Commentary on Plato's Symposium

theologians, who attributed the name of love to God, which is equally approved by the moderns. No name that is appropriate is common to God in ugly things, so that everyone should guard against transferring the divine name of love rashly to mad perturbations. Let Dicaearchus blush, and whoever else has had the boldness to rebuke the Platonic majesty for having too much caressed love: for toward beautiful, honest, and divine affections we can never show too much or sufficient caress. From here it follows that every love is honest, and every lover just, as love is entirely beautiful, and properly loves the beautiful. But that infuriated love, by which we are pulled with lustful wings toward lewdness, because it leads us to ugliness, is in every way contrary to love. And to return sometimes to the utility of love, I say that that shame which frightens us away from the dishonest, and the desire that inflames us toward the honest, are easily and quickly moved by love. Primarily because love, which seeks beautiful things and appetites the ornate and magnificent, and hates the deformed, must necessarily flee the ugly and dishonest. Furthermore, if it happens that two love one another, and observe and desire to please one another because of the love that one bears for the other, each one for himself, as if they were before a thousand witnesses, guards against dishonest things because of the desire they have to please one another. Likewise, they always take up great and beautiful enterprises with ardent study, so as not to come into contempt before the beloved, so that they may be reputed worthy of reciprocal love. Phaedrus narrates this reason with more words when he sets forth the examples of love, the first of the love of a woman toward a man where he speaks of Alcestis, wife of A-