Eros

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Eros is the Greek god of love, and the figure under that name shifts more than almost any other in the Greek imagination — from a force older than the gods to a winged child to a philosopher’s name for longing itself. The Romans called him Cupid or Amor. What stays constant across the changes is the thing he governs: not affection in general but desire, the pull toward what one lacks.

In the oldest layer he is cosmogonic. Hesiod’s Theogony names Eros among the first powers to come into being, alongside Chaos and Earth, before there are generations to fall in love — the principle by which anything is drawn to anything else, set at the root of the world so that the cosmos can begin to couple and multiply. Orphic theogonies pushed this further, making a primal Eros, often identified with the radiant first-born Phanes, the very source from which the gods unfold. Here love is not an emotion the gods happen to feel; it is the reason there is a world to feel anything in.

A quite different Eros belongs to later art and poetry: the son of Aphrodite, a beautiful and dangerous boy whose arrows make gods and mortals fall, helpless, for whatever they strike. This is the Eros of lyric and of the Hellenistic epigram — capricious, often cruel, the explanation for desire that arrives unbidden and against one’s interest. The two pictures, the cosmic first power and the troublesome child, were never fully reconciled, and Greek writers moved between them freely.

Plato gave the god his most consequential reading. In the Symposium the priestess Diotima teaches that Eros is no god at all but a great daimon, a spirit stretched between the mortal and the divine, born of Poverty and Resource and therefore always wanting, always reaching. Desire, on this account, is the soul’s response to beauty, and rightly followed it climbs — from one lovely body, to all, to the beauty of souls and laws and knowledge, and at last to Beauty itself. The Phaedrus keeps the upward motion in its image of the soul growing wings under the shock of the beautiful. The later Platonists took this seriously as metaphysics: for Plotinus, treated directly in his tractate on love, Eros names the orientation of every soul back toward its source, the hunger of the lower for the higher that runs through the whole structure of things.

That double inheritance — love as the force that builds the world and love as the force that lifts the soul out of it — is what made Eros so useful to later philosophy and so hard to pin down. Whether the cosmic Eros and the desire felt for another person are one thing or two is a question the Greeks raised and did not settle. The god remained, to the end, the name for a power felt as coming from outside and yet recognized as one’s own.

→ In the library: Plato — Symposium (Jowett) · Plato — Phaedrus (Jowett) · Plotinus — Third Ennead, On Love (MacKenna)

→ Related: Necessity · Neoplatonism · The One · Emanation · Nous