Socrates or Buddha?more, in a refi nement of love’s energy. It was a developed sense
that what lies beyond us powers our humanity – the longing to
understand, to discover, to become enlightened. Iris Murdoch
wrote a dialogue called Above the Gods, and at one point, Plato –
who’s a key character – becomes increasing excited until he rises
to his feet and exclaims: ‘You see, love is energy. The soul is a
huge vast place, and lots of it is dark, and it’s full of energy and
power, and this can be bad, but it can be good, and that’s the
work, to change bad energy into good, when we desire good
things and are attracted magnetically by them.’
I like the way that the philosopher Anthony Price has
described it too: ‘Love may be the best helper not because it pro-
vides reasons, but because, in a promising soul well prompted,
it is receptive of, and responsive to, the opening of new vistas.’
Similarly again, there’s the way Plato defi nes love as the child
of two parents, ‘poverty’ and ‘cunning resourcefulness’. Love,
then, is never more keenly felt than when it lacks what it loves,
which is as good a description of the agnostic predicament as
any. To my mind, it also makes better sense of the Buddhist
intuition that suffering must cease. It’s not actually suffering
that’s the problem. Suffering is rather the symptom of some-
thing else, namely that underneath our existential discontent
lies love. It’s not fi rst and foremost the love of compassion, but
rather the love that seeks more, that draws us out of ourselves.
In fact, if we weren’t the creature who loves, we wouldn’t be the
creature who suffers, at least in the existential sense. Or to put
it another way, if you want to stop suffering, you’re also com-
mitting yourself to giving up on loving, to becoming detached
from life.
Love, then, doesn’t promise an end to suffering but it also
always has tremendous strengths to draw on: whether bravely,
impetuously, mistakenly or intelligently it never ceases to seek
what it is compelled by. Loving is to be awakened to the more
of existence. Love is, if you like, promiscuous. Wake up to love,
and it can lead you elsewhere. It is the fundamental issue, as
Socrates seems to have realised.