Plato mounts up from sensuous love to intellectual love, and so does Shelley. In the Defence of Poetry, III, s. 125, he shows us how another great poet accomplished this. “His (Dante’s) apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise and the gradations of his own love and her loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to the throne of the Supreme cause, is the most glorious imagination of modern poetry.” One would be in this highest stage, according to Spinoza, when one has attained the intellectual love of God. “This intellectual love of God is the highest kind of virtue and it not only makes man free, but it confers immortality.”[145]
Shelly makes all things love one another. Thus in Adonais:
All baser things pant with life’s sacred thirst;
Diffuse themselves; and spend in love’s delight,
The beauty and the joy of their renewed might (st. 19).
This harmonizes with his earlier views concerning inanimate objects. We saw he believed that they all had life, that they were all possessed of the “Spirit of Nature.” In Prometheus Unbound he speaks of “this true, fair world of things a sea reflecting love.” Love draws man to man. It is the sine qua non of man’s existence. His love is founded in beauty as perceived by the senses. The Spirit of Beauty and the Spirit of Love are one.
Great Spirit, deepest Love!
Which rulest and dost move
All things which live and are
... Who sittest in thy star o’er Ocean’s western floor
Spirit of Beauty.[146]
We love that which is beautiful. “Love is a going out of one’s own nature, or an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person not our own.”[147] The beauty of the world leads us step by step to the love of pure Beauty, Love itself. In the Symposium, Diotima explains how the love of beautiful objects leads on to the conception of perfect abstract beauty, “eternal unproduced, indestructible.... All other things are beautiful through a participation of it ... When any one ascending from the correct system of Love begins to contemplate this supreme beauty he already touches the consummation of his labor.”[148] The earth is not Beauty, Love, Divinity itself; it is but the shadow of God.
How glorious are thou, Earth! And if thou be
The shadow of some spirit lovelier still.[149]
Again
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats unseen amongst us.[150]
This reminds us of platonism. The “Spirit” is the Idea, and the “shadow” is the earth. Plato’s Idea transcends the world of concrete existence. The two functions of the Idea are to cause things to be known and to constitute their reality. It is at the same time one and many.[151] It stood out most prominently in the mind of Plato as the Idea of Good or Beauty by which he meant God Himself. He says that the shadow of the power of intellectual Beauty inspires us and not intellectual Beauty itself. We could not endure that. Intellectual Beauty is God.