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VATICAN, NOV 19 – Below is the speech by Massimo Gramellini, writer and journalist, at the Nov. 19 Lectio Petri “At Corinth: Eros and Agape.”

Body and soul, this is how Plato in the “Symposium” explains love to us: only those who love create

A lectio on emotions and the meaning of life

In the New Testament the root of the Greek verb for love – agape – resounds no less than 320 times. You must trust me because I did not count them, but Cardinal Ravasi in his “Alphabet of God.” Two thousand years later, Love is the world’s most searched word on Google, with 18 billion results.

But what is this love, about which we talk so much and know so little? The emotional bond that unites two people, at least as long as their relationship produces the dopamine hormone, which is about three years on average? Or the supreme law of the universe, of which that emotional bond is only one of many manifestations? To answer such a question, not just any philosopher will do. It takes one who is also an artist. It takes Plato. He understood that love could not be arrived at by reasoning, but only by intuition. And he resorted to the only possible tool: myth.

Myth is like a parable, or a fable. It has two levels of understanding. The words it uses stop at our brain, but the images it evokes descend to our soul. The myth of the birth of love is found in the Symposium. From the same dialogue we often recall another, that of the soul mate, which, however, Plato recounts precisely in order to disprove it. It is not true, he says, that love consists in being reunited with our lost other half. Love is much more than that. And to convince us, he goes so far as to show us its identity card. Love, the myth states, was conceived on Mount Olympus on the same day that Aphrodite, the goddess of Beauty, was born, during the banquet set up for the happy event. Her mother is called Pena, Poverty, and her father Poros, which we might translate Resource or Expedient, although today a physics graduate would define the parents of love by more scientific names: Matter and Antimatter.

Poverty, that is, matter, is our existential condition. But in us there is also a principle antithetical to matter, a principle of attraction. In the myth this impulse is embodied by Poros and he falls asleep in the middle of the feast, drunk on nectar, in a corner of Zeus’ gardens. Poverty sees him, lies down beside him, and nine months later a beautiful child is born: Eros. Who, with such parents, can only have the character described by Plato in one of the most formidable pages of world literature. “Love is anything but beautiful and gentle. Love is hard, shaggy, barefoot and homeless. It always lies on the ground, without blankets, and sleeps outside in front of doors or in the middle of the street. Sometimes it flourishes and lives, sometimes it dies, but then it comes back to life. And what he procures always slips from his grasp, so that love is never poor or rich.”

Neither poor nor rich. When you have it, you fear to lose it. And when you lose it, you yearn to get it back. But what is it then, this “sweet bitter untamable beast,” as the poetess Sappho called it? Those who think that love is beautiful and delicate make the mistake of attributing to it the characteristics of the beloved. Instead, Plato is the first, at least in the West, to reveal to us that love is not found in the beloved, but in the lover. As a boy I was convinced to the contrary. I thought that love resided in the person I loved and coincided with the fulfillment of my desire: to be loved by her. Too many songs and perhaps too many fears had led me astray. Still, I could not expel the woodworm gnawing inside me: if being loved was the condition for being happy, why, when I was loved, was I not happy? Why couldn’t I dream big, believe in the impossible, imagine a better world? Why did I feel that I was betraying the mission of every human being, which, as George Bernard Shaw wrote, “consists in being a force of nature and not an agitated lump of trouble and resentment that complains and recriminates because the universe is not dedicated to making it happy”?

The answer comes from Plato. Since Eros is he or she who loves, each of us is not in harmony with himself or others when we receive love, but only when we give love. Without expecting anything in return. The Gospel calls it agape, St. Paul charity. If we were to summarize it in a tweet: love is what ego is not. So it is not a purchase, but a surrender. It is not possession, but freedom. Who among us has not experienced this at least once in our own skin? When you truly love, you step outside yourself and tune in to another dimension, that of eternity. Love does not have a why. Love is the why. And for a very simple reason: as Franco Battiato sang, the whole universe obeys love.

But it is not over. Plato still has a twist in store. Every man, he says, aspires to be immortal. It doesn’t matter if he says in words that he doesn’t care. His unconscious is irresistibly drawn to the desire to leave a trace of his own passing. Many try with hatred or anger and may even succeed, but it is an ephemeral success and in any case paid for dearly: anxiety and depression. Only love allows to become immortal in a natural way. How? Let Plato take us by the hand. Remember when, according to myth, love was conceived? On the day of the birth of Aphrodite, goddess of Beauty. It means that whenever we see Beauty in a person, in a phenomenon of nature, in a work of art or in an idea, we conceive love. We get excited. And by getting excited, we feel like generating and giving birth to something that will survive us. A child. Natural or spiritual.

Now, about what a natural child is, more or less, we all understand each other. But a spiritual child? There is not only the fecundity of the body, Plato explains. The soul, too, just like the body, can become aroused by what it feels beautiful and feel the irresistible urge to procreate something that will survive it. Love is thus an energy that takes possession of the lover and expresses itself in a creative tension. If it invades the body, it will lead to the birth of a flesh-and-blood creature. But if it invades the soul, it will generate works.

Of these works generated by love there is no complete catalog. Each person can make his or her own original contribution to it. Surely the catalog does not end with artistic creations, but touches every field of knowledge, from the humblest to the loftiest, because “humble” and “loftiest” are human judgments, while the universe considers them identical, since all contribute to its functioning. The words of Hugo Cabret in Martin Scorsese’s film come to mind: “Machines have exactly the number and kind of parts they need. If the world is a big machine, I must be here for some reason. And so do you!” We all have a job to do in this life. And we all have a talent that has been given to us for that purpose. The business of living is to find one’s talent. Recognizing it and then igniting it with the fire of passion.

What is Plato trying to tell us? That only those who love create. It is a simple and revolutionary message, more than ever in a time like this, dominated by anxieties, fears and emotional twists and turns, when we think the best is behind us and we cannot trust the future because we no longer have any in ourselves. But against all the fears, regrets and grudges, the moral of this fable stands fearless: every human being comes into the world to create something through love. All that remains is to spread the word.