Ha' Symposia

Everything seems akimble - this morning it was my computer. Worked fine yesterday, but today it refuses to boot. The tech guy came, tried, and went away to consult the Oracle. That was hours ago. He has not yet returned. John put me on another computer; but, hey, all my active files are on the C:\ drive! This has led to a bifurcated day in which the minority of the time I'm scraping at sometimes-year-old spreadsheets in search of an action point and the majority of the time I'm on the Perseus website reading Plato's Symposium.

That said, note the following quote:

[183d] ... the affair [of love] is no simple thing; you remember we said that by itself it was neither noble nor base, but that it was noble if nobly conducted, and base if basely. To do the thing basely is to gratify a wicked man in a wicked manner: ‘nobly’ means having to do with a good man in a noble manner. By ‘wicked’ we mean that popular lover, who craves the body rather than the soul: [183e] as he is not in love with what abides, he himself is not abiding. As soon as the bloom of the body he so loved begins to fade he ‘flutters off and is gone,' leaving all his speeches and promises dishonored: whereas the lover of a nature that is worthy abides throughout life, [184a] as being fused into one with the abiding.

2 thoughts. (1) The Symposium is ultimately a dialogue about the nature of true reality, that which "abides." (2) The love being talked about is pederasty; the "body" being craved is that of young boys by older men. Indeed, young men are encouraged to act virtuously and with wisdom in preferring older men to any other lovers, for older men are "untinged with wantonness," and have, "the robuster nature and a larger share of mind."[181c] Loving such is loving that which lasts, which is lawful, and which is oriented toward virtue. Love male-to-male is, thus, a true expression of love which ennobles and makes heroic.
I bring this up because it exposes to view a deep and interesting "given" in Western philosophy: that one can know only as one has some relation to what is known. Love of man to woman, and vice versa, is a lesser, "bodily" love, a lust, which does not lead to virtue and knowledge. But love of same-for-same is higher, etc. This is becoming long so I will make my observations propositional. (1) The platonic (Greek) distinction between body and spirit is discovered in love-of-same, in this case, spirit (mind) is preferred and body (matter) denigrated. (2) The Biblical view (and here is my insight), however, goes in exactly the opposite direction. By making male and female, though opposite, both in the image of God (again a not-like, so that God is not like human beings), opposition is preferred. Therefore, one comes to know, to love, and become virtuous not on the basis of one's likeness, but on the basis of one's unlikeness: does this sound like revelation to you? Does this sound not like a relation of equals (sameness) but of interrelated not-equals, say inter-dependent, mutually submissive persons: In other words, does this sound trinitarian to you? Does this remind you of grace, where we are loved not because of some quality we have but for love's sake despite unlikeness? Does this remind you of revelation, where knowledge is not based on one's ability to understand because what is contemplated is like in some way (I can know about a material world because I, myself, am material) but upon the gracious will of that which is higher revealing itself to that which is lower?