Wednesday, February 15, 2012

A guide who leads us only to ourselves

"A pantheistic force animating the world; a schizophrenic deity both plebeian and patrician; a guide who leads us only to ourselves: Eros, clearly, is no simple god. He is, Socrates contends, no god at all. Draw­ing together the strands of these various reflections, Socrates main­tains that Eros is, rather, a 'great spirit' who is 'midway between what is divine and what is human,' his ambiguous nature owing to the strange circumstances of his conception.

Sired at the birthday party of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love, Eros is the child of Pov­erty, who came to the festivities uninvited as a beggar, and the god Plenty, a welcome guest who passed out there drunk. He produces a son who is neither 'mor­tal nor immortal.' Now fully grown, Eros takes after his mother. Con­stantly in need, he is 'hard, unkempt, barefoot, homeless.' But, like his father, he is 'brave, enterprising, and determined.' Having inher­ited 'an eye for beauty and the good,' Eros continually searches for these two qualities through love, as befits one conceived in the pres­ence of Aphrodite.   

"Straddling the human and the divine, Eros is an emissary, con­ducting 'all association and communication, waking or sleeping,' between the gods and men. His twofold nature explains his defin­ing characteristic - desire itself. For what is desire but the human acknowledgment that one is in need, that one is lacking? As Socrates explains, 'the man who desires something desires what is not avail­able to him, and what he doesn't already have in his possession.' "

Author: Darrin M. McMahon  
Title: Happiness: A History 
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Date: Copyright 2006 by Darrin M. McMahon
Pages: 32-34

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