John Smith Harrison

“ In the “Hymne in Honour of Love” love is described as no merely cruel passion inflicted by the tyrannical Cupid of the amorist, but as the manifestation in man of the great informing power which brought the universe out of chaos and which now maintains it in order and concord. According to Ficino, the greatest representative of Italian Platonism during the Renaissance, one truth established by the speech of Eryximachus in the “Symposium” is that love is the creator and preserver of all things. ”

“ The Scripture that saith of God that He is life and light, saith also that He is love, and love is complacence, and complacence is joy; and to say God is infinite, essential love and joy is a better notion than with Cartesians and Cocceians to say that God and angels and spirits are but a thought or an idea. What is Heaven to us if there be no love and joy?” [8] This desire of life and love, along its upper levels of thought, was satisfied by Platonism; it enabled the poets to forecast the life of the soul in heaven, and of its anticipation on earth as a love of beauty. ”

“ In this contemplative love of beauty there is present as a noticeable element the consciousness in the poet’s mind of the moral significance of beauty. In Spenser’s description of the first meeting of Calidore with Pastorella, however, the contemplative love of beauty so absorbs the power of the soul that the lover and the poet are oblivious to every other thought and silently gaze upon the beauty of form present to their eyes. ”

“ The appeal which Platonism made to the English poets in its doctrine of a heavenly love was through its power to stir the minds with a deep sense of that beauty which God was understood to possess. The application of the principle of beauty to God resulted in a note of joy and in an exaltation of soul in the religious mind, which, after forsaking the beauty of this world of sense, could enjoy the great principle of beauty in the beatific vision of God. Such a strain of joy may be heard in Drummond, in John Norris, and even in the quiet lyrics of George Herbert. ”

“ Nothing was left for him to do but to shift his mind from a conception of virtue as one, to an inferior notion of virtue as a manifold of personal graces. But in thus changing his idea, he destroyed the unity of his work. In his first two books he had explained how the soul could perfect itself in the full scope of its powers; and in doing this he had taught the Platonic doctrines of a heavenly beauty and of temperance as the condition of virtue in the soul. Here lay the basic idea of his conception of a gentleman. ”

“ Man’s understanding, too, can become so broadened that it can apprehend God’s true being, not knowing it, to be sure, in its true essence, but having such a true insight that it can reject all narrow conceptions of His nature and welcome other more comprehensive ideas as closer approximations to the truth. The understanding is in a state that More calls parturient; God under certain conditions can be born within the soul. ”

“ The first way by which this elevation of a purely sensuous passion into a higher region was effected was through the Platonic conception of the “idea.” Plato had taught that in love the mind should pass from a sight of the objects of beauty through ever widening circles of abstraction to the contemplation of absolute beauty in its idea. This can be known only by the soul, and is the only real beauty. Spenser’s “Hymne of Heavenly Love” is the best example of the application of this idea to the love of Christ. In this poem he sings the praise of Christ as the God of Love. ”

“ The discipline of the Red Cross Knight in the House of Holiness is twofold. In the practice of the Christian graces—faith, hope, and charity—the Knight is perfected in the way of the righteous life. He is a penitent seeking to cleanse his soul of the infection of sin. On the Mount of Heavenly Contemplation he exercises his soul in the contemplative vision of the eternal world. But the emphasis laid by Platonism upon the loveliness of that wisdom which is the object of contemplation results in quickening the imagination 11and in stirring the soul to realize the principle in love. ”

“ In the same masque love is defined in accordance with the myth of Penia and Poros:
“Love is the right affection of the mind,
The noble appetite of what is best:
Desire of union with the thing design’d,
But in fruition of it cannot rest.
“The father Plenty is, the mother Want,
Plenty the beauty which it wanteth draws;
Want yields itself: affording what is scant:
So both affections are the union’s cause.” In “Love Freed From Ignorance and Folly” the sustaining power of love in keeping the 125parts of the universe in concord is used to combat the accusation that love is mere cruelty. ”

“ But we who live in these hollows [of earth] are deceived into the notion that we are dwelling on the surface of the earth; which is just as if a creature who was at the bottom of the sea were to fancy that he was on the surface of the water and that the sea was the heaven through which he saw the sun and the other stars, he having never come to the surface by reason of his feebleness and sluggishness, and having never lifted up his head and seen, nor ever heard from one who had seen, how much purer and fairer the world above is than his own.... ”

“ To style his wandering rage of passion, Love.
Love that imparts in everything delight,
Is fancied in the soul, not in the sight.”
(ll. 125–128.) In Jonson’s “Epode” in “The Forest,” the same differentiation of love from passion is present, and an attempt is made to define love as an essence. The love of the present is nothing but raging passion. ”

“ In the legend of temperance the efficacy of grace is no more vital, and what is more, it is an intrusion upon the moral order; it makes the soul untrue to itself and all that we know of her. The logic of Guyon’s inner life did not require that Arthur should come to his rescue after he had shown his ability to remain temperate under strong emotion and in the presence of wantonness and covetousness. ”

“ The pure soul, according to his belief, has power in itself to change the body to its own pure essence. The conversion of body to soul, however, is not a tenet of Platonic philosophy in any phase. It was the working in Milton of that tendency, visible throughout the poetry of the seventeenth century, to assert the primacy of the soul in life—an attempt which was made by the metaphysical poets especially in their treatment of love. ”

“ One reason why the people of the wood, the nymphs, the fauns, and the satyrs, were permitted to see the celestial beauty of Una unveiled lay in the fact that through their experiences a means was provided by the poet to quicken the imagination into a sense of its pure nature. ”

“ Spenser is so thoroughly convinced of the truth of that fundamental idea of Platonic ethics, that truth and beauty are identical, that he shows their union in the character of Una, 4in whom, as her name signifies, they are one. Plato had taught that the highest beauty which the soul can know is wisdom, which, though invisible to sight, would inflame the hearts of men in an unwonted degree could there be a visible image of her. ”

“ According to Drummond, the one “choicest bliss” of life is the possession of God’s beauty as a burning passion within the soul. In “An Hymn of True Happiness” he teaches that supreme felicity does not consist in the enjoyment of earth’s treasures, of sensuous beauty, or of other sensual delights, and not even in knowledge and fame. ”

“ But they fall into a distinct class by themselves. They are the ideals of conduct to be followed when man is acting in his purely social capacity as a member of society. They may be dignified as virtues, but can never be coördinate with the Platonic conception of virtue, which conceives of it not as an outward act, but as the very health of the soul when realizing, unhampered by any disturbing influences, its native impulses toward the good.
The difference between these two conceptions is strikingly illustrated by a comparison of Spenser’s idea of justice with the Platonic notion. ”

“ Platonic metaphysics are also present in Drummond’s account of the essential unity persisting throughout the triplicity of Persons. Plotinus had held that The One caused the mind or intellect, and that in turn caused universal soul. The order, however, is not one of time sequence, but merely a logical order of causation. In this series of causation there is no idea of a production as an act going out of itself and forming another; each producing cause remains in its own centre; throughout the series runs one cause or manifestation of life. ”

“ If the world be indeed fair and the artificer good, it is manifest that he must have looked to that which is eternal ... for the world is the fairest of creations and he is the best of causes.” By blending these ideas Spenser was able to conceive of God as creating the world after a pattern of ideal beauty, which, by virtue of its infusion into matter, is the source of that lively grace which the objects called beautiful possess. ”

“ Beauty that is nothing but a mere witchery of the sense disappears into thin air when confronted by virtue in her beauty. This is the lesson taught in the vanishing of the false Florimell when the true is placed beside her. (V. iii. 25.) The power of this affinity of the soul for beauty, mysterious as it is real, which Spenser’s work reveals, is conveyed in a question from Sidney’s “Arcadia,” where the spirit of the “Phædrus” is all present. “Did ever mans eye looke thorough love upon the majesty of vertue, shining through beauty, but that he became (as it well became him) a captive?” ”

“ Contemplation 93of Christ’s divine nature as essential beauty is totally absent from this passion. Christ as the object of this love is conceived only as the perfection of physical beauty; and the response within the soul of the lover is that of mere sensuous delight either in the sight of his personal beauties or in the realization of the union with him. This strain of religious devotion is heard in Herbert, in Vaughan, and Crashaw. ”

“ He next demonstrates that this soul is a self-moving substance. It is self-moving in plants, as the quickening power of the sun on vegetation shows. Through the heat of the sun the hidden centre, or soul, is called into the life of blossoming and growth. ”

“ In his treatment of this theme, there are two phases: one in which the enthusiasm of Milton asserts itself in a positive way, and the other a conviction of maturer experience, in which sin is explained negatively in its relation to the soul’s purity.
The fundamental idea of Plato on which Milton built his doctrine of chastity is the one taught in the “Phædo,” that every experience of the soul gained through the medium of the senses tends to degrade the soul’s pure essence into the grosser, corporeal form of the body. ”

“ According to the English poet, justice is purely retributive, a dispensing of reward and punishment. The education of the Knight of Justice, Arthegal, by Astræa, is thus described:
28“There she him taught to weigh both right and wrong
In equall ballance with due recompence,
And equitie to measure out along,
According to the line of conscience,
When so it needs with rigour to dispence.”
(V. i. 7.) In Plato, on the other hand, justice is the same thing as temperance, an inward state of the soul and the condition of any virtue. ”

“ In defining “What True Love Is,” the poets show that it cannot be desire, but is rather an essence pure in itself, and in one instance it is described as something unknowable either to sense or to mind.
Donne has left a letter in verse “To the Countess of Huntingdon,” in which he carefully explains how love cannot be desire. Sighing and moaning may be love, but it is love made in a weak way; love should never cast one down, but should elevate. ”

“ At this point the poem naturally passes on to develop the second suggestion found in Platonism, that the beauty of earth is but a shadow or reflexion of the absolute beauty. As was common in that time, this absolute beauty is identified with God. Accordingly, the young woman appeals to Drummond to trust in God’s beauty, which alone can fill the soul with bliss. If the power of earthly beauty—the glance of an eye—can make him leave all else, what, she asks, must be the love kindled by the “only Fair” ”

“ Platonic love, then, meant either a love devoid of all sensual desire, an innocent or hopeless 161passion, or it was a form of gallantry used to cloak immorality. Its one characteristic notion was that true love consisted in a union of soul with soul, mind with mind, or essence with essence. This idea of restricting love to the experience of soul as opposed to the enjoyment of sense is the one notion which runs beneath many of the love lyrics written in the seventeenth century; and it is the point attacked by opponents. ”