The Beloved as a Cult-Statue
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Socrates — τόν τε οὖν ἔρωτα τῶν καλῶν πρὸς τρόπου ἐκλέγεται ἕκαστος, καὶ ὡς θεὸν αὐτὸν ἐκεῖνον ὄντα ἑαυτῷ οἷον ἄγαλμα τεκταίνεταί τε καὶ κατακοσμεῖ.
So each lover chooses his love among the beautiful to suit his own bent; and, as though that beloved were his very god, he fashions him for himself like a cult-statue and decks him out.
Every soul, Socrates has said, once followed some particular god across heaven and bears that god's stamp. Now he shows what this means for love: each lover seeks a beloved in his own god's image — and then builds him into one.
This is Plato's psychology of idealization, and it is unnervingly exact. Every soul, the palinode has said, once travelled in the train of some particular god and still bears that god's character; so in love, each person 'selects' (<em>eklégetai</em>) a beloved who matches his own god's nature — the followers of Zeus seek a kingly, philosophical soul, the followers of Ares a more warlike one, and so on. Love is not blind chance but a homing instinct: you fall for the one who reminds you, without your knowing it, of the divinity your soul once followed. But then comes the astonishing verb. The lover does not merely find such a beloved — he <em>tektaínetai</em> him, 'builds' or 'crafts' him (the carpenter's word, <em>téktōn</em>, root of 'architect'), and <em>adorns</em> him, like a sculptor finishing a statue.<br><br>And what he crafts him into is an <em>ágalma</em> — a cult-statue. The Greek word is a small miracle: at root it means 'a delight,' something one glories in, and it came to mean specifically the image of a god set up in a temple, a delight dedicated <em>to</em> the god and bearing the god's own likeness. So the beloved, made into an <em>ágalma</em>, is three things at once — a treasure the lover exults in, an idol he worships, and an offering he dedicates. Plato has caught exactly what happens in infatuation: the lover does not see the actual person but <em>constructs</em> an idealized image, projects his highest vision of the divine onto a human face, and then adores what he has made. In the <em>Symposium</em>, Alcibiades will say that Socrates's plain words have <em>agálmata</em>, statues of the gods, hidden inside them; here the beloved is the statue. The wonder of the passage is that Plato does not treat this as mere delusion. The lover is <em>right</em> that something divine shows through the beloved's beauty — it is the Form of Beauty itself, dimly remembered. His error, and his art, is to build the whole god out of one mortal face. To love is to raise a shrine and place a person in it.
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