Love in Plato and Plotinus

Abstract

Our greatest blessings come to us through madness, Plato tells us in Phaedrus 244 A, and his examination of this particular form of madness has had a commanding influence in the history of Western philosophy and literature. The Symposium, which is the major concern of this paper, is one of Plato’s most ironic and yet most serious dialogues and has been repeatedly reinterpreted and repeatedly used as a source of inspiration and ideas from ancient times up until the 20th century. Some of its key phrases are echoed by the neo-Platonists, and its combination of the erotic and the mystical provided a fertile soil for the development of the Christian idea of love, despite the existence of a rival notion of love within Christianity, designated by the term agape. The classic attempt to distinguish between Christian and Platonic love was made by Nygren in his book, Eros and Agape, and this author draws a distinction between the two with glaring simplicity. Agape is (on this view) the quality of caritas, of feeling that bond with one’s fellow man which causes one to attend to his needs and wants, whilst eros is the more self-centred drive for personal fulfilment. The Patristic writers did not feel the difference between the two to be as decisive as that outlined by Nygren, and as John Rist notes in his Eros and Psyche, Origen was one Christian writer who failed to observe the sharpness of the distinction between them. It is not my intention however to dwell on this distinction, since the original Christian notion of love is more a matter of behavioural than philosophical or literary significance. However the debate is instructive since it tends to produce caricatures on both sides, with Christian love losing its mystical aspect, and Platonic love losing the emphasis on self-transcendence. In fact it is arguable that Platonic love is more concerned with need and lack, than it is with self-indulgence and with wallowing in some romantic vision, and this paper will argue that the idea of love as ‘lack’ is a most important, yet often overlooked ingredient, in the account of love which is given by Plato and Plotinus.