Higher Love in The Symposium and Confessions
Love has always been a sensation that has both mystified and captured humanity. It is a unique emotion and, while it means something different to everybody, it remains to all a force that is, at its purest form, always one step above mankind. In love's ability to exist differently from person to person, one can find love to be a conglomeration of different branches. It can be said that there are six such categories: Agape, a love which sets store on physical attraction in order to remain all-giving and intense; Eros, a love based on high passion; Storge, a love that is friendship-based and down to earth; Pragma, the searching for a partner to build a life with; Ludus, a love that is low on emotional feeling and high on sexual tendencies (often involving several partners); and Mania, a type of love that dwells on jealousy and possessiveness while creating an experience of great emotional highs and lows (Gayton v). Some branches of love are negative and unhealthy, while others remain positive and strong. One's opinion of love in general is often based one which branches of love he or she has encountered. This can best be seen when analyzing Plato's Symposium and Augustine's Confessions; because their vi
It is this reason-that Socrates was exposed to an Agape-type of love-that he found love to be a positive type of thing rather than the horrible act that Augustine looked upon it as. This is proved by earlier speeches in the dialogue where the various speakers talk about homosexual love, which to them is the highest type of love that can exist. It may be said that the body is not primarily designed for homosexual intercourse, so more than just sexual contact must exist in a relationship between two men. And because the two men would not be focusing on their sexual relationship, the Ludus branch of love, they are one step above on the ladder to reach a more Agape related sort of love. Those in the dialogue find sexual encounters to be little more than a stepping-stone to what can ultimately be achieved, and because Augustine did not know what lay beyond these sexual escapades he was not able to see the higher forms of love that the men of the Symposium spent so long trying to achieve. Augustine's problem was that he had come into contact with the wrong type of love. It was his first impression of love that made him discard the possibility of love as a method to a higher plane. Had he been able to see beyond just the sexual tendencies of Love, he might have given the emotion more credence. At the end of both Confessions and the Symposium, both Socrates and Augustine have discarded physical love as being a priority. Both do agree that a higher spiritual form is beyond physical love, and it is a true enlightenment that is without form. Both men have found a path to such enlightenment, but through different methods: Socrates feels that love without sexual contact is a path towards higher being, and Augustine feels that sexual contact only hinders the ability to reach such enlightenment. The reason that Augustine believed that love was
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Approximate Word count = 1252
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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