. Plato's theory of ideas is the philosophical
victory of the male-spiritual principle over nature, matter and their
warden: woman. (Perhaps it is even the revenge of the Greek genius for
man's original enslavement.) "Love between men," continues the seer,
"forms a stronger tie, a closer friendship, than love between parents
and children; it has a mutual share in children which are immortal and
far more beautiful than the children of men." She teaches Socrates that
this noble love is at the root of all the magnificent creations of the
spirit, as carnal love is the origin of human life. "Until he becomes
aware that the beauty of all bodies is closely related, a man must love
an individual with all his heart. If a man will follow after beauty, he
is foolish not to conceive the beauty of all bodies as one and the same.
As soon as he has learned this, he will become a lover of all beautiful
forms; his fervent passion for one will diminish, he will scorn the
individual and hold it cheap."

With the Hellenic homosexuality an element foreign and even hostile to
the original and natural bi-sexual sensuality crept into the erotic life
of the human race; it found its classical representation in the Platonic
dialogues "Symposium" and "Phaedros." In conscious opposition to all
sexuality Platonic love (what is usually called Platonic love is based
on an obstinate misunderstanding) turns to the purely spiritual, that is
to say, the conceptions of truth, beauty and goodness; it is a yearning
for the supernatural, and it knows itself as the path to it. In the
mutual love of all noble souls lies the germ of all higher things; it is
the way to the gods of light which, in this connection, are conceived
philosophically as ideas, though in the true Hellenic spirit as
objective ideas, the prototypes and culminations of everything human. To
grasp the meaning of Platonic love it is essential to realise
that--unlike the spiritual woman-worship peculiar to the Middle
Ages--it is not a personal feeling of one individual for another;
platonically speaking, the love for an individual is only a first stage;
the path which leads to the love of beauty and the eternal ideas. The
characteristic of this metaphysical love which Plato was the first to
conceive, was therefore love for the universal, and not love for an
individual. The latter, as we shall find later on, is the characteristic
of the true or, more modestly speaking, specifically European concep