Mark Vernon draws a lesson about the Bible from Plato's Symposium:
There is no one reading of the Symposium that's definitive. Love, like life, is both of us
and beyond us. And this is why the Symposium is a living text, and worthy of comparison with the real Good Book. Ultimately, it's not rational or even ethical, is not a distillation of wisdom or a consolatory read. Rather, it's a living text – and hence, like the Bible, has inspired art and further literature, architecture and generations of human beings. It forces us to read between its lines to glimpse something of the mystery of life, and thereby to want to make something of this most tremendous energy in life.
Or, of course, to draw back and flee in the opposite direction.
(Image: Plato by Raffaello Sanzio)
The Dish 