In Plato’s Symposium the priestess Diotima describes the right way of love: from love of one body to all beautiful bodies, to beautiful souls, practices and laws, to the beauty of knowledge, until the lover suddenly beholds Beauty itself, eternal and unmixed. Only there, she says, is life worth living.
Ladder of love
Diotima’s account in the Symposium of the ascent from bodily beauty to the vision of Beauty itself.
Also: scala amoris, Diotima’s ladder