INTRODUCTION.
THERE is a famous myth in Plato’s Symposium told to explain the origin of love. This myth says that primitive man was round, and had four hands and four feet, and one head with two faces looking opposite ways. He could walk on his legs if he liked, but he also could roll over and over with great speed if he wished to go anywhere very fast.
Because of their fleetness and skill these “Round people” were dangerous rivals in power to Zeus himself and he adopted the plan of weakening them by cutting each one of them in two. In remembrance of the original undivided state each half, ever since unsatisfied and alone, seeks eagerly for the other half. Each human being is thus a half—a tally—and love is the longing to be united. The two halves are seeking to be joined again in the original whole. Such in briefest compass is the myth.
But as the dialogue advances love is traced to a higher source. It is discovered to be a passion for the eternal, a passion which rises in the soul at the sight of an object which suggests the eternal, from which the soul has come into the temporal. The soul is alien here and its chief joy in the midst of the shows of sense is joy at the sight of something which reminds it of its old divine home. Thus, again, Plato tells us that love has its birth in the division of what was once a whole. We yearn for that from which we have come.
“Though inland far we be
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
That brought us hither.”
We may ignorantly stop at some mid-way good and miss the homeward path, but our real search, our master passion, is for that divine Other to whom we belong. So at last Plato poetizes.
We have discovered through other lips, what he could not tell us, that the search is a double search. We have learned that the Divine Other whom we seek is also seeking us. The myth, told at the beginning, is more suggestive than it seemed. It may perhaps do for a parable of the finite and the Infinite, the soul and its Father. May they not once have been in union? May not our birth in time be a drawing away into individuality from the Divine whole? And then may not the goal of the entire drama of personal life be the restoration of that union on a higher spiritual level? May it not be, that we are never again to fuse the skirts of self and merge into a union of oblivion, but rather that we are to rise to a love-union in which His will becomes our will—a union of conscious co-operation? So at any rate I believe. But this little book is not a book of speculation. It is not written to urge some fond belief.