Socrates and Diotima Sexuality, Religion, and the Nature of Divinity [Hardcover]

Few women's voices have survived from the antiquity period, but evidence shows that, especially in the area of religion, women were influential in Greek culture. Drawing on Socrates' Symposium , Nye advances this notion by not only exploring the original religious meaning of Diotima's teaching but also how that meaning has been lost throughout time.

Introduction

PART I: LESSONS IN LOVE
1. Daemonic Eros
2. The Work of Love
3. Beauty Itself
4. The Spirit at the Center of the World

PART II: LESSONS LOST
5. The Highest One
6. Demonizing the Daemonic
7. Saint Augustine and Concupiscence of the Flesh
8. The Eclipse of Beauty
PART III: LESSONS REGAINED
9. Religion Without God
10. Social Virtue
11. The Problem of Evil
12. Surviving Death

This book is ambitious in scope. Nye first argues for a historically grounded reading of Plato's character, Diotima. Nye articulates a view of love and the divine that belonged to the historical Diotima. Nye engages in a thorough reading of the Symposium and other texts of the ancient Greek poetic, tragic, and philosophic tradition to support her reading of the authenticity of Diotima. Nye then traces how Diotima's view of love and the divine was suppressed and forgotten by the later western Christian tradition. She explores the cultural implications of that loss. This book stands to significantly alter the scholarly conversation about Diotima particularly and the role of the feminine in culture more generally. - Anne-Marie Schultz, Professor of Philosophy, Baylor University, USA

Andrea Nye has done something wonderful in rescuing Eros from the priestly theologies that would have us banish and condemn it. Seekers will find in Socrates and Diotima a philosophy deeply consoling as well as erotic in itself. Like Cynthia Bourgeault's tlS©