In a world of turmoil, strife and restless change, the one thing that remains resolutely constant, is love.

Inspired by love of glory, Achilles sets out to fight and die in Troy. Inspired by love of his family and country, Hector dies fighting Achilles. For impiety in desecrating Hector’s corpse and love of justice, Apollo guides Paris’ arrow that kills Achilles. Inspired by love of Helen, Paris starts the whole messy business. Inspired by love of home, Odysseus rejects eternal life with Calypso for the homely Penelope and his faithful old dog Argos. Inspired by love of Odysseus, Argos doggedly awaits his companion’s return and only dies after he alone recognises Odysseus. For love of Argos Odysseus sheds a few quiet tears. Homer’s epics are replete with love and longing.

In Plato’s Symposium we also find a movement of love. Unlike, Homeric love, characterised by the metaphor of a mercurial and stormy sea, Platonic love, characterised by the metaphor of the ladder, is dynamic, ascending and transcendent. The upward movement of Platonic love with the vision of the Good always in sight synthesises the Apollonian with the Dionysian; Achilles self-centred individualism and Hector’s communal cosmopolitanism that led to the Roman and Byzantine Empires; Andromache’s noble love for Hector, the warrior citizen, with Helen’s irreverent and passionate love for Paris the dilettante playboy. Love happens. From the pandemic Eros of sexual passion, to the empyrean Eros of Agape and ultimately the mystical love of the highest good, the Good itself, Platonic love has an upward redemptive motion.

In the movie Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Marilyn Monroe muses that “when love goes wrong nothing goes right”. Plato would agree. For Plato, things can only go right with the right kind of love. If love goes wrong it is because the love pursued is of the wrong kind. Love will never go wrong if it is the one true thing. This is roughly what Diotima, the mysterious woman from Mantinaea, tells Socrates in the Symposium – a dialogue on Love comprising a series of seven speeches given in honour of Love by the guests at a dinner party.

We can think of Plato’s vision of love as an inclusive and dynamic continuum between the lowest form of love – lustful or carnal love – and the highest form of love – love of the Beautiful and the Good. In between there are various other kinds of love including romantic love, familial love, friendship, and love of the Arts and Sciences. If we substitute the Beautiful and the Good with God, we get an early version of Christianity. Not surprising, Plato had a substantial influence on Christianity, something for which he was accused by Nietzsche who labelled Christianity as “Plato for the masses”.

We can view Love of the Beautiful and the Good as analogous to love of God, through Jesus Christ as God incarnate. And as Christ is traditionally presented as the medium between the human and the divine, He is functionally analogous to Plato’s Eros. He is symbolically the embodiment of Love and Philosophy as both Love and Philosophy are, according to Diotima, intermediaries between the human and the divine and both driven by a longing for wholeness and immortality. Moreover, like Platonic Love and Philosophy, Christ is presented as the One who can heal the rift between us and God and help us recover our original divine state of wholeness prior to the Fall.

Plato’s and Christ’s notions of love are a call to heaven’s diaspora. Both Platonic Love and Christian Agape offer a pathway to redemption. Like love of God, Platonic Love although immanent in the world is also transcendent and extends beyond this world to a more perfect world.

Love lies at the heart of both Platonic philosophy and Christianity and provides them with a unique ethics based exclusively on love. Together they offer reconciliation between faith and reason.

Plato’s Symposium also compliments Homer’s narrative of troubled love in the Iliad and Odyssey and lays the foundation for modern civilisation itself. It is a transition in which the sacred gives birth to the secular rather than the secular replacing the sacred. Without the sacred civilisation perishes. For in love we re-discover our divinity through the perfection of our humanity.

Diotima’s love compliments that of Marilyn’s and Helen’s for when love goes right nothing can possibly go wrong.

Dr Edward Spence is a Senior Research Fellow at the ARC Special Research Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. He teaches communication ethics and media ethics in the School of Communication and Creative Industries at Charles Sturt University. His co-authored book ‘Media, Markets, and Morals’ (Wiley-Blackwell 2011) was published recently.