a three-level cosmos composed of a supreme reality, a world of gods and a world of souls. The inferior levels look to the higher levels for sustenance. The gods look to Reality, the souls look to the gods and have a less direct view of reality. Redemption is ultimately based on judgement and atonement according the merit of one’s actions and behaviour. Plato considers that the philosophical life is the ideal path to redemption. He introduces the role of beauty along with the notion of divine madness. The beauty that one sees in the beloved creates an intense feeling of inspired frenzy. 

 

This divine madness of lovers is considered to be the fourth and greatest type of madness. It provokes a recollection of the original vision of essential truths of the soul in the heavens. He describes the original vision of divine beauty as one of the brightest visions in the celestial world in lyrical, mystical tones. He relates the process of recollection to the mother of the muses. Beauty is described as being the most vividly manifested of essential principles and is particularly striking because it appeals to our visual sense, considered to be the brightest and sharpest of our senses. Plato however observes that the sight of beauty is like a double-edged sword. If experienced with modesty and restraint, it is a deeply uplifting experience. Without those sanctifying virtues it can lead to a debased carnality and crude sensuality. It is this moral challenge of beauty that the speech is essentially concerned with.[1]

 

 The image of the charioteer and the two horses, a noble one and an unruly one, are introduced corresponding to the rational, spirited and sensual divisions of the soul in the Republic. In Freudian terms, the struggle to control the unruly horse in the sight of beauty could be described as a process of sublimating the energies of the libido (instincts and unconscious energies) through a proper repression in order to develop a socially functional adult behaviour.[2]

 

According to Sanford: “The debate on the Symposium concerning the status of eros in its ‘‘educated’’ forms can be (and sometimes explicitly is) presented precisely in relation to Freud’s concept of sublimation. Is it that a specifically sexual concept of eros is postulated as the driving force behind the higher sublimated aims of the philosopher – that eros as sexual passion is responsible for all desire, including the desire to philosophize, and that philosophy is thus a sexual-erotic discipline? (Sanford 53)

 

In summary, Plato uses the image of the charioteer and the two horses at a cosmic level for ontological purposes. The charioteer participating in the divine revolutions denotes the soul’s metaphysical nature. The fall of the soul deals with the problem of the origins of human incarnation and the origins of human consciousness. It serves to evoke why human beings have the capacity for reason and understanding, distinguishing them from animals, despite having an animal nature. When the soul suffers incarnation in a body, Plato pursues the charioteer image to develop on the epistemological, psychological and ethical aspects of the human condition.

 

Plato concludes the myth by discussing three paths that a loving relationship can take: one lived in chaste purity and virtue leads to salvation, regaining one’s wings; a life of virtue inspired by love, but with occasional lapses into physical passion, leads to a slower, partial redemption; a relationship characterized by seduction and calculation is not conducive to salvation. The loss and re-growth of wings deals with the intellectual faculties of the soul. The loss symbolizing forgetfulness and ignorance and the re-growth denoting progress in recollection and knowledge.

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[1] “These, in sum, are innocent frequenters of beauty, not to be confused with the class to whom it becomes an occasion of fall into the ugly – for the aspiration towards a good degenerates into an evil often” (Plotinus, III, 5, 1).
[2]We have defined the concept of ‘‘libido’’ as a quantitatively variable force which could serve as a measure of processes and transformations occurring in the field of sexual excitation. We distinguish this libido in respect of its special origin from the energy which must be supposed to underlie mental processes in general, and we also thus attribute a qualitative character to it (Sanford 54); Socrates’ speech identifies (contra Halperin) a metaphysical desire for immortality shared by all animals,including the human. Even intellectual procreation in the more abstract forms of beauty is described in ecstatic terms. Eros, in all its manifestations, is neither somatic nor psychical, neither ‘‘sexual’’ nor ‘‘non-sexual,’’ but both"(Sanford 56).

Part 2

Dimensions of Sacred Geography

Chapter 14 of Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled, vol. 1 featured a pioneering study of Sacred Architecture and Sacred Geography and the field is doing very well nowadays thank you very much, notably with the work of people such as Rana P.B. Singh of India, below are the fivefold dimensions of sacred geography from Visioning Sacred Geography, Rana P.B. Singh from Sacred Geography of Goddesses in South Asia, p. 9:

The notion of sacred geography refers to an all-encompassing reality that maintain the prāna (ethereal breathe/ life-force) by interactional web of the five gross elements (mahābhutas), viz. earth, air, water, fire, and ether/space. The interactional web of network may further be reflected into at least five dimensions (cf. Pogačnik 2007: 5-6):

(i) Dimension of eternity ― representation of primeval vibration, the divine all-presence, the light of light, e.g. sacred territory like Vindhyāchal Kshetra.

(ii) Archetypal dimension of reality ― the inherent quality of spatial manifestation that preserves the sense of planetary creation or archetypal patterns behind reality, e.g. representation of other sacred places of India in the sacredscapes of Banaras.

(iii) Dimension of consciousness ― the operational system of cosmic ideas and archetypes that makes the mindset and covers the range from mental to emotional, and from intuitive to rational ― ultimately making the ‘belief systems’, e.g. various myths, folk believes and rituals that make the consciousness always alive, active and expanding.

(iv) Etheric dimension ― possessing vital-energy or bio-energetic dimensions, symbolised with ether that invisible hold and manifests the rest four elements, e.g. Vital-energy fields, Earth chakras, and channel/orsite of vital power or places of healing.

(v) Material dimension ― the dimension in which embodiment of minerals, plants, animals, human beings, landscape features, stars and the Earth’s crust takes place ― the visual world of physical perceptibility.

Through the Gates of Gold – Chapter 2 – The Mystery of Threshold - Part 1

There are no more meaningless or trifling circumstances in his life, for each is a link purposely placed in the chain of events that have to lead him forward to the “Golden Gate” or the “Gates of Gold”. Each step, each person he meets with, every word uttered may be a word purposely placed in the day’s sentence with the purpose of giving certain importance to the chapter it belongs to and such or another (Karmic) meaning to the volume of life. (HPB, Letter to London Students)

Part 1

“THERE is no doubt that at the entrance on a new phase of life something has to be given up. The child, when it has become the man, puts away childish things.”

“With each drop of the divine draught which is put into the cup of pleasure something is purged away from that cup to make room for the magic drop. For Nature deals with her children generously: man’s cup is always full to the brim; and if he chooses to taste of the fine and life-giving essence, he must cast away something of the grosser and less sensitive part of himself.”

“This has to be done daily, hourly, momently, in order that the draught of life may steadily increase. And to do this unflinchingly, a man must be his own schoolmaster, must recognize that he is always in need of wisdom, must be ready to practise any austerities, to use the birch-rod unhesitatingly against himself, in order to gain his end.”

“For that there is before him power, life, perfection, and that every portion of his passage thitherwards is crowded with the means of helping him to his goal, can only be denied by those who refuse to acknowledge life as apart from matter. Their mental position is so absolutely arbitrary that it is useless to encounter or combat it. Through all time the unseen has been pressing on the seen, the immaterial overpowering the material; through all time the signs and tokens of that which is beyond matter have been waiting for the men of matter to test and weigh them.”

Relevant passages from Light on the Path:
All steps are necessary to make up the ladder. The vices of men become steps in the ladder, one by one, as they are surmounted. The virtues of man are steps indeed, necessary — not by any means to be dispensed with. Yet, though they create a fair atmosphere and a happy future, they are useless if they stand alone. The whole nature of man must be used wisely by the one who desires to enter the way. (1,20)

 Seek it by testing all experience, by utilizing the senses in order to understand the growth and meaning of individuality, and the beauty and obscurity of those other divine fragments which are struggling side by side with you, and form the race to which you belong. (1,20)