Love in Platos Symposium and Augustines Confessions - Essay Example

Task: Love in Plato’s Symposium and Augustine’s Confessions The ideology and concept of love is inherently confusing and complex in some way. Sticking around different notions regarding the interpretation of the meaning of love and evolving around different ideologies regarding love by great scholars such as Plato and. Augustine, we may arrive at a consensus. The essay tends to expound on the different ideologies of the two scholars in a mode of contrasting and comparison. This dissection will aim at espousing critically, the love existing in the world. This includes inter-human love, divine love and other numerous kinds of love, coupled and closely related to each other in a way or another. Regarding our main topic of focus, love is neither an abstract nor a concrete emotion or feeling. In our daily lives, we usually and constantly refer to the word love innumerable times simply because of our unfamiliarity with its meaning. In all those instances whereby we apply the term love, we mean different things though unawares. In most cases, however, we mean that the referee is something or someone that we desire and would profoundly prefer looking after or caring for. Everything can be a subject to loving by another both abstract and concrete. However, concrete things objects that have no emotions cannot love. The love of an individual towards someone or something therefore encompasses an extremely broad nature and has to be succinctly espoused. The study outlined below encompasses both the similarities and also the dissimilarities between the two philosophers in terms of what their views are regarding the critical issue of love (St Augustine 373). Plato derives his views and definitions for love from the evaluation of other peoples’ personal conveniences regarding love. This kind of love is referred to as common love, merely for sexual satisfaction. He defines heavenly love as a profound feeling or elated emotion that emanates from the soul and characterized by a no-conditional liking and passion between mostly a man and a man. This kind of love is made possible by a connection to the heavenly God. This love is deeply rooted beyond the soul and is indispensable. Common love is referred to as immoral and vulgar since it is aimed at satisfying the participants sexually over a short period of time. This love comes from the profound and strongly rooted physical attraction. This kind of love is not right and is not supported by the two philosophers. St. Augustine gives the same kind of types of love and expounds on the instances in almost a similar way as Plato (Sheffield et al 1). In both their assessments, they perceive the female gender as inferior to the men excluding the goddesses. This elicits a similarity between the two scholars’ views on the nature and types of love (St Augustine 373). Both Plato and Augustine come to terms that there is a greater version of love than the concrete and physically expressed love. This kind of love is enlightened and formless. Both men and women aim at receiving that enlightenment but in entirely diverse ways. Augustine slightly differs with Plato regarding the actions and activities inculcated in the love relationship. This is sexual contact between people who love each other. Plato argues that sexual intercourse is a path to achievement of the higher love that everyone aims to obtain and which brings about enlightenment. Augustine, on the other side argues that the action of sexual intercourse only brings about tradeoffs towards the achievement of such enlightenment to the higher reality. He perceives and strongly believes that expression of physical love is not a stepping stone but rather a barrier to attainment of spirituality. This is due to the fact that he had previously experienced situations regarding the same issue at hand. He considered romantic or common love as purely sacrilegious and non credible since he had actually gone through in his early ages. Plato argues that in the initial stage of love, the amans’ love get directed to lovingly gorgeous verbal expressions, mode of wording and the entire body and being of the amandum. Gradually growing from the fundamental kind of love is another greatly elevated love that is strong and profound. This occurs when the chaste form of the elegance is perceived in the entire soul of the amans primarily via the body, mind inclusive of words and the language too. The ultimately greatest kind of love is achieved when the amandum gets attracted to the amandum specifically through the profound effect of the realest elegance and beauty emanating from the latter, and not merely via the convenience of the soul or the body of the individual. The lower love aims at procreating gorgeous children in physicality, the upper love deals with creation of beautiful notions while the highest and greatest one deals with attainment of complete immortality and gaiety. However, Augustine’s conceptual view does not include sexual love as the initial step in attainment to the greatest love. Augustine argues that none is supposed to direct their love to earthly objects but postulates that love ought to be directed towards the almighty God in heaven only. He argues that the up to down linguistic relationship ought to be applied in the communication between man and God. Love between an individual encompasses a combination of the two (St Augustine 373). Plato’s view regarding sexuality elicited an idea concerning Eros, which he espouses as a profoundly powerful and energetic force or drive that influences individuals with a passion for achieving to climb to the peak and the greatest zenith of achievement and affluence in arts, crave for knowledge and also the scientific world. Augustine strongly disputes Erotic love as the greatest and perceives that the greatest love ought to be directed towards the highest living God in heavens. He elevates the apparently profound love of God to the guiding principle on the ways of life and the only way to salvation. Augustine therefore includes ethical comparisons to the love towards God. Plato, thus, takes a firm stand on inter-human love and Augustine on the different end concentrates and presses on the love between God and humanity, divine love. Augustine does not arrive at a valid conclusion regarding the relationship between sexual and non-sexual love, which Plato succinctly does. Plato, therefore, concentrates on common and practically concrete love, for sexual satisfaction. This results from his profound and thorough research on the topic of love from the symposiums he attended and made investigations in (Sheffield et al 1). Augustine’s contempt for common love was negative mainly probably because he had constantly met the wrong types and modes of love in his early years of growth. The sour experiences such as the loss of a close friend or acquaintance of his at a tender age engraved the notion of common love as inferior and wrong as disputed to real love; divine love. Losses of the people he loved made him feel desolate and lonely. This proved to him that the common love was temporary and replaceable. His sour experiences with sexual lust and juvenile delinquency developed his character that he out rightly depicts in his semantically assessments. His marriage life was entirely passive and not based on real love as was expected. Apparently, the people of those ages perceived marriage as a contract to procreate and generate future heirs. This kind of attitude towards romance was contributed further by his parents who had primarily concentrated on his education more than anything else. Oppositely, Plato is a philosopher who grew up with a strong and profoundly undisputable urge and aim to know what love was; therefore, his assessments are more based on his own research as disputed to personal experience that Augustine depicts (Sheffield et al 1). Having succinctly looked into the entire notion about love from the two philosophers, we have come across instances where they concur with each other’s views and also other instances where their views are totally different and dissimilar. Plato derives his assessments about love from the symposium where different scholars state their own perceptions regarding the true nature of the mind. He therefore does not obtain the knowledge on love from real life experiences. However, St. Augustine resolves and reflects back onto his sour past regarding the painful and juvenile practices that cost him a lot of grief. He was completely a juvenile delinquent and practiced vile practices as fornication and sexual lust in his boyhood years. He happened to lose one of his best friends who he loved so much. He, thus, continued in the same habit through his adulthood since his parents were not there to provide advice on how to evade the challenges that he was facing. Even in his matrimonial home, he did not truly; love his wife as his perceptions were that the wives were meant to play a part in procreation only and not to be loved. Having found out about the bitter olden days due to love, Augustine derived from his findings that the co0mmon love expressed between individuals is a mere sinful act and abomination. Therefore, he prescribes the humankind to go for the ultimate love; the love of God. He condemns sexual lust and advises individuals to love each other with a connection for the sake of God (St Augustine 373). References Sheffield, Cheyenne et al. Plato, the Symposium. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Print. St Augustine. The Confessions of Saint Augustine. Minneapolis. Filiquarian Publishing, LLC., 2008. Print Read More