Proclus on the Teacher-Disciple Bond of Love

Proclus, William O'Neill (T) · Higher Ethics and Devotion Series · 34 pages

Selections from Proclus's Commentary on Plato's First Alcibiades in William O'Neill's translation, thirty-four pages, opened by an abstract and train of thoughts with page references. The running head names the subject: Socrates delivers Alcibiades by the philosophy of love.

The commentary begins from the place of the father in the pursuit of virtue — the memory of one's father inspiring it, and the Father having, in the phrase quoted, sown the fire-laden bond of love so that the divine lovers turn, recall and rally around him. Love is then given a structural role rather than a merely personal one: it is called the cause of the dis-integration of the One, the medium between spirit and matter — between the upper triad and the lower quaternary — and the cause of re-integration, so that the same power both separates and restores. Perfection is said to come to those who love contemplating truth. The heart of the selection is a five-point comparison of what happens when love meets a bad receptacle, producing a life tyrannical and intemperate in five distinct ways. The coarse lover hangs on his darling where the true lover is self-reliant and poised. The one loves the body and discards the person when the bloom of youth has withered; the other loves the soul. The one is fickle and readily forsakes his beloved; the other is truehearted and loyal. The vulgar lover contrives every sort of pretext for conversation; the true lover avoids talking to his beloved unless there is some spiritual benefit in it. And the one lives apart from the One, while the other is akin to it and an exemplar of divine virtue and beauty.

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