Love Friendship Beauty and the Good: Plato Aristotle and the Later Tradition: 26 (Veritas)

This book tells a compelling story about love friendship and the Divine that took over a thousand years to unfold. It argues that mind and feeling are intrinsically connected in the thought of Plato Aristotle and Plotinus; that Aristotle developed his theology and physics primarily from Platos Symposium (from the Greater and Lesser Mysteries of Diotima-Socrates speech); and that the Beautiful and the Good are not coincident classes but irreducible Forms and the loving ascent of the Symposium must be interpreted in the light of the Republic as the later tradition up to Ficino saw. Against the view that Platonism is an escape from the ambiguities of ordinary experience or opposed to loving individuals for their own sakes this book argues that Plato dramatizes the ambiguities of ordinary experience confronts the possibility of failure and bequeaths erotic models for the loving of individuals to later thought. Finally it examines the Platonic-Aristotelian heritage on the Divine to discover whether God can love us back and situates the dramatic development of this legacy in Plotinus Iamblichus Proclus and Dionysius the Areopagite.