In Plato's Symposium (180), Pausanias proposes the division of love which is common and includes that for a woman's body, and that which is divine and seeks satisfaction only in the union of the souls. From this division result the double Venus and the double Cupid. Marsillo Fieino's famous 'commentary' is at its most powerful at this point and in a letter Fieino himself coined the term 'Platonic love', to describe the higher and morally perfective affection. But unlike some of his followers, and Erasmus himself in the Enchiridion, Ficino holds the compatibility of the two loves. The doctrine of the four furores, poetic, Bacchic, prophetic and erotic. the forms of divine frenzy which move the soul to its reunification in the ascent of its love through the four circles of creation to beatitude is elaborated in Ficino from the doctrine of Socrates in the Phaedrus (244). The poetic furor in particular was an important Renaissance concept. It was used, for instance, to explain the religious and moral significance which Sébillet and the Pléiade attributed to poetic activity, and allowed them to insist on the need for the poet to be moved emotionally when he wrote. By 1546 Richard Le Blanc in his preface to the translation of Plato's Ion could go so far as explicitly to identify the poetic furor with divine grace.
Rabelais makes much play of Ficino, whose Plotinian philosophy he caricatures, especially on the erotic and Bacchic frenzies.