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Savio Saldanha SJ
24-02-2026
DOI:
10.5281/zenodo.18763831
Introduction
This
reflection arises from encountering personal and intellectual crossroads during
reflection about the concept of graduality. Much of my philosophical formation
has been shaped by ancient Greek thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle. Their
analyses of love, desire, friendship, and the good life remain remarkably
sharp. At the same time, as I engage more deeply with Christian theology and
the Catholic magisterium, I notice something important. The Church does not
simply repeat Greek philosophy. It receives it with gratitude, but also
corrects it, transforms it, and brings it to fulfillment in Christ.
Plato’s scala
amoris (ladder of love), when taken alongside Pope Francis’ teaching
on the “law of graduality” and Karl Rahner’s notion of a “gradual ascent to
Christian perfection,” seems to show how Christian grace confirms, purifies,
and radicalizes philosophical structures of ascent. Yet I do not meet these
ideas only in books. I read Plato’s Symposium in a Paris
classroom and Amoris laetitia in a Jesuit community that
carries stories of Indian families, caste wounds, and fragile faith. When I
place all this on the table of the Examen, I find myself asking: how does the
ladder look when it passes through the Principle and Foundation and through
concrete mission among the poor, not only through conceptual analysis?
Plato’s ladder of love (scala amoris)
In
the Symposium, Plato presents love through the voice of Diotima as an
ascent. Love begins with attraction to one beautiful body. It then widens to
appreciation of all beautiful bodies. From there, it moves to the beauty of the
soul, then to beautiful laws and institutions, then to the beauty found in
knowledge. Finally, it reaches the vision of Beauty itself, eternal and unchanging
(Plato, Symposium, 210a–212b).
The
movement is clear. Love rises from the sensible to the intelligible. It moves
from the particular to the universal. It seeks permanence rather than decay. At
its heart lies the human desire for immortality. This desire expresses itself
through “birth in beauty,” either through physical children or through lasting
achievements such as virtues, laws, or wisdom.
Plato’s
account is profound. Eros is not reduced to appetite. It is a teacher. It
educates desire and stretches the soul beyond immediate satisfaction. Yet there
is also a limit. The concrete beloved person can appear as a rung on the ladder
rather than as someone whose value endures and the higher ascent risks leaving
the personal behind in favor of abstraction.
Pope Francis and the law of graduality
Pope
Francis shares Plato’s intuition that love grows in stages. Yet he speaks from
within a biblical, sacramental, and pastoral framework. In Amoris laetitia,
love—especially marital love—is described as a lifelong process. Spouses learn
to love through time, through patience, forgiveness, and daily fidelity
(Francis, 2016).
Francis
explicitly recalls the “law of graduality,” first articulated by John Paul II.
Human beings grow morally and spiritually step by step. They come to know and
live the good progressively. This graduality concerns the subject, not the
moral law itself. The norm does not change. What changes is the person’s
capacity to recognize it and to embody it (Francis, 2016, n. 295).
Here
the image of a ladder reappears, but with an important difference. There are
not higher and lower loves that replace each other. There is one vocation to
love, lived more deeply over time. Eros is not left behind but it is purified
and integrated into agape. Concrete relationships remain the privileged place
where growth in love occurs.
Karl Rahner and the gradual ascent to
Christian perfection
Karl
Rahner develops a similar vision in his essay “Reflections on the Problem of
the Gradual Ascent to Christian Perfection.” For Rahner, every human life
unfolds within God’s self-communication. Grace is always already offered. The
Christian life is therefore not a sudden leap to perfection, but a history of
free responses to this grace (Rahner, 1966).
Rahner
insists that holiness is not reserved for spiritual elites. There is one call
to holiness for all. Yet this call is realized in time, through countless small
decisions. Growth in love is real, uneven, and often fragile. What matters is
the fundamental direction of one’s freedom.
Like
Pope Francis, Rahner rejects any notion of different moral laws for different
people. There is one Gospel demand, grounded in Christ. Graduality refers to
the way this demand is appropriated within concrete biographies. Rahner’s
ascent thus parallels Plato’s structure, but it is decisively re-grounded in
grace and in the Paschal mystery.
How Christian grace confirms Plato
From
the perspective of someone formed by Greek philosophy, the points of
convergence are striking. Plato and the Christian tradition both refuse to
reduce love to mere feeling or instinct. Love points beyond itself while
revealing a human openness to the infinite. Augustine’s confession—“our hearts
are restless until they rest in you”—echoes Plato’s insight that desire reaches
beyond any finite object (Augustine, Confessions).
Both
Plato and the Church also see love as educative. Desire matures. It widens its
horizon. In Amoris laetitia, the family is described as a school of
love. Imperfect loves are not dismissed but they become places where growth can
begin. In this sense, Christian graduality confirms Plato’s intuition that love
leads the soul beyond narrow self-interest.
How Christian grace corrects Plato
I
am aware that Christians, including Jesuits, have sometimes used ‘holy’
language to instrumentalize others “for mission” in ways uncomfortably close to
the Platonic risk I am describing. However, Christian grace corrects Plato at a
decisive anthropological and relational level. Plato’s ladder of love is
powerful, but it risks reducing concrete persons to instruments of ascent. In
the Symposium, the beloved body—and later even the beloved soul—can
appear as a rung to be transcended once a “higher” form of beauty is perceived.
The individual person does not remain the final object of love; rather, love
matures by moving away from the particular toward the universal and abstract
Form of Beauty (Plato, Symposium 210a–212b).
The
Christian tradition affirms Plato’s intuition that love educates desire, but it
refuses to detach love of truth from love of persons. Grace corrects Plato by
insisting that the concrete other is never merely a stage to be surpassed.
Every human person is created in the image of God and called to eternal communion.
Love does not grow by leaving the beloved behind, but by loving the beloved
more truthfully and more faithfully over time (Gen 1:27; Mt 22:37–40).
This
correction is especially clear in the Christian understanding of marriage and
family life. In Familiaris consortio, John Paul II describes marriage
not as a preliminary good that points beyond itself, but as a genuine path to
holiness. The spouse is not a means toward contemplation, but a co-pilgrim
through whom God’s grace is mediated. Love matures within the bond, not by
escaping it (John Paul II, 1981, §56).
Pope
Francis develops this insight further in Amoris laetitia. He insists
that married love grows through time, imperfection, and daily acts of care.
Here, love is not purified by abstraction, but by patience, forgiveness, and
shared vulnerability. Pope Francis explicitly rejects a spiritual logic that
separates “higher” spiritual love from embodied, relational love. Instead,
grace works within history and relationships, healing and elevating them
from inside (Francis, 2016, §§120–123, 295).
Karl
Rahner offers a theological explanation for this correction. For Rahner, love
of God and love of neighbor are not two parallel paths but one single movement
of grace. There is no ascent to God that bypasses the concrete other. Any
spirituality that distances itself from real human relationships risks becoming
illusory. Grace binds transcendence to history and eternity to everyday
fidelity (Rahner, 1967/1978).
In
short, Christian grace corrects Plato by rejecting the idea that growth in love
requires leaving the beloved behind. The ladder is not climbed away from
persons, but through them. Love becomes more real, not less personal, as
it matures.
How Christian grace radicalizes Plato
Christian
grace does not only correct Plato; it radically transforms the very direction
and meaning of the ascent. Plato’s ladder culminates in contemplation of the
eternal Form of Beauty—unchanging, impersonal, and untouched by suffering. The
highest love is intellectual vision. Fulfillment lies in stability, permanence,
and distance from the flux of embodied life (Symposium 211a–212a).
Christian
revelation radically redefines what counts as “highest” beauty. The supreme
revelation of divine beauty is not an abstract form, but the crucified and
risen Christ. In Christian theology, beauty is revealed in self-giving love,
vulnerability, and sacrifice. The cross becomes the place where divine glory is
most fully disclosed (Jn 12:32; Phil 2:6–11). This is a decisive rupture with Platonic
logic.
Here,
ascent no longer means withdrawal from suffering, but deeper participation in
love that risks loss. Grace radicalizes Plato by revealing that perfection is
not achieved by distancing oneself from fragility, but by allowing love to pass
through it. The Christian ladder is shaped by descent: God descends into
history, into flesh, into death. Human ascent is a response to this prior
divine movement (Balthasar, 1982).
This
has profound implications for graduality. In Plato, ascent depends primarily on
intellectual and moral refinement. In Christianity, growth depends on grace
received through weakness. Pope Francis emphasizes that Christian maturity
unfolds through limits, failures, and mercy. Holiness is not reserved for those
who have already climbed high, but for those who allow God to love them where
they are (Francis, 2016, §§296–300).
John
Paul II’s articulation of the “law of gradualness” becomes crucial here. In Familiaris
consortio §34, he insists that while God’s call is radical and unchanging,
human beings enter into it step by step. The standard is not lowered, but it is
lived through a real history of conversion. The measure of love is Christ
himself, not an abstract ideal of perfection (John Paul II, 1981).
Rahner
deepens this vision by grounding graduality in the mystery of grace. For him,
God’s self-communication is always complete, but human freedom receives it
slowly. The ascent to perfection is not linear or triumphant. It unfolds
through ordinary decisions, endurance, and trust in God’s hidden presence. This
makes sanctity accessible, but also demanding in a new way: it requires
perseverance in love rather than escape into contemplation (Rahner, 1966/1978).
Thus,
Christian grace radicalizes Plato by changing the destination and the path. The
highest beauty is not beyond history but revealed within it. The ladder leads
not to abstraction but to communion. Love reaches its fullness not in
self-transcending vision alone, but in self-giving fidelity shaped by the cross
and sustained by grace.
Ignatian discernment, tantum quantum,
and love of the other
Ignatian
spirituality helps clarify why Christian grace neither instrumentalizes persons
nor abandons them for higher ideals. At first glance, Saint Ignatius’ principle
of tantum quantum—using created things “insofar as they help us toward
our end”—can sound dangerously close to Plato’s ladder, where the beloved risks
becoming a step to be surpassed. But this reading misunderstands Ignatius at a
fundamental level.
It
should be noted that the concept of ‘tantum quantum’ has been
misinterpreted and misused in history under the pretext of mission. But for
Ignatius, tantum quantum is not about using others as means. It is about
freedom from disordered attachment so that love may become rightly ordered. The
end (finis) toward which everything is oriented is not abstract
contemplation but “the praise, reverence, and service of God our Lord, and by
this means the salvation of one’s soul” (Spiritual Exercises, §23).
Crucially, this salvation is never solitary. It is always ecclesial and
relational.
Ignatian
discernment begins not by asking how others serve my ascent, but by asking how
my desires, relationships, and choices serve God’s loving work in and through
others. In this sense, tantum quantum presupposes a radical respect for
the other as a subject of God’s grace. The discernment question is not “How
does this person help me rise?” but “How does God invite me to love this person
in a way that leads both of us closer to Him?”
Seen
from an Ignatian perspective, any spirituality that moves away from concrete
persons toward an abstract ‘beyond’ becomes suspect. Whatever one concludes
about Plato’s intention, Ignatius offers me a clear Christian criterion: God is
to be found and served in concrete relationships, historical situations, and
embodied commitments. Discernment
is always contextual. It takes place within friendships, marriages, ministries,
and communities. The other is not a rung on a ladder but a companion in mission.
The
Principle and Foundation makes this clear. Created things are to be
received with gratitude and freedom, not domination. They are to be used or set
aside only insofar as they help one respond more faithfully to God’s call. When
the “created thing” is a human person, this logic is transformed. A person can
never be “used” without violating love. Instead, discernment asks how one’s
freedom can be placed at the service of the other’s good, ultimately understood
as their growth in truth, love, and holiness.
Here,
Ignatian discernment aligns deeply with the Christian correction of Plato.
Growth in love does not mean leaving the beloved behind. It means loving the
beloved more truthfully, without possessiveness, manipulation, or ego-driven
need. Indifference (holy indifference) is not emotional coldness but
availability to love in the way God asks, even when that love costs something.
Ignatius
also radicalizes Plato in a way that resonates with the Christian
transformation of the ladder. For Ignatius, discernment is shaped by the cross.
The Exercises repeatedly invite the retreatant to contemplate Christ poor,
humble, rejected, and crucified. The highest clarity does not come from
abstract vision but from companionship with Christ in suffering love (Spiritual
Exercises, §§98–104). This mirrors the Christian claim that the highest
beauty is revealed not in distance from fragility but in self-giving fidelity.
In
this light, tantum quantum becomes pedagogy of love. It teaches the
heart to move from possessive attachment to self-gift. It purifies desire so
that relationships become places of mutual salvation rather than
self-advancement. The ascent is no longer about climbing beyond others, but
about descending into service with them.
Thus,
Ignatian discernment brings together what Plato intuited and what Christian
grace fulfills. Love does educate desire. Growth does happen in stages. But the
measure of progress is not how far one has risen above others. It is how deeply
one has learned to love for the greater glory of God and the salvation of
souls—beginning with the concrete person placed before us.
Magisterial anchors
Two magisterial texts are especially
important.
First,
Familiaris consortio 34. John Paul II clarifies the “law of graduality”
while rejecting any “gradualness of the law.” There is one divine plan for love
and marriage. People grow toward it step by step.
Second,
Amoris laetitia 295. Pope Francis retrieves this teaching and applies it
pastorally. He insists that graduality concerns moral growth, not moral
relativism. This text provides a stable theological framework for
accompaniment.
Together,
these documents show continuity rather than rupture in Catholic teaching. They
also resonate deeply with Rahner’s theology of grace and history.
Conclusion
For
me, this is not an abstract comparison between Plato and the magisterium. It is
the daily experience of carrying Plato’s Symposium under my
arm while listening to family and friends from home speak about illness, caste
and religious tensions, suicide, or a failed marriage. In the classroom, the
ladder of love can sound like a beautiful structure of ascent; in the parish or
on the street, it becomes a question of whether I can recognize God’s beauty in
the tired face of an undocumented migrant, a lonely expat, or an elderly
parishioner. As an Indian Jesuit in a French intellectual environment, I am
slowly learning that the true “graduality” God asks of me is not primarily a
refinement of concepts, but a conversion of how I look at the concrete people I
encounter every day.
Standing
at the crossroads between Plato and the Church reveals both continuity and
transformation. Plato teaches us that love educates desire and draws us beyond
ourselves. The Church receives this insight. Yet in Christ, love no longer
ascends away from the world. It descends into history and raises it from
within.
For
someone shaped by Greek philosophy, this offers both challenge and consolation.
The ladder remains, but its summit is no longer an abstract Form. It is a
wounded and risen person. Growth remains gradual, but grace is already fully
given. Love is learned slowly, yet it is always measured by the fullness
revealed in Christ. In this sense, my years in French theology are becoming
less an escape from my Indian experience and more a school where my mind learns
to serve what my heart already knows from the poor and from prayer.
References (APA 7)
Augustine.
(1991). Confessions (H. Chadwick, Trans.). Oxford University Press.
Francis. (2016).
Amoris laetitia. Vatican Publishing House.
John Paul II.
(1981). Familiaris consortio. Vatican Publishing House.
Plato. (1997). Symposium
(A. Nehamas & P. Woodruff, Trans.). Hackett.
Rahner, K.
(1966). Reflections on the problem of the gradual ascent to Christian
perfection. In Theological Investigations (Vol. 3, pp. 3–23). Herder
& Herder.
Ignatius of
Loyola. (1992). The Spiritual Exercises (G. E. Ganss, Trans.). Loyola
Press. (Original work published 1548)
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