Page 23 - GALIET EMBERS & SAPPHIRE: Milton IV

17th century feminine Socrates exchanging Agathon’s touch for contemplation of the beloved. Psyche denying her Eros, found in the sameness of the same: airy spheres, not of monotony, but of Platonic sublimation: Eunoia. While Comus experiences both, the ideal and the real and is sublimated into oneness by her mythic song, she, unwilling to experience the erotic, experiences only the ideal. Thus, her sublimation is purely intellective.
Comus’ Apollonian metamorphosis is temporary; what he asks of her seems permanent. It is not a flowing river of coming into being and passing away, of giving way to one other: it is erotic possession and enduring transformation. And reason, like virtue, refuses to be possessed: it wishes its own freedom. “Fool, do not boast,/Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind/With all thy charms...”(663-5). Yet the appetitive part, Comus, desires sublime reason, Lady Virtue, to become Eros by subjugating reason to desires. Something her spirit will aid her reason not to do.32 She refuses to be trapped, ensnared,
images to contemplating true reality and its final end, the Supreme Idea or Form of the Good. In their ascension towards what is, that is, “true philosophy” (521c), individuals will move “away from becoming” towards “truth and being” (525c): Sun light. Plato. Republic. Book VII. Plato. Republic. Trans. By G.M.A. Grube. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1992.
32 For Plato, the spirit part ideally has to side with the rational part, logos and not with the appetitive part. In Plato’s view, reason is distinct from appetite because of law of opposites. The same thing cannot do, or be affected by, opposite things at the same time and in the same respect or relation. He also claims that the souls both bids us and forbids us to do the same thing: e.g. both to drink and not to
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