So I Started Reading This Essay On Aeon, Only 14 Pages, I Thought. Easy. I’ll Breeze Through It And

So I started reading this essay on Aeon, only 14 pages, I thought. Easy. I’ll breeze through it and read another one (trying to make it a habit to read more essays).

I’m on page 3 and completely spiraling (in the best way).

It’s about Plato, love, and beauty… specifically Diotima’s “ladder of love” from the Symposium. Basically, the idea is that what we think of as love (like being into someone’s looks or charm or whatever) is actually just the lowest rung of a bigger, higher journey. What we’re really in love with isn’t their body, it’s the beauty that their body reflects?

And at first I was like… I get it but I also don’t? But then it i understood. We’re not just drawn to a person’s hands or eyes or smile, we’re pulled toward something those things point to. Something more abstract. We love not just their kindness, for example, we start to love kindness Itself. And once you realize that, it’s like your love detaches from just one person and expands outward… you start seeing beauty everywhere, in everyone.

And then I started thinking, what if this whole “ladder of love” is also a metaphor for faith?

As someone that was brought up Christian, even when I have doubted the existence of God, I kinda never really stopped loving what “God” represents: compassion, forgiveness, honesty, gentleness. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s not about whether we can prove the source. It’s about the fact that we’re drawn to it. The beauty of that source?

That longing for the good, the beautiful, the meaningful maybe that’s what’s divine in us.

It’s like a person standing in sunlight and the sun is casting their shadow on the ground. We fall in love with the shadow, the body, the charm, the vibe but what we’re really responding to is the light behind it. The source. The thing we can’t touch, but feel. Does this make sense omg..

So yeah, this is only three pages into the essay. Gonna nap.