seems time that the Netherlands has a practical lesson in 'stepping outside your comfort zone'. Time that concepts like multiculturalism and diversity are more than popular buzzwords", he writes. "A blck man calling to his son in a shopping center is nothing more than a MAN calling for his son in a shopping center. A group of black people gather in a city to demonstrate is no more than a group of PEOPLE."the very epitome of love; all other kinds of love immediately seem to fade in comparison."

But eros is unplanned and unwilled, the divine madness that Shakespeare describes in A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which the love-charmed Titania, queen of the fairies, falls in passionately love with Bottom, a humble weaver with the head of an ass:

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,Such shaping fantasies, that apprehendMore than cool reason ever comprehends.

Despite this deranged and destructive aspect, for Plato, eros also pointed to transcendence. In physical desire, man fleetingly attains, he thought, an experience of unchanging Beauty beyond the deceptions of the material world. So the desire for sexual satisfaction, which is shared with animals, points beyond itself to the Infinite.

But, as Benedict XVI points out, Plato recognised that