Socrates leaves Agathon's method and retells a lesson from Diotima of Mantineia. When the Athenians sacrificed before the plague, she delayed the disease ten years. She taught him the art of love. He had told her what Agathon has just told him: Love is a mighty god, and fair. She proved, from his own words, that Love is neither fair nor good. When he asked if Love was then foul, she told him to hush. What is not fair need not be foul. Right opinion stands between ignorance and wisdom. Love stands in a middle of that kind.
The gods possess good and beautiful things. Love wants them, so Love is not a god, and not mortal either. Love is a great spirit, a daimon, between divine and mortal, carrying prayers up and commands down, because God does not mingle with man. On Aphrodite's birthday, Plenty slept in the garden of Zeus, and Poverty conceived Love by him. The child is poor and exposed, like his mother, and bold and hungry for wisdom, like his father. He lives in plenty and dies when plenty runs out. No god seeks wisdom, being wise already. The ignorant do not seek it, because they feel no lack. Love, between the two, is a philosopher.
Asked what use he is, Diotima says that to love the beautiful is to want it as one's own. Socrates cannot say what beauty gives. She substitutes the good. Possession of the good is happiness, and all people want that. Only some are called lovers, because one part of the desire has taken the name of the whole. She rejects the other-half story unless the half or the whole is also good. People would cut off hands and feet if those were evil. They love the good, its possession, and its everlasting possession. Love, she says, is the love of the everlasting possession of the good.
Coming Up in Chapter 9
Diotima asks what people are doing when they show all this eagerness and heat, and what object they have in view. Socrates says that if he knew, he would not have come to learn this from her. She answers that the object is birth in beauty, whether of body or of soul. He does not understand, and says the oracle needs explaining.
