When Petrarch, age twenty-two, in the Church of Santa Chiara at Avignon, on April 6, 1327, caught sight of a lovely girl, his heart pounded or stopped or leapt into his throat. His soul had been assailed by beauty. Was this when the Renaissance began? Or had it already begun, this Vita Nuova, when Dante, in 1274 at the age of nine first saw Beatrice (“she who confers blessing”), crimson-dressed girl-child and anima mundi, awakening his heart to the aesthetic life.
“At that moment,” writes Dante, “I say … the spirit of life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of my body shook; and in trembling it said these words: ‘Here is a deity stronger than I; who, coming, shall rule over me’” (Vita Nuova, II). From then on he was a devotee of this deity in the shape of his soul figure, dedicated to love, imagination, and poetic beauty, all three inseparably.
These couples, Petrarch and Laura, Dante and Beatrice, had no personal satisfaction, no human relationship. Yet what emerged from these happenings in the heart was the transformation of all Western culture, commencing as an aesthetic transformation; it was generated by Beauty. Was not Psyche in the Apuleius tale singled out by her beauty, and is not Aphrodite, the Beautiful One, the soul of the universe (psyché tou kosmou or anima mundi) that produces the perceptible world according to Plotinus (III, 5, 4) and also the soul of each of us?
Can we attend to what these figures and tales are saying? Can we realize that we are each, in soul, children of Aphrodite, that the soul is a thérapeutes, as was Psyche, in the temple of Venus—that is where it is in devotion. The soul is born in beauty and feeds on beauty, requires beauty for its life. If we read Plato the way Plotinus did, and understand Psyche the way Apuleius did, and experience soul as did Petrarch and Dante, then psyche is the life of our aesthetic responses, that sense of taste in relation with things, that thrill or pain, disgust or expansion of breast, those primordial aesthetic reactions of the heart are soul itself speaking. Psyche's first trait and the way we know her first, is neither by her labors, the work of soul-making, nor by her sufferings for love, nor in her oppression in lostness, the absence and deprivation of soul—these in the Apuleian tale all come later. We know her first by her primary characteristic given with her nature: Psyche is beautiful.