Platonic Eros and Christian Eros in the Corpus Areopagiticum‌ 89 The significance of Eros in the work of Plato In Plato, Eros is the driving force, the most powerful stimulant of the human psyche. This is the reason why it is so intimately connected with the idea of education. Eros is the heart of the paideic process. Consequently, the reform of the city envisioned by Plato is basically a reform not only of the principles that informed the Greek paideia, but mainly of its driving force: the erotic power that stirs the human soul. By mythical means Plato undermines the mythical images that adorned Eros before him: with Plato, Eros is no longer a power that tyrannically gets hold of the human heart from outside (as in Sappho1, for example), but one that works from within it; and He is no longer a god but a daemon, an intermediate being that unites the lower world with the higher one, the mortal with the immortal2. He is the one driving force of the human kind to reach its completion in the divine. In itself, he is the yearning for the Beautiful and the Good by means of the beautiful and the good. And this is but one step in Plato’s endeavor to apprehend what the essence of Eros really is: it is not only the desire for the Beautiful and the Good, it is the desire to make them its own forever3; it is the desire to beget in the Beautiful and the Good4. Thus, Eros is the desire for immortality that works in the mortal being5. The task of the philosopher as a lover of wisdom is thus to educate this longing for immortality by way of a continuous paideic process that leads him from the images of the beauty bellow to the Beautiful in itself, which is the shining brilliance of the Good. The one risk that permanently hunts the un-philosophical type is to forget that Eros is a mediator and to concentrate all its desire on a single object as if it were the Beautiful or the Good in itself. It is what in a Christian terminology See Fragment 47. See Symposium, 202 e. 3 204 d, 206 a. 4 206 b. 5 207 a. 1
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