To
grasp the meaning of Platonic love it is essential to realise
that--unlike the spiritual woman-worship peculiar to the Middle
Ages--it is not a personal feeling of one individual for another;
platonically speaking, the love for an individual is only a first stage;
the path which leads to the love of beauty and the eternal ideas. The
characteristic of this metaphysical love which Plato was the first to
conceive, was therefore love for the universal, and not love for an
individual. The latter, as we shall find later on, is the characteristic
of the true or, more modestly speaking, specifically European conception
of love. Platonic love, finally, was the perception of perfection, the
Socratic knowledge; its alpha and omega was not, as the mystic and true
erotic would have it, its ardour and passion, the fulness of its own
being. It had an alien purpose: the knowledge of things divine, by a
later period Christianised and understood as the divine mysteries. To
Plato, the essence and climax of antique, ante-Christian culture, every
individual, even the beloved mistress, was but a preliminary, a
finger-post, pointing the way to the perception of perfect beauty.
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