An estray from Byzance, tossed thence on
the shores of the mediaeval Dead Sea, translated in the Florentine Academy,
printed in the Venetian metropolis of pleasure and dedicated to the
scholar pope, no better aid to enjoyment could he or any one have had. In
the mystic incense of the liturgy to Aphrodite was what prelates and
patricians, the people and the planet long had needed, a doctrine of love.

In the _Republic_ Plato stated that those who contemplate the immutable
essence of things possess knowledge not views. That was precisely what was
wanted. But what was wanted Plato did not perhaps very adequately supply.
Hitherto love had been regarded sometimes as the fusion of souls sometimes
as that of the senses. There had been asceticism. There had also been
license. Plato, from whom something more novel was wanted, seemed to offer
but an antidote to both. In the _Symposion_ love was represented as the
rather vulgar instinct of persistence and beauty, one and indivisible,
alone divine. Moreover, from the austere regions of that abstraction came
no explanation of the charm which feminine loveliness exercises over man.
On the other hand, Plato had told of two Aphrodites, one celestial, the
other common, a distinction which doctors in quintessences utilized for
the display of two forms of love, one heavenly, the other mundane,
simianizing in so doing, what is human, humanizing that which is divine
and succeeding between them in producing for the world the modern
conception of platonic affection, which, in so far as it relates to the
reciprocal relations of men and women, not for a moment had entered
Plato's sky-like mind.

The doctors were Ficino--a Hellenist whom Cosmo dei Medici had had
trained for the sole purpose of translating Plato--and Bembo, a prelate,
who already had written for Lucrezia Borgia a treatise on love. What
Ficino advanced Bembo expounded.

Bembo's commentary was to the effect that earthly loveliness is a
projection of celestial beauty irradiated throughout creation. Falling as
light falls it penetrates the soul and repercuted creates love, which
consequently is a derivative of divine beauty transmitted through a
woman's eyes. To man the source of that beauty is, however, not the soul
but the flesh. From this error disillusion proceeds. For the rightful
enjoyment of beauty cannot consist in material satisfaction from which
satiety, weariness, and aversion result, but rather in disinterestedness,
wh