What is love? This is one of humanity’s oldest questions, and yet it continues to resist explanation. In this lecture, Ralston College Provost Dr David Butterfield explores the enduring power of antiquity’s great myth, Cupid and Psyche, reflecting on how beauty, suffering, and love can shape the human being.
Beginning with the literary context of the Roman Empire and what we know about the life of the author Apuleius, he examines the story’s ties to folklore, Platonic philosophy, and the perennial human search for what exceeds us.
Drawing on Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, Dr Butterfield brings the narrative into conversation with questions of desire, divine grace, and the distinction between earthly and heavenly love. Considering Psyche as an embodiment of the soul and Cupid as the embodiment of love, he traces the story’s movement through curiosity, suffering, and loss toward redemption and joy. What appears at first to be a simple tale of love thus unfolds into a profound meditation on the formation of the soul and its longing for what lies beyond itself.
The lecture concludes with a deeply personal reflection on the power that works like these hold over a human life. When taken seriously, the great books become companions to life itself, accompanying us through moments of discovery and decision, revealing not only who we are, but who we are becoming.
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