When Orpheus’ wife Eurydice died, the grief-stricken Orpheus descended into the Underworld in order to retrieve her back again. He is allowed this on one condition: he cannot look back at her as they reascend to the world of the living. Thinking this would be easy, he agrees, and yet as the two travelled he could not hear her footsteps, and eventually just before the exit he loses faith and looks behind him – sending Eurydice back for good.

Phaedrus in Plato’s Symposium presents Orpheus as having been a coward, with the gods only presenting to him a shade of his wife because he was unwilling to part with his own life to be with her.
Underneath this however is the point Plato was trying to make; that Love in its truest or most perfect sense is when one separates spirit from the body, stripping mundane “life” from that of the sacred and eternal, a Tradition passed from yore down to individuals as the likes of Dante.

Orpheus failed because he was unwilling to do this kind of death, evident both in how his intention was always to return to the transient world, and in how he lost his faith when he couldn’t hear the physical footsteps of his beloved. He was dependent upon the bodily and the terrestrial, rather than allowing its Beauty to inspire within him a recollection of his real self and being, separating the earthly from the heavenly, charging the Spirit toward the divine.

What he exemplifies then are individuals who hold onto the world of the senses, and see it as the only reality. Death to this state then is something that inspires fear, because it is the only world he knows – this is the coward that Plato sought to illustrate, who fears the death before dying, the trial by fire that is the first step in all mysteries, followed by ‘suffering’ and, finally, Love. Particularly, Love of Divinity.

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