f the _Convito_ to the beatific vision
of the _Paradiso_, bears no slight resemblance to the _Eros_ of the
_Symposium_. Yet we know that Dante could not have studied Plato's
works; and the specific love which Plato praised he sternly stigmatised.
The harmony between Greek and mediaeval mysticism in this matter of the
emotions rests on something permanent in human nature, common alike to
paiderastia and to chivalrous enthusiasm for woman.

It would be well worth raising here the question whether there was not
something special both in the Greek consciousness itself, and also in
the conditions under which it reached maturity, which justified the
Socratic attempt to idealise paiderastia. Placed upon the borderland of
barbarism, divided from the Asiatic races by an acute but narrow line of
demarcation, the Greeks had arrived at the first free notion of the
spirit in its disentanglement from matter and from symbolism. But this
notion of the spirit was still aesthetic, rather than strictly ethical or
rigorously scientific. In the Greek gods, intelligence is perfected and
character is well defined; but these gods are always concrete persons,
with corporeal forms adapted to their spiritual essence. The
interpenetration of spiritual and corporeal elements in a complete
personality, the transfusion of intellectual and emotional faculties
throughout a physical organism exactly suited to their adequate
expression, marks Greek religion and Greek art. What the Greeks
worshipped in their ritual, what they represented in their sculpture,
was always personality--the spirit and the flesh in amity and mutual
correspondence; the spirit burning through the flesh and moulding it to
individual forms; the flesh providing a fit dwelling for the spirit
which controlled and fashioned it. Only philosophers, among the Greeks,
attempted to abstract the spirit as a self-sufficient, independent,
conscious entity; and these philosophers were few, and what they wrote
or spoke had little direct influence upon the people. This being the
mental attitude of the Greek race, it followed as a necessity that their
highest emotional aspirations, their purest personal service, should be
devoted to clear and radiant incarnations of the spirit in a living
person. They had never been taught to regard the body with a sense of
shame, but rather to admire it as the temple of the spirit, and to
accept its needs and instincts with natural acquiescence. Male beauty
diseng