Plato as quoted by Fr. Brendan Purcell
That which makes human beings human in terms of a love that deepens through the three stages of what is called the love of outer, inner and everlasting beauty.
a) love of outer beauty:
"First, he will fall in love with the beauty of the individual body, so that his passion may give rise to noble discourse. Next, he will see that if he is to devote himself to loveliness of form, it will be absurd to deny that the beauty of each and every body is the same... he must be the lover of every lovely body"
b) love of inner beauty
"Next, he must grasp that the beauties of the body are as nothing to the beauties of the soul, so that wherever he meets with spiritual loveliness, even in the husk of an unlovely body, he will find it beautiful enough to fall in love with, and to cherish - and beautiful enough to quicken in his heart a longing for such discourse as tends towards the building of a noble nature. And from this he will be led to contemplate the beauty of laws and institutions"
c) love of everlasting beauty
"And now, Socrates, there bursts upon him that wondrous vision which is the very soul of the beauty he has toiled so long for. It is an everlasting loveliness which neither comes nor goes which neither flowers nor fades... Nor will his vision of the beautiful take the form of a face... or of anything of the flesh. It will neither be words, nor knowledge, nor a something which exists in something else... but subsisting of itself and by itself in an eternal oneness, while every lovely thing partakes of it... starting from individual beauties, the quest for the universal beauty must find him ever mounting the heavenly ladder... until at last he comes to know what beauty is."
That which makes human beings human in terms of a love that deepens through the three stages of what is called the love of outer, inner and everlasting beauty.
a) love of outer beauty:
"First, he will fall in love with the beauty of the individual body, so that his passion may give rise to noble discourse. Next, he will see that if he is to devote himself to loveliness of form, it will be absurd to deny that the beauty of each and every body is the same... he must be the lover of every lovely body"
b) love of inner beauty
"Next, he must grasp that the beauties of the body are as nothing to the beauties of the soul, so that wherever he meets with spiritual loveliness, even in the husk of an unlovely body, he will find it beautiful enough to fall in love with, and to cherish - and beautiful enough to quicken in his heart a longing for such discourse as tends towards the building of a noble nature. And from this he will be led to contemplate the beauty of laws and institutions"
c) love of everlasting beauty
"And now, Socrates, there bursts upon him that wondrous vision which is the very soul of the beauty he has toiled so long for. It is an everlasting loveliness which neither comes nor goes which neither flowers nor fades... Nor will his vision of the beautiful take the form of a face... or of anything of the flesh. It will neither be words, nor knowledge, nor a something which exists in something else... but subsisting of itself and by itself in an eternal oneness, while every lovely thing partakes of it... starting from individual beauties, the quest for the universal beauty must find him ever mounting the heavenly ladder... until at last he comes to know what beauty is."
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