Platonic love

Platonic love is a chaste and strong type of love that is non-sexual.

Plato and his students.

Platonic love in this original sense of the term is examined in Plato's dialogue the Symposium, which has as its topic the subject of love or Eros generally. It explains the possibilities of how the feeling of love began, and how it has evolved – both sexually and non-sexually. Of particular importance is the speech of Socrates, relating the ideas attributed to the prophetess Diotima, which present love as a means of ascent to contemplation of the divine. For Diotima, and for Plato generally, the most correct use of love of other human beings is to direct one's mind to love of divinity. In short, with genuine platonic love, the beautiful or lovely other person inspires the mind and the soul and directs one's attention to spiritual things.

Platonic love, in its original conception, is largely connected with homosexual desire – it was thought that Greek male and boy lovers were one of the noblest examples of this type of spiritual love; see Greek love. For it is a true love if you love a male because you love them for spiritual reasons, loving women was seen as only for sexual greed. One proceeds from recognition of the beauty of another to appreciation of beauty as it exists apart from any individual, to consideration of divinity, the source of beauty, to love of divinity.^{[citation needed]} Similarly, Ficino himself exhibited homosexual attraction towards men, together with misogyny towards women – see Marsilio Ficino for details.

The English term dates back as far as Sir William Davenant's Platonic Lovers (1636). It is derived from the concept in Plato's Symposium of the love of the idea of good which lies at the root of all virtue and truth. For a brief period, Platonic love was a fashionable subject at the English royal court, especially in the circle around Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of King Charles I. Platonic love was the theme of some of the courtly masques performed in the Caroline era—though the fashion soon waned under pressures of social and political change.

Barbara Graziosi, professor of Classics at Durham University, described Platonic love as the "Christian apology" of Greek love.

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 
• Vladimir Solovyev (2004) Transformations of Eros: An Odyssey from Platonic to Christian Love.

External links

• Plato on Friendship and Eros – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy