Love in Plato and Augustine

Love
In the Symposium, Socrates repeats the words of Diotima that love “is of the good’s being one’s own always” (Symposium 268). These words essentially get to the heart of Augustine’s own feelings towards his mother Monica, who would be recognized by the Church as a saint: as Augustine observes, she was faithful to God all her life, dutiful to her husband, careful of her children and always laboring to serve God’s servants. Through her actions she showed herself to be in love with God, full of the spirit of God, and in possession of the good. If love is of the good’s being one’s own always, as Diotima suggested, Monica was certainly the personification of love. This paper will show that Augustine’s conception of love has much more in common with Diotima’s than it has differences, for both get to the heart of love as being a union between the source of all goodness and the human soul.
For both Socrates and Augustine, love is a kind of holy union with the divine—the ultimate source of all that is good. When one is “in love” one is united to that goodness and possesses it completely and permanently, never losing it. Love is also a process of begetting—of engendering, of bringing forth fruit—which Augustine observes is certainly the case with his mother Monica, who brought her children into the world and raised them and even looked after them when they went wayward, as Augustine did, that they might come back to the good that they were born to be a part of. Diotima explains it to Socrates thus: “For eros is not, Socrates, of the beautiful as you believe.” “Well, what then?” “It is of engendering and bringing to birth in the beautiful.” “All right,” I said. “It is more than all right, she said. “And why is eros of engendering? Because engendering is born forever and is immortal as far as that can happen to a mortal being” (Symposium 269). Love produces fruit, in other words. Love produces children, either in the flesh or in the spirit. For Monica it was thus as Augustine says in his Confessions, speaking to God: “Such a one was she — Thou, her most intimate Instructor, teaching her in the school of her heart” (Confessions 9.9.21). Monica emphasized the union with God and how this was all that mattered, even on her deathbed. Augustine recounts that when his brother asked her whether she would not prefer to be buried in her homeland, she stated that it mattered not to her where she was buried but only “that you will remember me at the Lord's altar, wherever you be” (Confessions 9.11.27). By observing how faithfully Monica observed the laws and spirit of God and made them part of her own life, converting her husband, her mother-in-law and her own children to the spirit of God, Augustine shows that Monica’s love is just like Diotima’s conception of love: of being one’s own always.
The main difference in terms of conception between the two is that Diotima’s sense of love is based upon the pagan experience or upon the natural philosophy of her time. She has no conception of Christ as the Man-God. Monica does have this sense and this spiritual belief and thus love for Monica is rooted in the Christian religion and in acting in the example given by Christ—i.e., in showing love and patience towards one and all that they might come to believe in the love and mercy of Christ, her God. For Diotima, love is not personified by Christ and consists of a much more abstract notion, though in essence the idea of love is similar to what Monica evinces in her own daily life, as depicted by Augustine: love is unconditional, love is lasting, love is faithful, and love is total. The quality of love is that it is transformative and lifts one up above the mediocre and average. For Monica, by possessing the love of God, she became a saint, living her life in the holiness of one who is in possession of love and exuding love in all directions. It is her unwavering possession of this love, her example of love, that causes Augustine to grieve when she dies: he has lost her example in his own life and now must remember her and use her example as a guide for himself—that he too might engage in the engendering of love wherever he goes.
The Christian idea that Monica espoused was certainly very similar to Diomita’s sense of love in the Symposium in this way, too: it was not self-centered but rather other-centered. It did not seek to contain love solely within the self and keep it there, not sharing it with others. On the contrary, the essence of love is that it must shine out and pour out and bring forth more love—i.e., it must engender more and more: “love is of engendering” as Diomita says—and this is what Augustine shows with Monica. Monica is always working to bring forth love wherever she goes. Even when her mother-in-law despises her, Monica does not return evil for evil but rather returns love, just as the words of Christ compel her to do. She is a reservoir of love, of Christian love—and it pours out and engenders the same Christian love in the hearts of those who are touched by her charity—including her mother-in-law and her husband.
Augustine notes that her husband never beat her or hit her, that she was unlike the other women whose husbands were rough with them: the reason is that she never gave him reason to be rough with her. She obeyed him and served him out of love, even if he was not of the same spirit as she. She understood that God’s love commanded her to serve others just as Christ served others when He lived. In this manner, Monica engendered love throughout her life.
Augustine himself was the outcome of Monica’s love, for by remaining devoted to God she followed Augustine, praying for him, and being his spiritual support through his wayward years. When he was finally converted and brought into the Church and into the union of love with God, he realized that he owed this to her labors, her tears, her love and her prayers. Her possession of love enabled him to find love himself because it came from God through her to him. He thus became a servant of the Church, serving others in the spirit of God just as his mother served those around her, converting them and bringing them into union with the spirit of God as well.
For these reasons, Augustine’s experience of God’s love with his mother Monica is quite similar to Diotima’s explanation of love to Socrates in the Symposium. Both recognize that love engenders love and that love is defined as being one’s own always. Augustine sees that love in terms of Christian action—prayer, charity, conversion, servitude to the law of God, love towards others. Diotima explains it in more colorful, abstract terms—but the essence is the same. The only difference between the two is that Diotima is speaking from a non-Christian time, a pagan time when the Christian God was unknown. Nonetheless, she captures the same idea of love as Augustine does when he is writing about his mother and his experience of God’s love that he sees through his mother and her devotion not only to him but to her husband, her mother-in-law and to God.
In conclusion, it could be said that Diotima and Augustine are both of the same spirit in terms of how they see love. They see it not as a feeling or as a possession of the beautiful. Rather, they see it as a process—a work of begetting, of engendering. They see it as a holy union. Monica had that holy union with God and passed it on to Augustine. Diotima understood this concept intimately even in the pre-Christian era.