Kallos

Kallos (κάλλος) is beauty; to kalon, 'the beautiful', is also 'the fine' and 'the noble', for the Greeks heard moral and aesthetic splendor in a single word. Beauty is no mere ornament in the Platonic tradition but one of its driving forces — the spur that sets the soul in motion toward the divine.

The ladder of love

In the Symposium, Plato describes the ascent of love: rightly guided, the soul rises from the beauty of a single body to the beauty of all bodies, then to the beauty of souls, of laws, and of knowledge, until at last it glimpses Beauty itself — eternal, unchanging, the Form of the Beautiful, of which every lovely thing is a reflection. To love beauty truly is to be led, step by step, beyond it.

The most visible Form

In the Phaedrus beauty has a special privilege: alone among the Forms it shines through to the senses, so that the sight of a beautiful thing can shock the soul into recollection of the realities it once beheld, and make its lost wings begin to grow. Plotinus devoted his very first treatise to beauty, teaching that a thing is beautiful by sharing in form, and that all beauty is in the end the radiance of the Good shining through the orders of being.