Ladder of Love

In the Symposium, the priestess Diotima teaches Socrates the right way to love as a ladder of ascent. One begins by loving a single beautiful body, then sees the beauty common to all bodies, then the beauty of souls, of laws and institutions, of knowledge — and finally beholds Beauty itself, eternal and partless, the source of all the rest.

Each rung loosens the soul’s attachment to particulars and turns Eros from possession toward contemplation. For the Neoplatonists the ladder became the very model of the soul’s ascent toward the intelligible and the One.