In Plato's Symposium, Socrates recounts the doctrine about Eros (love) that, he modestly says, has been imparted to him by the wise
woman Diotima. She bids us not to linger in the love evoked by the beauty in a single human body, but to mount up as by a stair, "from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms," then up from the beauty of the body to the beauty of the mind, until we arrive at a final contemplation of the Idea, or
Form, of "beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting."
From this beauty, in its own world of Ideas, the human soul is in exile, and of it the beauties of the body and of the world perceived by the senses are only distant, distorted, and impermanent reflections.
Plotinus and other Neoplatonists (the "new Platonists," a school of Platonic philosophers of the third to the fifth century) developed the view that all beauty in the sensible world—as well as all goodness and truth—is an "emanation" (radiation) from the One or Absolute, which is the source of all being and all value.
From both Platonic and Neoplatonic
sources, Christian thinkers of the Italian Renaissance, merging this concept of the Absolute with the personal God of the Bible, developed the theory that genuine beauty of the body is only the outer manifestation of a moral and spiritual beauty of the soul, which in turn is rayed out from the absolute beauty of the one God Himself.
The Platonic lover is irresistibly attracted to the bodily beauty of a beloved person, but reveres it as a sign of the spiritual beauty that it shares with all other beautiful bodies, and at the same time regards it as the lowest rung on a ladder that leads up from sensual desire to the pure contemplation of Heavenly Beauty in God.
Highly developed versions of this conception of Platonic love are to be
found in Dante, Petrarch, and other writers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and in many Italian, French, and English authors of sonnets and
other love poems during the Renaissance.
See, for example, the exposition in
Book IV of Castiglione's The Courtier (1528), and in Edmund Spenser's "An
Hymn in Honor of Beauty."
As Spenser wrote in one of the sonnets he called
Amoretti (1595):
Men call you fayre, and you doe credit it....
But only that is permanent and free
From frayle corruption, that doth flesh ensew.
That is true beautie: that doth argue you
To be divine and borne of heavenly seed:
Derived from that fayre spirit, from whom al true
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