Eros (concept)

Based on Eros (concept) from Wikipedia

The Madness That Makes the World

The ancient Greeks believed that falling in love was a form of insanity sent by the gods.

This wasn't a metaphor or poetic exaggeration. They called it theia mania—divine madness—and they meant it quite literally. When you found yourself unable to eat, sleep, or think about anything except another person, you weren't experiencing a normal human emotion. You had been struck by an invisible arrow, wounded by a force beyond your control, infected by a kind of beautiful disease.

This concept of eros—the Greek word from which we get "erotic"—has traveled an extraordinary journey through Western thought. It began as an explanation for romantic obsession, was transformed by Plato into a pathway to divine truth, got absorbed into Christian theology, and eventually landed on Sigmund Freud's couch in early twentieth-century Vienna. Along the way, it picked up meanings that range from raw sexual desire to the fundamental life force that animates all existence.

Understanding eros means understanding something essential about how Western civilization has thought about desire, beauty, love, and what it means to be human.

Arrows Through the Eyes

The Greeks developed an elaborate mythology to explain what happens when someone falls in love. The central image was the arrow—shot by Eros himself (the god, not the concept) or his Roman counterpart Cupid. These weren't metaphorical arrows. The Greeks imagined a precise mechanism.

Here's how they thought it worked: You see someone beautiful. Light reflecting from their form enters through your eyes. This light carries something with it—call it the image of the beloved, call it love itself. The light travels from your eyes down into your heart, where it lodges like an arrowhead. Once embedded, it begins its work. You become sick. You become obsessed. You have been wounded.

This is why the Greeks called the experience of falling in love a wound. Not because it was bad, necessarily, but because it was something that happened to you. You didn't choose it. You didn't control it. You were struck.

The metaphor captured something real about the experience. We still talk about being "struck" by someone's beauty, about love "hitting" us unexpectedly. The Greeks were simply more systematic about their imagery.

Love at First Sight—and Other Routes

The arrow metaphor explained love at first sight beautifully. You see someone; you're struck; it's over. But the Greek and Roman writers acknowledged that passionate love could take other routes as well.

Consider Phaedra, the queen who fell catastrophically in love with her stepson Hippolytus. In Ovid's telling, she writes to him: "That time I went to Eleusis... it was then most of all (though you had pleased me before) that piercing love lodged in my deepest bones." The wound came after several meetings, not at the first glance.

Even stranger was the case of Paris and Helen of Troy. Paris claimed he loved Helen before ever seeing her. Rumors of her beauty reached him, and those rumors were enough to pierce his heart: "You were my heart's desire before you were known to me. I beheld your features with my soul ere I saw them with my eyes; rumour, that told me of you, was the first to deal my wound."

You could fall in love with an idea of someone, with their reputation, with the promise of their beauty. The arrow could fly through many media.

The Dangerous Beauty

Greek literature is littered with warnings about eros. The classical authors treated passionate love the way a public health official might treat a disease outbreak: acknowledge its existence, document its symptoms, and for heaven's sake, warn people about the consequences.

The symptoms were well-catalogued. When love was unrequited—when the beloved was "cruel or uninterested," as the texts put it—the lover would spiral into depression. They would lament. They would waste away. Lovesickness was considered a genuine medical condition.

But the dangers weren't only for the lover. The beloved could suffer too, especially if she happened to be beautiful. The Greeks imagined extreme beauty as a kind of curse. Helen of Troy was beautiful enough to launch a thousand ships—which also meant she was beautiful enough to get kidnapped. Men who looked upon the naked goddess Artemis were driven mad or destroyed. Actaeon, a hunter who accidentally glimpsed Artemis bathing, was transformed into a stag and torn apart by his own hunting dogs.

Beauty was power. Power was dangerous. And eros was the mechanism by which that power operated.

Plato's Revolution

Around the fourth century before the common era, a philosopher named Plato did something remarkable with eros. He took this concept of romantic obsession—this divine madness, this arrow wound—and transformed it into a ladder to the divine.

The setting for Plato's most famous discussion of eros is a dinner party. The Symposium depicts a group of Athenian intellectuals, including the playwright Aristophanes and the philosopher Socrates, taking turns giving speeches about love. Each speech builds on the last, and together they construct a radically new understanding of what eros might be.

Aristophanes offers a creation myth. Originally, he says, humans had four arms, four legs, and two faces. Zeus, threatened by their power, split them in half. Ever since, each person has wandered the earth searching for their other half. This explains why we feel incomplete without our beloved—we literally are incomplete. We're looking for the piece of ourselves that got cut away.

Some original humans were half male and half female; their descendants became heterosexual men and women. Some were entirely female; their descendants became lesbians. Some were entirely male; their descendants became gay men. Aristophanes presents this not as moral commentary but as simple explanation. Different people seek different partners because of how their ancestors were originally configured.

The Ladder of Love

But the real revolution comes from Socrates, who claims to be merely reporting what he learned from a wise woman named Diotima. Her teaching transforms eros from a problem to be managed into a force that can lead us toward truth itself.

Here's the insight: When you fall in love with someone, what draws you is their beauty. But what is beauty? It's not the physical features themselves—those decay and change. Something deeper attracts you, something that the physical features are merely expressing.

Diotima suggests a progression, what scholars call the "ladder of love." You start by being attracted to one beautiful body. Then you recognize that beauty exists in other bodies too—the same quality appearing in different forms. This leads you to appreciate beauty in souls, then in activities and laws, then in knowledge, until finally you perceive Beauty itself: the pure form that all beautiful things participate in, unchanging and eternal.

Eros, in this view, is not a distraction from philosophical truth. It's a vehicle for reaching it. The energy that makes you obsess over a beautiful person can be redirected—Plato would say properly directed—toward ultimate reality.

This is the origin of "Platonic love," though that phrase has drifted far from its original meaning. Platonic love isn't just non-sexual friendship. It's the transformation of erotic energy into philosophical aspiration. The lover learns to love Beauty through the beloved, rather than simply loving the beloved.

Neither God nor Human

Plato adds one more crucial element. Eros, he says, is not a god. The gods possess everything they desire—they lack nothing. By definition, they cannot experience longing. Eros is all about longing.

Instead, Eros is a daimon: a being between the divine and the mortal. He mediates between the two realms. He is the force that allows humans to reach toward the divine, though he cannot himself be divine.

This makes eros fundamentally aspirational. It's characterized by "permanent aspiration and desire." Even when it seems to give, it is really reaching for something. It wants to possess, but what it wants to possess ultimately is the eternal—beauty that doesn't fade, truth that doesn't change, a connection to something beyond the mortal world.

Through the Medieval Eye

The imagery of love's arrows didn't disappear with ancient Greece. It traveled through Rome and into medieval Europe, where it was developed further by the troubadours of Provence—the poet-musicians of southern France who created the tradition of courtly love.

The troubadours were obsessed with the eyes. They developed complex theories about how love originated in the gaze of a beautiful woman. When her eyes met those of her future lover, something passed between them—light, perhaps, or love itself. This transmitted love would travel through his eyes and down to lodge in his heart.

The mechanism was essentially the Greek arrow wound, but the troubadours focused particularly on the eyes as the point of entry. Some medieval texts compared the gaze of a beautiful woman to the glance of a basilisk—a legendary serpent whose look could kill. Love and death began to seem like related phenomena.

This tradition continued into the Renaissance. Boccaccio, the great Italian writer of the fourteenth century, merged the classical arrow imagery with the troubadour emphasis on eyes: "Nor did he (Troilus) who was so wise shortly before... perceive that Love with his darts dwelt within the rays of those lovely eyes."

By the seventeenth century, writers were exploring the paradoxes inherent in this imagery. How could a wound be pleasurable? How could a dart both torment and tickle? A song from the English opera The Fairy-Queen captured the contradiction:

If Love's a Sweet Passion, why does it torment?
If a Bitter, oh tell me whence comes my content?
Since I suffer with pleasure, why should I complain,
Or grieve at my Fate, when I know 'tis in vain?
Yet so pleasing the Pain is, so soft is the Dart,
That at once it both wounds me, and Tickles my Heart.

Eros Meets Christianity

The Christian tradition had to figure out what to do with eros. Greek thought pervaded the Mediterranean world in which Christianity arose, and early Christian thinkers couldn't simply ignore Plato.

The Greeks had distinguished several types of love. Eros was passionate desire. Philia was the mutual affection between friends. Storge was the natural affection within families, the instinctive love of a parent for a child. Agape was selfless, giving love—the love that expects nothing in return.

Christian theology elevated agape above the others. This was God's love for humanity: unconditional, sacrificial, generous beyond measure. The theological question became: Where does eros fit in this hierarchy? Is passionate desire simply a lower form of love, to be transcended? Or does it have its own legitimate place?

Pope Benedict the Sixteenth addressed this question directly in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est—"God Is Love"—published in 2006. He argued that eros and agape are not opposites but complements. In agape, you give of yourself to another. In eros, you seek to receive from another. Both are inherently good. The danger is that eros, without the balancing influence of agape, can degrade into mere physical gratification—sex without love, desire without connection.

The earlier Christian thinker Augustine of Hippo had wrestled with the same tensions fifteen centuries earlier. Augustine knew eros intimately; before his conversion to Christianity, he had lived a famously dissolute life. His theology reflects someone who understood passionate desire from the inside and spent decades thinking about how to reconcile it with Christian teaching.

The Life Force

When Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he reached back to the Greek concept of eros—but transformed it into something quite different from romantic love.

For Freud, eros is the life instinct. It's not just sexual desire, though sexuality is part of it. Eros is the drive toward creation, connection, and complexity. It makes us want to build things, form relationships, and continue existing. It's what makes life grow.

Freud contrasted eros with Thanatos, the death instinct. Thanatos is the drive toward dissolution, toward returning to an inanimate state. It manifests as aggression, destruction, and self-destruction. The psyche is a battleground where these two forces struggle.

In a 1925 paper, Freud explicitly connected his concept of eros to Plato's version in The Symposium. He was irritated that critics accused him of reducing everything to sex. That's not what I'm doing, he insisted. Read Plato. Eros is broader than genital activity. It's the energy that drives all our instinctive needs.

Some scholars have noted that despite Freud's claim, he and Plato were actually going in opposite directions. For Plato, eros is fundamentally spiritual; it descends into physical expression. For Freud, eros is fundamentally physical; it can be sublimated into higher forms. They agreed that erotic energy could be transformed. They disagreed about where it started.

Jung's Complement

Carl Jung, who started as Freud's protégé before developing his own school of psychology, took eros in yet another direction. For Jung, eros has a complementary opposite: logos.

Logos, in Greek philosophy, means word, reason, or rational principle. Jung associated it with objectivity, logic, and analytic thinking. Eros, by contrast, he associated with relationship, connection, and what he called "psychic relatedness."

Here's where Jung gets controversial: he gendered these principles. Eros, he claimed, is fundamentally feminine. Logos is fundamentally masculine. Women's psychology is built on eros—the drive to connect, to bind, to relate. Men's psychology is built on logos—the drive to analyze, to categorize, to understand objectively.

But Jung didn't stop there. He believed that each person's unconscious contains elements of the opposite gender. A man's unconscious includes a feminine component—Jung called it the anima—which is characterized by eros. A woman's unconscious includes a masculine component—the animus—characterized by logos.

Psychological growth, in Jung's view, requires integrating these unconscious elements. A man must learn to accept and value his own eros—his capacity for relationship and connection—even though his conscious identity emphasizes logos. This is part of what Jung called individuation: becoming a complete person by owning all parts of yourself, even the parts you've projected onto others.

In essence, Jung brought eros back to something like Plato's conception: it's ultimately the desire for wholeness. It might begin as passionate attraction, but what it really seeks is integration, connection, and participation in something larger than the isolated self.

The Thread Through Time

What's remarkable about eros is how it has remained both central and contested for nearly three thousand years of Western thought. The ancient Greeks looked at the experience of falling in love—the obsession, the physical symptoms, the sense of being overwhelmed by forces beyond control—and they asked: What is this? Where does it come from? What does it mean?

Their answer involved gods and arrows. But the deeper insight survived the death of Greek religion. Eros names something real about human experience: the way desire pulls us beyond ourselves, the way beauty captures our attention and doesn't let go, the way longing for another person can feel like both wounding and healing at once.

Plato saw in this experience a clue about the nature of reality. If we can be drawn so powerfully toward beauty in another person, perhaps that attraction points to something—Beauty itself—that exists beyond any particular beautiful thing. Our capacity for eros might be evidence that we're built for connection with the eternal.

The Christian tradition wrestled with whether this was a blessing or a temptation. Freud saw it as raw biological energy that could be channeled in various directions. Jung saw it as one half of a fundamental polarity within the psyche.

But all of them recognized that eros—whatever else it might be—is central to human life. We are creatures who desire. We are creatures who long for beauty. We are creatures who can be overwhelmed by love.

The Greeks called it madness from the gods. They weren't wrong to see it as both wonderful and dangerous, as a force that could elevate or destroy, as something that happens to us rather than something we fully control. Three millennia later, we're still trying to understand it.