The Wisdom of Hypatia: Ancient Spiritual Practices for a More Meaningful Life (43 page)

The beloved’s beauty is
supernatural
in the literal sense that it is not purely natural—a consequence of physical characteristics—but it comes from above. According to Neoplatonic metaphysics, the body is created and moved by the soul, and the soul is an emanation of the Forms, and so it is illuminated by Ideal Beauty, and in particular the human soul is illuminated by the Ideal Human Beauty.

This idea is captured by the concept of
grace
. The English word, like its Ancient Greek and Latin translations (
charis
,
gratia
) means both a beautiful naturalness of movement and a gift, especially from the gods. Grace is the ideal movement of the soul, and to the extent that the soul is able to govern the material of the body, the body’s movements are also graceful. Furthermore, the soul governs the movement of cells during the development of 214 the path of love

the embryo, and this graceful process creates beauty in the physical body. Thus Leonardo da Vinci said, “Beauty is nothing but fixated grace.”247

The ultimate source of this grace is the Good, which defines the ideal movement of

each species, its natural grace. Therefore beauty and grace are indeed gifts of God, manifesting in the physical body. Because Beauty and Grace are emanations of the Good, which everything desires, they ignite desire in the lover’s soul, warming it, exciting passion. Love gives the soul wings by which she may ascend toward the Good.

Greek
charis
(Latin
gratia
) refers to a gift or other act of kindness, but also to the mutual feelings of joyous goodwill in the donor and recipient. The giver is happily caring, gracious, and benevolent; the receiver is grateful and delighted. This shared joy is the state of grace.

Does this mean that people who are beautiful (by contemporary standards) are better

than other people? Of course not. Perhaps you don’t think of yourself as beautiful or graceful. (Certainly, they are not words I apply to myself!) Rather, the more important, more enduring beauty resides in the soul, for that is the beauty that is created by the gods and refined by the way you live your life. The Path of Love will help you to sculpt a beautiful soul.

In Plato’s
Symposium
each of the guests at the drinking party gives their own explanation of the nature of love; these explanations build up to Diotima’s, which is the culmination. However, one of the others is also important to our purpose here. The comic poet Aristophanes tells a ludicrous tale about how humans were originally spherical in shape with four legs, four arms, and four eyes (a typical symbol of wholeness, according to Jung).

Because these primordial humans were too powerful, Zeus decided to split them in half.

Some were split into a male and a female half, others into two male halves, and others into two female. Ever since then, we divided-humans have been seeking our missing halves, either of the same sex or the opposite. Love is the desire to find our missing part and return to our well-rounded and potent wholeness.

Aristophanes’ myth can be interpreted spiritually and psychologically: love is the desire to reclaim our lost part, our higher self, and so return to completeness. The higher self, the inner divinity, resides in the unconscious, and the most accessible archetype is the
anima
in a heterosexual man and the
animus
in a heterosexual woman. In straight people, this archetype has the opposite gender from the conscious ego. (Its gender in gays, lesbians, transsexuals, and transgendered people is less well understood.) The anima/animus often the path of love 215

enters dreams and fantasies as an ideal erotic image, sometimes as the Seducer or Seductress. They may have magical power, as Svengali or Circe.

Hypatia again. “Diotima gets Socrates to realize that fundamentally love is a desire for the good, for possession of the good leads to happiness, which is its own end, for all beings by nature desire happiness. Furthermore, they desire to be happy so long

as possible, to have everlasting happiness, and so they desire both the good and im-

mortality.

Love is desire for eternal possession of the good.248

“But, because bodies must die, the only immortality possible to embodied beings

is through procreation, reproducing after their kind.”

“Then the marriage bed,” Gaius interrupts, “”is the way to immortal happiness!”

Surprised by his outburst, Hypatia replies, “It is
one
way. Loving union transforms the lovers and creates new life, born of the union, but it could be a union of souls. Furthermore, Diotima argues, birth, whether physical or spiritual, depends on love’s desire for beauty, for it is beauty that first awakens love.

Love is only birth in beauty,

both in body and soul.249

“That is, at the level of the body, Eros causes one person to seek union with another to create offspring, but at the level of the soul, Eros causes one soul to seek union with another to engender the good appropriate to the soul, that is, wisdom and the other

virtues. This is explained in the following maxim, drawn from the
Symposium
:
Wisdom is a most beautiful thing,

and love is of the beautiful;

and therefore Love is also a philosopher,

a lover of wisdo.250

“Remember that the literal meaning of ‘philosopher’ is ‘lover of wisdom’. Whether

in body or soul, beauty inspires us to create, for beauty is the cause of creativity as well as its result.

“With this background,” Hypatia continues, “you are ready to learn the Ascent by

Love. There are four stages, corresponding the planes of reality as symbolized in the

216 the path of love

Tetractys (see fig.): body, soul, nous, and One. The ascent proceeds upwards from the body toward The One above, or alternatively, inward, from superficial physical beauty toward The One within, the ‘Flower of the Soul’. But first, let’s stretch our legs in the garden.”

The Tetractys

If you follow the nine-month program of study (ch. 1), you will be spending a month

learning each of the three paths. Since each path has four stages, you could devote one week to each stage. You should be flexible, however, since some of these stages will be easier to learn than others. Also, you will probably want to study the other paths before you have mastered the Path of Love.

Providential and Returning Love:
Sit quietly with your eyes closed, breath deeply a few times, and calm your mind. Depending on which of the Geocentric or Central

Light Images (ch. 8) you find more natural, imagine pure, warm energy of

love radiating toward you, either from the heavens or from the center of the

earth. Breathe it into your heart. Feel it enlivening, harmonizing, and perfect-

ing everything in the world, including you. Be grateful. When you feel full to

overflowing with this love, direct it back towards it source, feeling yourself as

a conduit through which the power of love circulates. When you feel the cir-

culation is well established, allow the feeling to dissipate and return to normal

consciousness.

Awakening—The Body

After a break, Hypatia resumes her explanation of the Path of Love. “You are em-

barking on the first path of ascent, but like anyone preparing for a journey into unthe path of love 217

familiar territory, you must be equipped with both knowledge and training. First, to make the ascent successfully and to get the maximum benefit from it, you should

have your everyday life in order. This is why you have learned the first two degrees of wisdom and have been practicing them—I hope!—in your daily life. They will equip

you with the godlike serenity and orientation toward divinity needed for the ascent.

“The first stage of ascent is symbolized by the row of four dots in the Tetractys.

They represent the four
Cardinal
or
Social Virtues
(moderation, fortitude, justice, practical wisdom), which govern relations among people, as well as the four traditional

elements—earth, water, air, and fire—that constitute physical reality. This shows that the first stage of ascent, called
Awakening
, is at the level of the body and focuses on the physical beauty of your beloved. Thus it begins with your everyday perception of beauty, but heightens your awareness of the transcendent beauty behind it in order

to prepare your soul for the ascent proper.”

I mentioned briefly the four
Cardinal Virtues
or
Excellences
at the end of chapter 7 in connection with the Stoic disciplines. Useful as they are as a framework for ethics and character, they have an added role in Neoplatonic ascents to The One, for they are reinterpreted on each level of ascent, as I’ll explain later. In the first level, that of ordinary life, they are interpreted as
social virtues
, which govern our relations with each other.

Hypatia continues, “Let’s begin with ordinary embodied love. First notice that the

lover’s response is out of proportion to the beloved’s physical beauty, as disinterested observers can testify. That is, the lover perceives her beloved to be more beautiful than strangers would judge him. What is the source of numinous beauty? One answer is

that the presence of the beloved is essentially an invocation of the god Eros. According to Platonism, the Idea of Love is implicit in any particular instance of love, but the physical presence of the beloved makes this Idea salient; it dominates consciousness.”

Psychologically, the Eros archetype has been activated, which transforms perception

of the beloved.

“Therefore,” Hypatia explains, “the first stage (at which most people experience love and beauty) makes use of sensation, the mental faculty that we share with other animals. That is, at this stage love is the desire of beauty through the senses. The focus is on the particular beauty of an individual body, that of the beloved. Even here the lover must keep in mind that the body is not the source of beauty, but only an imperfect reflection