Eros

Eros, in Greek, is passionate love or desire. In Plato’s Symposium, the priestess Diotima teaches Socrates that eros is not a god but a spirit between the mortal and the divine, born of Poverty and Resource: it longs for what it lacks, the beautiful and the good, and seeks to possess them forever. Rightly guided, it rises by stages from the love of one beautiful body to the love of all beauty, of souls, of laws and knowledge, and finally to the sight of Beauty itself.

In the Phaedrus, eros is a divine madness, by which the soul, seeing beauty in another, remembers the Forms it once beheld and grows its wings again. Plotinus wrote on eros as the soul’s longing for the Good, and Dionysius the Areopagite boldly called God himself eros, a yearning love that goes out of itself in creation and draws all things back.

In the twentieth century the Swedish theologian Anders Nygren contrasted eros, the love that desires and ascends, with agapē, the Christian love that gives and descends, and the contrast has been much debated. The passionate love of the Sufis (ʿishq) and the Vaiṣṇava prema are often compared with eros as ways in which longing becomes a path to God.