Plato's Symposium and the Divine Pursuit

Plato’s Symposium is more than just a philosophical dialogue—it is a spiritual masterpiece that offers one of the most profound meditations on love in Western philosophy.

Its insights into the nature of love as self-sacrifice, as a longing for unity, and as a means of ascent toward the divine resonate deeply with biblical teachings. While Plato’s vision of love predates Christianity, its themes align so closely with Christian theology that one cannot help but see Symposium as a philosophical forerunner to the Christian understanding of God’s love.

Love ... is the intermediate between the divine and the mortal … [Love] is the mediator who spans the chiasm and divides them, and therefore in [Love] all is bound together, and through [Love] the arts of the prophet and the priest, their sacrifices and mysteries and charms, and all prophecy and incantation, find their way. For God mingles not with man; but through Love all the intercourse and converse of God with man, whether awake or asleep, is carried on. The wisdom which understands this is spiritual.

— Symposium

The dialogue’s most striking insight is that Eros—far from being mere desire—is the force that compels humans toward ultimate truth and self-sacrifice. Plato’s assertion that “love will make men dare to die for their beloved” finds a powerful parallel in the Christian declaration:

Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

— John 15:13 (NIV)

This elevates Eros beyond physical attraction, revealing it as the very energy that draws the soul toward divine reality.

One of Symposium’s most moving passages is the myth of the divided humans, who spend their lives searching for their lost halves in an aching pursuit of wholeness. This longing is not merely for another person but for something beyond the beloved, an inexpressible unity that transcends physical form. Plato suggests that true love seeks to restore a unity that has been lost—an idea deeply resonant with Genesis:

That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.

— Genesis 2:24 (NIV)

...and with the Christian understanding that all human longing is, at its core, a yearning for divine communion. Love, then, is not just the desire for another but the soul’s attempt to reunite with the eternal.

Diotima’s “Ladder of Love” presents Eros as an ascent from earthly beauty to the contemplation of divine Beauty itself. Beginning with love for an individual, the lover moves beyond physical attraction to appreciate the beauty of all things—bodies, souls, laws, and wisdom—until finally reaching the Form of the Good, which is eternal and unchanging.

These are the lesser mysteries of love, into which even you, Socrates, may enter ... For he ... should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms ... and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another; and then if beauty of form in general is his pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty in every form is and the same! ... When he perceives this he will abate his violent love of the one ... and will become a lover of all beautiful forms; in the next stage he will consider that the beauty of the mind is more honourable than the beauty of the outward form ... until he is compelled to contemplate and see the beauty of institutions and laws ... after laws and institutions he will go on to the sciences, that he may see their beauty ... drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in boundless love of wisdom ... and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, which is the science of beauty everywhere ... a nature which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning.

— Symposium

Indeed, the most striking parallel between the perspective given in Symposium and the Christian worldview is the nature of the Form of the Good, which Plato describes as eternal, perfect, and the source of all beauty and truth.

He who from these ascending under the influence of true love, begins to perceive that beauty is not far from the end. And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards ... from one going on to two... from two to all fair forms... from fair forms to fair practices ... from fair practices to fair notions ... until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essense of beauty is. This, my dear ... is that life above all others which man should live, in contemplation of the beauty absolute; a beauty which if you once beheld now entrances you.

— Symposium

This is unmistakably close to the biblical concept of God as the ultimate Good—unchanging, the giver of all that is true and beautiful. Just as Plato envisions the lover who reaches the highest stage becoming “the friend of God and immortal,” Christianity promises eternal life through divine love. This suggests that Eros, far from being merely a reflection of divine love, is in fact the very means by which the soul approaches God. As Jesus said:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.

— Matthew 22:37 (NIV)

And as St. Augustine confesses,

You move us to delight in praising You; for You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.

— Confessions, Book I, Chapter 1

For wherever the soul of man turns itself, unless towards You, it is affixed to sorrows, yea, though it is affixed to beauteous things without You and without itself. And yet they were not unless they were from You.

— Confessions, Book IV, Chapter 10

One may interpret Romeo and Juliet as demonstrating the destructiveness of Eros. However, in Plato's framework, Romeo and Juliet’s tragedy is not simply that they followed Eros too far, but that they did not follow it far enough. Had they transcended their earthly passion into a deeper, wiser love—one that transformed suffering into something meaningful rather than merely inevitable—they might have found salvation rather than destruction.

Plato’s insights into love as self-sacrificial, unifying, and transformative not only anticipate Christian theology but offer a philosophical framework for understanding the deepest human longing. This is a book that speaks to the timeless ache of the soul—the desire to love and be loved, not just in a temporary sense, but in a way that leads to the eternal.