Commentary on Plato's Symposium

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This divine beauty creates in all things love, that is, a desire for it; for if God draws the world to himself, and the world is drawn, it is a continuous pulling, beginning from God, passing into the world, and finally ending in God. This movement, as if in a circle, returns again from where it started, such that this circle from God into the world and from the world into God is called by three names: First, because it begins in God and lures: beauty. Insofar as it passes into the world and draws it along: love. Insofar as it returns to the author and joins his work to him: joy. Love, therefore, ends from beauty in joy. This is signified by that beautiful hymn of Hierotheus and Dionysius the Areopagite, where those theologians sang thus: "Love is a good circle, revolved in the good by a perpetual good." Necessarily, certainly, love is a good thing; seeing that, born from the good, it returns to the good. The same is God, whose beauty is desired by everyone in possessing it, from which all things are acquired. Here our desire is kindled; here the ardor of lovers is appeased; nor is it extinguished, but rather it increases greatly. Nor without reason does Dionysius liken God to the sun; for as the sun illuminates and warms the body, so God grants to men the light of truth and the ardor of charity. The comparison, which I shall now relate to you, we have taken from the third book of Plato's Republic. The sun, he says, creates visible bodies and the eyes with which they can be seen; it gives to the eyes a clear and lucid spirit so that they may see; it paints the bodies with colors so that they may be seen. Neither the light itself is sufficient for the eyes, nor the colors for the bodies, to make sight perfect, if that light, from which many lights, both proper to bodies and to the eyes, are [derived]...