Heavenly love, as conceived in the poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, refers to two distinct experiences. By this term the poets meant either the love known in the soul for the realities of the unseen world or the love which God had shown to man in his creation and preservation, and which man could experience through the indwelling of God’s spirit within him. In the explanation of the nature of these two experiences the teaching of Platonism played a very important part, directing the course of that love of man for heavenly things, and accounting for the presence of love in the Godhead.
To the discussion of the latter of these subjects Platonism was able to offer two conceptions, in which a rational explanation of God’s love as revealed in the creation could be found; one presenting the highest reality as beauty, the other as the good. The first conception was present in its theory of love. In the “Symposium” Plato had taught that love was a desire of birth in beauty, and that the highest love was a desire of birth in beauty absolute, the ultimate principle of all beauty. (“Symposium,” 206, 211–212.) Christianity, on the other hand, had taught that God is love. By identifying the absolute beauty of Plato with God, and by applying the Platonic conception of the birth of love to this Christian conception of God as love, God Himself was understood as enjoying his own beauty, thus begetting beings like to it in fairness. In Spenser’s “Hymne of Heavenly Love,” this idea forms the first division of the poem which treats of the love of God. (ll. 25–122.) At first God is conceived as living in Himself in love.
“Before this worlds great frame, in which al things
Are now containd, found any being place,
Ere flitting Time could wag his eyas wings
About that mightie bound, which doth embrace
The rolling Spheres, and parts their houres by space,
That high eternall powre, which now doth move
In all these things, mov’d in it selfe by love.”
(ll. 25–31.)