For Plato, a perfect god cannot love. For Saint John, God is love. The two statements seem mutually exclusive, and the distance between them marks one of the most important turning points in the history of ideas: on one side, love as lack; on the other, love as fullness. Understanding how Christianity bridged that distance without discarding Plato's ladder is what makes Benedict XVI's encyclical Deus caritas est more fascinating than it might seem at first glance.
Why, for Plato, a god does not love
The premise comes from Diotima's speech in the Symposium. To love is to desire what is lacking: this was the admission Socrates extracted from Agathon, recorded in passage 200e. Diotima draws out the consequence. The gods lack nothing, and whoever lacks nothing does not desire. Therefore, love is not a god. It is an intermediary, dwelling halfway between the divine and the human, between ignorance and knowledge, and its origin as the child of Poros and Penia, resource and poverty, illustrates this (this genealogy can be found in why getting what we want is not enough).
The reasoning is very logical, and worth remembering: for Plato, a perfect god cannot love. Love belongs to those halfway along the road. And that road takes the form of a ladder. Desire begins in a single beautiful body, ascends through the beauty of souls, practices, laws, and knowledge, all the way to Beauty itself (the path is detailed in Diotima's ladder of love). At the top, as the lecture notes, stands a beauty that does not even know you exist.
"God is love": a scandal to a Greek
Nearly five centuries later, a sentence written in a very different world states the opposite. In the First Letter of John (1 John 4:8), we read that whoever does not love does not know God, for "God is love."
To a Greek, this statement was a scandal: a God who lacks nothing, and yet loves. If love, for Plato, is born of lack, how can there be love in one who lacks nothing? The answer Christians gave is that there exists a love that is not born of lack: a love born of fullness, which does not seek to receive, but to give. This love they called agape: a love of self-giving, of devotion, giving of oneself without expecting anything in return.
Benedict XVI: ascending love and descending love
Confronted with two such different loves, the temptation is to sever them: eros for the world, agape for faith. This was precisely the reading Pope Benedict XVI sought to dispel in his first encyclical, Deus caritas est, published in 2005. In the official English text on the Vatican website, he observes that the two concepts are often set in opposition as ascending love and descending love, and then affirms (paragraph 7):
"eros and agape [...] can never be completely separated"
In other words: eros is ascending love, agape is descending love, and neither survives alone. The encyclical adds that ascending desire must undergo a process of refinement. In paragraph 4, he writes that eros requires discipline and purification. And in paragraph 5 he clarifies what this means: it is not a rejection of eros, nor its "poisoning," but a healing that restores its true grandeur.
Hence the formula that sums up the lecture: ascending desire needs to be purified, not uprooted. And the lecture draws a practical consequence from this: ascending does not mean abandoning the person you love, it means loving that person without demanding that they be the top of your ladder.
What Christianity preserved and what changed
Christianity did not discard Plato's ladder. The lack we feel remains the rung: desire remains the engine of the ascent. What changes is the summit.
In Plato, at the top of the ladder stands a beauty that does not even know you exist. In Christianity, there is a love that needs nothing and, precisely for that reason, loves: it does not seek to receive, it seeks to give. Christian revelation kept the ladder and transformed the summit, because at the height stands a God who loves and who lacks nothing, whose love consists in giving without needing to receive.
Plato turned inside out
This explains the phrase with which the lecture concludes: what Plato did at that banquet was to turn love inside out. Everyone was praising love, and Socrates showed that it is lack, the desire for what one does not yet possess, including the desire to keep tomorrow what one has today. Diotima gave this lack a portrait, the child of poverty and resource, and a direction: we do not seek the missing half of ourselves, we seek the good, for ourselves and forever.
To read the ladder carefully, the best path is the Symposium itself, which can be read in an evening or two, returning afterward to Diotima's speech. It is in those few pages that Plato says what is essential.
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See the recommended reading listFrequently asked questions
What is the difference between eros and agape?
Eros is love born of lack: it desires what it does not have and ascends toward it. Agape is love born of fullness: it does not seek to receive, it seeks to give. In the formulation of Benedict XVI, in the encyclical Deus caritas est (2005), eros is ascending love and agape is descending love, and the two can never be completely separated.
Why, according to Plato, can a god not love?
Because, in Diotima's reasoning in the Symposium, to love is to desire what is lacking, and the gods lack nothing. Whoever lacks nothing does not desire. Therefore, for Plato, love belongs to those who stand halfway, between the divine and the human.
Is platonic love a sin?
The lecture does not deal with sin, but it addresses something close through what it says about Benedict XVI: the ascending desire must be purified, not uprooted. Plato himself, in the Symposium, says there is no shame in loving a beautiful body, because that is where the ascent begins. What both traditions agree on criticizing is stopping on the rung.
What does the encyclical Deus caritas est say about eros?
Published in 2005, it is the first encyclical of Benedict XVI. In it, the Pope states that eros and agape, ascending love and descending love, can never be completely separated. He also states that eros needs discipline and purification, and that this is not a rejection of eros, but a healing that restores its true grandeur.
Continue: What Having a Platonic Love Means, According to Plato · The Ladder of Love: What Diotima Teaches Socrates · Why Getting What We Want Is Not Enough: The Myth of Eros · The lion episode in Don Quixote
Source lecture: O Banquete, de Platão | O que é, de verdade, o amor platônico