I remember when I fell in love with Plato. It was in December, just a few days before I would be flying back to Louisiana from Maryland after my first semester of college. I remember walking around the hills of my small brick college town and thinking, Plato! This thought lasted as long as I could walk, and I walked for a long time.

This was a resolution, for me, of a severe dilemma. At my college, all the freshman began reading the Republic together in October. It takes three weeks of two classes per week to make one’s way through the book. I was finding it pleasantly strange, until I slammed into the discussion of poetry in its tenth and final book. I couldn’t understand, first of all, why Socrates would ban poetry from the beautiful city. I was extremely fond of poetry and found this personally insulting.

But the real problem was worse. First he says poetry, music, literature, scripture must be edited, exorcised via non-aesthetic principles; but then later on, he revises this to say that all things resembling poetry itself, imitation as such, as endless mirror reflections of something better than itself, have to be exiled altogether from our common lives—gone forever. But was this the worst? Not at all. As my seminar tutor pointed out, this argument comes down to us as written in the very sort of poetic style that Socrates condemns: a condemnation of poetry straight from the mouth of a poet’s beloved. What can you do with a contradiction like that? I rejoiced to think I simply did not know.

But I was shaken: if imitation is bad, but you only learn about its problems from imitation itself, what exactly do you do next? Personally, I gave up being an actress, to start (thank goodness I couldn’t make myself give up music and singing). Walking around town some more, I kept wondering: How can you say that Plato is for, or against, poetry? Neither side made sense. If poetry is bad, don’t write it. If poetry is good, why write to cancel yourself? Plato sets but a poor example for the rest of us. You can’t listen to him because he has no advice.

So why was I suddenly locked into a one-sided love affair with this intractable author? In high school, I had read Plato’s Apology as an act of rebellion, unassigned, stealing back a few hours otherwise owing to documented schoolwork. At the time, in my small Catholic high school where I was regularly on the wrong side of the law for wearing the wrong earrings, with skirts alternatively too long and too short, making too many jokes in official documents, I was happily captivated by the image Socrates presents of himself in his speech. He was, to me, the noble loner, the sole defender of truth hounded by unserious, ignorant men. Even the narrator of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground could not satisfy my desire for rebellion more. What did Plato have in him after all, his underworlds, his Cave, his Atlantis? Plato might seem to disavow poetry in favor of philosophy, but surely what he gives you back is both at once, with all the fervor of a story you can’t forget. I resolved to love Plato, even if he did not love me back.

But time at college was spinning me away from the Greeks, and into strange corridors. I had begun my interest in the Greek philosophers as an atheist, eager to escape the distortion that Christianity had practiced on the natural world. But by the time I’d made it through Greece, Rome, medieval Europe, and then on to Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and Mill, I realized I was lonely again. The world felt empty; Locke was empty, and so was that jerk Francis Bacon. I started to realize that I hadn’t been looking to the Greeks for a godless world, but for a redirection back to a world that was full not of doctrines but of gods, the temple dedicated to the one last unknown god.

But I was still not sure my love was worth other people’s time. I knew too many people who thought that being a woman was disqualifying for studying philosophy, and worse, they often seemed rather sharper than others and otherwise; I still can love sharpness for its own sake. It wasn’t until I read Hegel that I felt the spirit move again. Here too was poetry and philosophy in one, and I rejoiced to see that it made no sense to almost anyone else. If you can understand Hegel, surely you are not disqualified from the love of philosophy?

Hegel had no lasting advice, either, but he was captivating. He counsels that art strives for the same heights as philosophy; and also that religion and philosophy are the same, united in a worship of the divine, an argument that has satisfied almost no one in the history of the world. Strange image, and its prisoners strange, yet I fell for it hard. In high school, the world of religion had revolved around the catechism, a book designed to be a book of answers, which I was taught to defend—though it hardly needed my help, considering the whole court of canon law there to back it up. Hegel, in his singular Lutheranism, offered a way past law to the spirit, past the petty brokenness of sedimented language and the strength of sin that is the law. Eventually I stopped wanting to be forgiven for things it took a court of law to weigh in on; eventually I stopped wanting to be forgiven things I couldn’t understand at the tip of my own tongue.

After Locke and Bacon, I started going back to church, but this time to a Protestant church, and at night, on a weekday, to a service run by women—but not by those who had to apologize, as I’d seen a nun do in Lafayette, Louisiana, one Sunday, for having the temerity to preach a sermon on her own authority. Later, I found an Episcopal church that was not dedicated to the pursuit of wealth but to the gospel. I went to church and kept going because unlike people at school, Christians had to love you, even and especially if they didn’t want to. Loving without hope, I could live with that. Hear the comfortable words of our Savior: Jesus Christ came to this world to save sinners; and who else was going to do it?

James K. A. Smith talks about the love of philosophy and the love of wonder going to grad school to die. I think I almost died. I remember that. Why are America’s philosophers full of tears? I remember hearing stories of Plato as the cold rationalist, but I could not understand it. In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates speaks of a perfect love, one that reaches up through the imperfection of individual humans to the love of the beautiful itself. It sounds like a lovely sort of speech, and it is, up until you realize that Socrates has left something out. It takes someone who loves him, loves Socrates, in all the perfection and misery of unrequited love, to join the conversation, to let us see what’s missing. Alcibiades bursts into the room to mess the whole tale up, to hymn and harp the suffering and the glory of loving someone who doesn’t love you back. Socrates refuses him, yet Alcibiades remains in love. Loving is worth being unrequited. The good news is, loving God feels like unrequited love, but it is not.

I agree with Smith that philosophy, conceived as rationalism, where rationalism needs no rhetoric or poetry, but simply hits you on the head with a ruler until you pretend to agree, is no sort of love at all. But this is not philosophy. The philosophy I remember reading is the philosophy of Socrates, who never wrote a book, who had no dreams of punditry, who got very passionate in the equivalent of small cafés but never tried to sell it on the larger circuit, and who died without being sure he was on the right track at all. Western philosophizing loves to see itself as footnotes to Plato’s Socrates, without remembering that you can’t make a footnote to someone who never wrote a book. It’s no surprise that the philosophy that made it to the western part of Europe and then Britain and then America simply has not followed Socrates’ advice. And it continues to mistake the attempt to assert wisdom on someone else’s head for the love of the thing it necessarily has to do without, that is, wisdom.

Let us by all means see what philosophy as narrow rationalism misses. And let us have poetry back again as the fur lining to our despair, the foretaste of joy. I don’t think we can do without either. They are not the same, as someone like Hegel might blithely claim. But they are not completely different, as Plato’s poetic paradox implies. Socrates, Socrates, Socrates! It’s impossible to try to love him without loving something else. I urge us to try first the one, and then the other.