mistakable anticipations of
Christianity in Plato's writings. Such phenomena--the occasional
occurrence of which I do not altogether deny, although I regard them as
on the whole improbable as far as the sphere of my research is
concerned--are not infrequently met with in history, but their effect
upon civilisation was nil; they were presentiments, incomprehensible in
their day, and for this very reason probably preserved as curiosities.

In spite of the fact, however, that in those far-off days spiritual love
of a man for a woman was unknown, we find Plato contrasting "a base and
degraded Eros with a divine Eros." Pausanias says in the "Symposium":

"The man who loves with his senses only, loves women and boys equally
well. He loves the body more than the soul.... His only striving is to
obtain the object of his desire, and he cares not whether it be worthy
or unworthy. The Eros he worships is the ally of that younger goddess in
whom male and female attributes are blended. But the other Eros is the
companion of Aphrodite, Urania, the divine; unbegotten by a father,
unconceived by a mother, she is the offspring of the male element, the
elder one, unstained by passion.... The sensualist who loves the body
more than the soul is base. His love passes away like the object of his
passion. But the companion of the Olympic goddess is the Eros who fills
the hearts of the lovers with the longing for virtue. The other Eros is
the confederate of the debased Aphrodite." And Aristophanes, another of
the participators in the feast, says: "The yearning does not seem to be
a desire for the pleasures of the senses, the one taking delight in his
intercourse with the other; far from it, it is obvious that each soul is
craving for something which it cannot express in words, but can only
divine and conjecture." And the mysterious Diotima revealed to Socrates
an entirely novel principle in erotic life; the principle which guides
man beyond the pleasures of the senses and--through love--leads him to
the divine. "The slave of his senses runs after women; but he who loves
with his soul and strives to win immortality through virtue and wisdom,
seeks a great and beautiful soul that he may surrender himself to it
completely." But in the opinion of the classical ages, a beautiful soul
was only to be found in the body of a man; woman belonged to the lower,
animal spheres; she was destined for the pleasure of the senses and the
propagation of the race