Commentary on Plato's Symposium

deas of which parts are all gathered in that supreme mind. It is indeed true that the union of that mind to God went before the birth of the perfect ideas: the kindling of desire to the union, the infusion of rays to the desire, the turning of the desire to the infusion, the essence in forms of that mind to the turning of the desire. We therefore want this essence without form to be the chaos; its first conversion into God we will say is the birth of love; the infusion of rays is the food of love; the kindled desire that follows, we call the growth of love; the uniting with God, the impetus of love; the forming, the perfection of love. The conjunction and union of all forms and ideas is called mundus world by the Latins, and ornament by the Greeks. The grace of this ornament is beauty itself, toward which love, immediately upon being born, directed the mind and led it. Before, being without form, it is ugly to the same mind; then, being formed, it is beautiful. The condition of love is therefore to draw another to beauty and to join ugly things to beautiful ones. Who, then, will doubt that love was born immediately from chaos, and that it was before the world and all the other gods assigned to its parts? Since that desire of the mind was before its information, and in the formed mind were born both the gods and the world. Deservedly, therefore, Orpheus called love most ancient and perfect in itself, as if to say that it makes itself perfect, because that first movement of the mind by its nature seems to draw and take its perfection from God, and to give it to the mind that is then formed, and to the gods that are then born. Beyond this, they make it most prudent, and not without reason, because every wisdom, the