THE

DOWNSIDE
REVIEW

VOLUME LXXIX

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AT THE CATHOLIC RECORDS PRESS
EXETER

MCMLXI
PLATONIC EROS AND CHRISTIAN AGAPE
by

PROFESSOR A. H. ARMSTRONG

AN increasing number of people who have seriously studied and

thought about Plato, Plotinus and the later Neoplatonists are
increasingly dissatisfied with the sharp antithesis between Greek
philosophical eros and Christian agape which was given currency
by Nygren's famous book. In this contrast eros appears as essentially
acquisitive and self-centred, the passionate impulse to the satis-
faction of the lover's need, the fulfilment of his desire. So man's
eros for God can, in the last resort, be only his desire for his own
perfection and fulfilment, and God, who is perfect and needs
nothing, can have no eros at all. Agape, on the other hand, is
essentially unselfish, gratuitous, generous, giving love. God's agape,
manifested in his giving of his only Son for us, is primary, and is
the source, cause and exemplar of agape in man. Now those who are
dissatisfied with this contrast have no quarrel with the account
given of agape as it is revealed in the New Testament. What they
maintain is that Nygren and those who follow him have failed to
grasp the depth, range and value of the conception of eros in Plato
and the later Platonists. It is not only a question of finding a place
for eros-love, as defined above, in Christian life and thought,
and of justifying the important place which it has occupied in that
life and thought in the past. It is of course necessary to find a place
for the passionate love of desire and aspiration, even if that place
is far below that held by the love of divine generosity and sacrificial
self-giving, if we are not to repudiate a great deal of our Christian
past, and be content to present Christianity as something which
has no connection with one of the most important parts of human
life and some of the strongest and noblest forms of human religion.
But the purpose of this paper is to show that the conception of
eros was so deepened and widened by Plato and later Platonists

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that Origen and the Greek Christian writers who followed him
were not wrong in thinking it a suitable word to use for the agape-
love of God revealed in Christ: and that this was done without
losing sight of the ·original meaning of eras or breaking the con-
nection with it.
Before we begin to explore the Platonic doctrine of eras it will
be as well to remind ourselves of what the word meant to the
ordinary unphilosophical Greek. Its primary and always pre-
dominant meaning was, of course, sexual passion, and it could
carry every shade of meaning and overtone appropriate to the
different forms of that passion, from the highest and tenderest
love (in the usual English meaning of the word) to the animal lust
of rape and buggery. But eras for the Greeks was not just the
name of a human passion. It was the name of a god, who was
not only recognized by poets and philosophers (with most unusual
unanimity) as a great cosmic force, responsible for the coming into
being of the world and gods and men and all other living things,
but also had a place in ordinary everyday religion and received a
real cult, and a very ancient one, especially at Thespiae in Boeotia,
where his image was an unhewn stone. (Of course, unsophisticated
Greek thinking did not separate Eros the god and eras the passion.
Any strong emotional disturbance or impulse was attributed by the
ancient Greeks, at the time when the Homeric poems were composed
and long afterwards, to the direct action of a god.) This belief
that Eros was a god had an important influence on later philosophical
developments.
My starting-point in examining the Platonic tradition about eras
is the interpretation of Plato's Symposium, put forward some years
ago by my colleague and friend Dr R. A. Markus in an article in
THE DOWNSIDE REVIEW. 1 This seems to me completely convincing,
and an important contribution to our understanding of Plato. His
profound and subtle analysis of the movement of thought in the
dialogue needs to be studied closely with the text to appreciate its
1 The Dialectic of Eros ill Plato's Symposium, DOWNSIDE REVIEW No. 233, Summer
1955, pp. 219-30. This is summarised in chap. VII, Love and Wiii, of our joint book
Chdstian Faith alld Greek Philosophy (Darton, Longman and Todd 1960) My own
work, and that of others which I have seen, has led me since this book was prepared
for publication to take a rather different view of the later Platonic doctrine of eros
and its relationship to Christian !bought from that given by Dr Markus in this chapter.

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PLATONIC EROS AND CHRISTIAN AGAPE

quality fully, but all I can do here is to give a summary of his con-
clusions. He shows how Plato moves, so unobtrusively that the
movement has often passed unnoticed, away from the conception
of eros as acquisitive, unsatisfied desire (the 'daemonic' Eros of
the myth, child of Poverty and Plenty, half-way between god and
man); how he arrives at a conception of eros which, first of all, is
not indiscriminate desire for any and every object experienced as
desirable, but, if it is true eros, for that object only in so far as it is
good. 'Good' here is obviously not just synonymous with 'desirable',
but implies reference to a standard of goodness, which, as the
whole context makes clear, is nothing less than absolute and eternal
good. Next, and most important of all, Markus shows how Plato
faces the dilemma that, if eros is just desire to possess its object,
it must cease to exist when it achieves possession. The lover must
stop loving precisely when he is united with his beloved. To deal
with this difficulty Plato first introduces the idea that true eros is
'desire for perpetual possession of the good', and goes on from
there to develop a conception of eros as a desire completely different
from that with which he started, a desire which is no longer a
desire for possession but the desire of the lover united with his
beloved to produce, to 'bring forth in beauty'- a desire which is
no longer acquisitive but creative. Plato keeps within the analogy
of sexual love, but goes far beyond the too narrow conception of
that love as self-centred passion with which he started.
We must now add something from the other great dialogue on
love, the Phaedrus. The teaching of the two dialogues on eros is
very similar, but there is an important difference in their account
of beauty. In the Symposium beauty is simply good as lovable, and
everything that is good has its own beauty; there is moral and
intellectual beauty which is higher than physical beauty, and
absolute beauty is identical with absolute good. In the Phaedrus
the moral Forms are still described in the most impassioned language
as glorious to see and supremely lovable. But beauty is now one
Form amongst many, distinguished only by the superior vividness
with which it is imaged in the sense-world (250); that is, it is not
here simply the good as lovable (so that all the Forms are beautiful,
participating in beauty in their participation in good) but the
Form or transcendent principle of physical beauty, beauty in the

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narrow sense, one perfection among many, not a synonym for all
perfection, sharply distinguished from the (in this life) less attractive
moral Forms. Plato (and Plotinus following him) seem to have
seen that you can talk about beauty in two ways: one which brings
out the real and close connection which exists between aesthetic
and moral values, so that it makes sense to talk about the beauty
of laws and institutions, good ways of life, and moral virtue: and
another which recognizes that moral and aesthetic values can,
and sometimes must, be distinguished, and that in human life
there can be competition, and sometimes conflict, between the
love of beauty and the Jove of goodness. 2
We have seen that in the Symposium true eros is not just any
and every sort of indiscriminate desire but love of the good, and
that, when the lover is united to the good which he seeks, his eros
does not disappear but turns into a desire to produce good off-
spring, a desire for procreation in beauty. In the Phaedrus the true
lover loves his beloved because he sees in him an image of the
beauty which he once saw in the World of Forms, and reverences
him as one would reverence an image or apparition of a god (250-1);
or, as Plato puts it a little further on, with a very interesting variation,
because the beloved is like the god whom the lover followed when
he took the heavenly path to the vision of the Forms (252-3). And
the true lover's eros does not lead him to want to possess and use
his beloved, physically - Plato condemns this in the plainest
terms as bestial perversion (250E) - or even spiritually. It leads
him to try to make his beloved more godlike, to 'work on him and
adorn him' as if he was an image of the patron god (252D). And
it is precisely in trying to make his beloved more like the god that
he becomes more like the god himself (253A). Here again we find
the idea that eros is not just a self-centred passion to satisfy one's
own need by acquiring something good or beautiful. It is a desire
of absolute good or beauty which is somehow inevitably also a

'Cf. the superb treatment of this theme in Plotinus Enneads Vs [321 12, especially
33-38. 'The Good is gentle and kindly and gracious and present to anyone when
he wishes. Beauty brings wonder and shock and pleasure mingled with pain, and
even draws those who do not know what is happening away from the Good, as the
beloved draws a child away from its father: for Beauty is younger. But the Good is
older, not in time but in truth, and has the prior power; for It has all power' (my
translation).

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PLATONIC EROS AND CHRlSTIAN AGAPE

desire to increase good and beauty, to make someone dse better

and more beautiful. This is the thought of both Symposium and
Phaedrus; only the metaphor is different, 'working on the statue'
in the latter being substituted for 'procreation' in the former.. The
reason for this substitution may be that the earthly love which is
the starting-point is more explicitly and exclusively in the Phaedrus
than in the Symposium that aristocratic paederasty which, in the
society in which he lived and for which he wrote, was the kind of
love from which Plato had to start. This convention of homosexual
love was not just an approval of perversion and unnatural vice
(to which the attitude of those who accepted it was oddly ambiguous).
It included, at least idealiy, and sometimes in practice, an obligation
for the lover to educate and improve the boy he loved, to make
him as good a man as possible. This Plato accepted, though already
at the time when he wrote the Phaedrus condemning unnatural
sexual intercourse, which later in the Laws (836A - 839D) he
denounces with a ferocity worthy of a father of the Church; the
passage ends with an admirable statement of natural law in these
matters, which makes marriage the only legitimate form of sexual
intercourse. A later pagan Platonist, Plutarch, in his tediously
charming Erotikos (Amatorius) develops this line of thought
further, ending the dialogue with a well argued defence of the
position that married love is the highest form of eros: and Plotinus
was made more indignant by an apology for philosophical sodomy
than by anything else in his life except Gnosticism. 3
We must now consider shortly some features of Plato's thought
about goodness, human and divine, which he never explicitly
connects with his thought about eros, but which are important if
we are to see its full possibilities. It is the cardinal doctrine of
Plato's theology that the gods are good and causes of good, never
of evil. 4 He insists that because they are good they cannot be
responsible for any of the real evils in the world, for which some
explanation other than divine action must be found. Being good
for Plato means doing good. Neither god nor man can be really
good without in some way communicating his goodness to others.•
3 Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, chap XV.
4 Cp. e.g. Republic II, 378-9.
' Aristotle develops this line of thought about human goodness finely in Nico111achea11
Ethics IX, 8, II68b-1169a.

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This way of thinking reaches its climax in the description of the

Maker of the world in the Timaeus. 'He was good, and one who is
good is always absolutely without any sort of selfish jealousy
(phthonos): so since he was quite free from this he wanted everything
to be as nearly as possible like himself.' 8 I now think, after having
for many years rather uncritically accepted Cornford's criticisms
of A. E. Taylor's 'Christianising' interpretation of this passage,
that Plato has here come as near as a philosopher could reasonably
be expected to do to the Christian doctrine of God's agape as mani-
fested in creation. And if he had ever combined this doctrine of
divine goodness with his doctrine of eros he would certainly have
come startlingly close to the Christian revelation of God's love.
But he never explicitly did so, perhaps because eros always remained
for him a human passion, however much his conception of it was
purified and extended, and, in accordance with the tradition of
Greek philosophical theology, he is very much concerned to deny
anything like human passions to the gods. We should always
remember when we are considering Greek philosophical theology
that it began in a reaction against the gross anthropomorphism of
the poets, Homer and the rest, who gave the gods bodies, parts and
passions just like men. One of its first great utterances was that of
Xenophanes 'One god, greatest among gods and men, in no way
like mortals in body or thought' (Diels B23), and this tone con-
tiirned in later speculation. This accounts, I think, to a considerable
extent for the tendency of the Greek philosophers to prefer im-
personal ways of speaking about God. (In Plato, of course, the
object of eros, the highest divine perfection, is always presented
as an impersonal Form, not a god, and the evidence - as I think -
is insufficient to determine how he thought of the Forms as related
to the supreme divine intelligence, 'the maker and father of the
universe'.) If we find Greek philosophical theology chilly, we
should remember that the alternative to that chilliness was the heat
of Zeus's embraces and Hera's tempers. Plotinus, the greatest of
Greek philosophical theologians, whose doctrine of eros we shall
next have to consider, could no longer regard poetic theology as a
6
29E: cp. 29A. Here, as at other points in this paper I am much indebted to an
unpublished dissertation by Mr J. M. Rist of Trinity College, Cambridge, which I
have had the opportunity of seeing. His defence of A. E. Taylor's view of this passage
seems to me to be convincing.

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PLATONIC EROS AND CHRISTIAN AGAPE

living enemy; the poets are for him venerable sources of images
and allegories to decorate his thought. But in his critical re-thinking
of Platonic and Aristotelian theology he carries on and develops
the anti-anthropomorphic tendency. His God is the One or Good
who gives good equably, as the sun's light shines upon all, to all
the beings he creates, by an eternal action at once free and inevitable
which does not break his peace, according to their capacity to receive
it: and even at a level far below the Good divine action is tranquil
and universal, without choice or planning or break in contemplation.
This, I think, is why he so much disliked Judaeo-Christian
theism as he understood it. 7 These barbarian theists seemed to him,
in contrast to his own conception, to think of God as a fussy,
arbitrary little deity who, after aeons of inertia, suddenly decided
to create a world and started to make plans and possibly even
collect celestial machinery in order to do so, and would eventually
destroy it with equal caprice, and in his management of it showed
deplorable favouritism and arbitrariness. And before we attack
him on the ground of the extreme 'impersonality' in his conception
of God (which is not by any means wholly impersonal) we should
remember how far our own traditional theology has followed
Plotinus and the Hellenic tradition in bringing out the implications
of God's infinite and eternal perfection. The Church has seen the
amount of truth there was in the Hellenic conceptions and has
laid upon her theologians the obligation of reconciling them with,
not rejecting them in favour of, the personal revelation of God in
Scripture. The personal revelation must of course, for Christians,
have the priority. And it seems to be true that, while someone
who starts with a wholly impersonal conception of God will have
to reject personal conceptions as inadequate or inferior, someone
who is aware of God as a person will be able to accept the truth
contained in impersonal ways of speaking or thinking about him
without inconsistency or loss of anything essential: provided, that
is, that he is prepared to purify his conception of personality of
anthropomorphic elements, of everything in it that derives from
human weakness or simply from the limitations of created being.
1 He may only have known anything about it through the Christian Gnostics who
were members of his circle at Rome: but the criticisms summarised here do not
seem to be aimed at specifically Gnostic ideas.

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And if he is not prepared to do this, if he remains too simple-

mindedly biblical in his thinking, the history of Christian thought
and piety shows only too clearly that he will be in danger of thinking
and speaking about God as if he was a man, and, sometimes, not
even a good man, of representing him as the sort of being whom no
responsible appointing body would choose as the headmaster of a
school or the bishop of a diocese.
We must now consider in some detail Plotinus's doctrine of eras.
At first sight, and especially if we confine our attention to the two
treatises where he is particularly concerned to expound the teaching
of the Symposium and the Phaedrus as he understood it (the early
I 6 [1] On Beauty and the late III 5 [50] On Love), it looks as if
Plotinus had completely missed just the point in Plato's teaching
that Markus and I have been trying to bring out, the idea of eras
as creative, or productive of good in others. For instance, in I 6,
9, 13-15, he uses the metaphor of 'working on the statue' from the
Phaedrus with a very significant change. Plato showed the lover
working on his beloved to make him more godlike, and becoming
more godlike himself in the process. Plotinus exhorts the lover of
absolute beauty to go on working on 'his own statue' so as to make
himself perfect and fit for the final vision. 8 And in III 5, I, he dis-
tinguishes the desire of beauty from the desire of perpetuity, though
admitting that the objects of the two desires are akin, and places
the pure desire of beauty, for itself alone, above that which is mixed
with desire for perpetuity through generation, though asserting
that both are good and legitimate: this effectively rules out the
idea that the highest form of eras is essentially productive and
creative. And further study of the Enneads confirms that for Plotinus
the eros of aspiration to and union with the Good is a solitary love,
a love of one for One (to discuss the reasons for this, and the amount
of truth there is in it, would take us too far from our main theme).
None the less, if we read him carefully, we shall find that he made
some important contributions towards developing the meaning of
eros to the point where it became an appropriate term to use for
the love of God for men.

8Cp. W. Theiler's very pertinent comment on this passage in Plotin Zwischen Plato
und Stoa, Entretiens Hardt V, p. 70.

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PLATONIC EROS AND CHRISTIAN AGAPE

The first point to notice is that the eras for the Good is given
by the Good. The Good, as we have already seen, creates all things,
gives them being, by a process at once free and inevitable, and the
being, which he gives them is a dynamic being which turns back
towards its source, which looks, tends, strives towards him: and
in us this movement back to our source is eras, a love given by and
conforming us to the Good we love. 'The soul loves him, moved
by him to love from the beginning.' (VI 7 [38], 31, 17-18: the whole
chapter is one of the best expressions of this part of his thought.)
Furthermore, Plotinus is prepared, with all the qualifications and
reserves that in his view necessarily apply to any positive terms
which we use about the transcendent source of being, to say that
the Good is not only erasmian, lovable, but is eros. 'He is at once
lovable and love and love of himself' (VI 8 [39], 15, 1). Our soul,
too, when it is on its way to the Good 'lifted by the giver of its
love', itself becomes eros (VI 7, 22, ro). And its eros persists when it
reaches its goal of vision and is perfectly conformed to and united
with the Good, and is then clearly distinguished from oregesthai,
still aspiring, unsatisfied desire (I 6, 7, 14-19). This is also the
significance of the distinction between Eros-god and Eros-daemon
in III 5 (cp. especially 4, 23-25). Plotinus therefore maintains
two of the most important points in Plato's doctrine of eros: the
first, that true eros is always love of the good, a love, that is, that
carries in it its own principle of regulation and purification, that
is not just blind passion: and the second, that it is not just un-
satisfied desire, desire seeking fulfilment, but a Jove which persists
when it has attained to union with its beloved, the absolute Good
which it seeks. And he makes two important additions : one that
eros is caused by the Good, not only in the sense that he is its
'final cause', its object, but in the sense that he gives it in his eternal
creative act, which is the creation of dynamic being 'homed' on
him, whose being is constituted by its movement towards him:
and the other that the Good is himself eros.
Having reached this point, it might seem natural to our way of
thinking that Plotinus should go on to say that the eros which is
the Good extends to all that he causes ; that he should bring to-
gether his doctrine of the universal free giving of good by the Good
and his statement that the good is eros; or at least that he should

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establish some connection between eros and the good pronoia or

providence which (at a divine level far below the Good) directs
everything in the universe for the best, as far as the nature of the
universe allows. But in fact he does nothing of the sort: I, at least,
can find no indication in the Enneads that he ever thought in terms
of the love of God for his creation or for men. One reason for this is
that the idea of eros at its highest as procreative or productive of good
has, as we have seen, dropped out of his account of human love.
But there is another and more important one. Plotinus is always
intensely concerned to maintain that God remains unchanged and
undiminished by his creative giving, that he has no need to produce
and no need of the beings he produces, that it makes no difference
to him whether they exist or not. 'He suffices, and need seek nothing
beyond himself since he transcends all things: He suffices to himself
and the others, being what he is' (VI 7, 37, 29-31). 'He does not
need the things which have come into being from him, but leaves
them altogether alone, because he needs none of them, but is the
same as he was before he brought them into being. He would not
have cared if they had not come into being; and if anything else
could be derived from him he would not grudge it existence. But
as it is, it is not possible for anything else to come into being, and
there is nothing left. He is not all things; if he were he would need
them: but since he transcends all things he can make them and
let them exist by themselves while he remains above them' 0f 5,
12, 41-49). 9 It is clear from this last passage that Plotinus thought
that his doctrine that God is unaffected by creation excluded any
idea of divine love or care for creation. And there are two other
features of his thought which may have helped to keep this idea
out of his mind. One is the doctrine, found everywhere in the
Enneads but most fully expounded in III 8 [30], that divine action,
and the best and most godlike human action, springs directly from
contemplation, without willing or planning or concentration of
attention on the activity. A man, in his opinion, will act more
9 There are of course historical reasons for this insistence that God is unaffected by

what he produces : the influence of Aristotle, reaction against the dynamic materialism
of orthodox Stoicism, in which the divine substance undergoes an endlessly recurring
cyclic change in producing and re-absorbing the universe (though Plotinus's own
doctrine of divine production probably owes something to the Platonizing Stoicism
of Posidonius), and reaction against the melodramatic imaginations of Gnosticism
which he hated so much.

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PLATONIC EROS AND CHRISTIAN AGAPE

virtuously if, instead of thinking 'I propose to perform the-following

virtuous actions', he simply concentrates his mind on virtue so
intensely that the virtuous actions follow naturally and spon-
taneously as occasion requires. And this, apparently, was not only
how he thought but how he Iived.1° The other is his insistence
that man's true self is divine in the sense of being eternal and im-
passible; it cannot change, nothing can ever really happen to it,
it has been given all it needs in the eternal act which constitutes
it in being. 11 This doctrine in its full rigour is held by only Plotinus
and Porphyry, as is now generally recognised by Neoplatonic
scholars, and marks them off clearly from their Middle Platonist
predecessors and later Neoplatonist successors. It would certainly
tend to prevent Plotinus from feeling any need to postulate a divine
love and care for man.
This account of Plotinus's thought brings out very clearly the
challenge presented to Christian theologians by the degree to which
the Church has accepted Hellenic religious philosophy. Those
who follow the Catholic tradition are bound to accept Plotinus's
teaching that creation makes no difference to God, that it does not
react upon him or affect him. They must therefore, when they
speak of God's love for us and all created things with proper
theological precision, make clear that it is a love in which there is
no passivity, that God feels no need for us and cannot be hurt
by our rejection of him. The alternative, if we wish to construct a
really original, un-Hellenic metaphysic of love, is to adopt an
extreme 'kenotic' theory of creation, as well as of redemption:
and this is impossible for Catholics. 12
Plotinus is the greatest of the Platonists, but in many ways (we
have just noticed one of the most important ones) his thought
stands apart from the main Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition.
When we turn to consider the teaching about eros given by the
great systematic expounder of later Neoplatonism, Proclus, we
shall find that it differs from that of Plotinus and is, as I think, in
some ways closer to the real thought of Plato. Proclus the Platonic
10
Porphyry, Life, chap. IX. .
u On this see my Salvation, Ploti11im1 and Christian, DOWNSIDE REVIEW, Sprmg, 1957,
pp. 126-39.
"Cp. the very careful examination of kenotic theologies in P. Henry's article Kenose
in Supplement au Dlctionnaire de la Bible, letter K. cols 7-162.

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THE DOWNSIDE REVIEW

Successor (i.e. head of the Academy at Athens) lived in a world

which was officially Christian (his dates are A.D. 410-485), but he
was, like all the Athenian school of Neoplatonists, an extremely
stalwart pagan, and I can find no serious evidence of Christian
influence on his doctrine of eros, which seems to me to be, for all
the peculiarities of its late Neoplatonist theological setting, an
authentic development of Plato's thought on lines which owe
nothing to the New Testament or Christian theology. In accordance
with the general character of his philosophy, Proclus limits the
scope of eros more rigidly than Plotinus. It is only found in one
particular group of gods and the godlike men who follow them.
But it is interesting and important for our purpose that he does
believe in a divine eros which is a particular manifestation of the
universal divine goodness and moves the gods and their followers
to work for the salvation of men. His most striking and easily
accessible passages on eros are in his commentary on Plato's
Alcibiades /. 13 The following will give some idea of his thought
without plunging us too deeply into the obscure complexities of
late Neoplatonist theology:
' . . . so the whole order of Jove is for all beings the cause of
reversion to the divine beauty, on the one hand elevating to, uniting
with and establishing in it all that is secondary, and on the other
filling therefrom what lies subsequent to itself and making to shine
hereon the communications of divine light that proceed from it'
(30). 14 'For after the unitary and primary principle of love and
triple subsistence and self-perfecting thereof1 5 appears the manifold
mass of loves, whence the choirs of angels are filled with their
participation of love, the bands of spirits through the fullness
imparted by this god accompany the gods in their ascent to intelligible
13 Throughout this section I am much indebted to the work on the Alcibiades com-
mentary of my friend and pupil Mr W. O'Neill, whose translation I quote.
"The numbers are those of Creuzer's pages, given in the margin of the edition of
L. G. Westerink (Amsterdam i954), whose text has been translated by Mr O'Neill.
10
As it would require another article roughly twice the length of this one merely to
sketch the theology of Proclus, I will simply state my own belief, based on very
thorough researches by Mr O'Neill, that neither this triplicity nor the mysterious
three gods who appear later in the commentary (51) on whom the famous triad pistis,
aletheia, eros, depend, show any influence of Christian theology. The pistis of Proclus
is not Christian faith but Platonic firm rational confidence: and the triadic structure
runs through his whole system and has clearly non-Christian origins. Proclus's angels,
of course, come from Judaism, via the 'Chaldean Oracles' (from which the triads
also derive).

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beauty, the armies of heroes revel with the spirits and angels because
of their sharing in the beautiful, and everything as it were is aroused,
re-kindled and warmed in respect of "the effluence of beauty".
Furthermore, men's souls receive a share of such inspiration, and
through intimacy with the god are moved with regard to the beauti-
ful, and descend to the region of coming-to-be for the benefit of
less perfect souls and out of forethought for those in need of sal-
vation. For the gods and their followers "abiding in their own
characters" benefit and turn back to themselves all that is secondary,
and men's souls descending and laying hold on process imitate
the providence of the gods, which has the form of goodness' (31-32).
Here, it seems to me, we have an authentic development of
Plato's thought about eros, in particular of the Phaedrus (as often
in Proclus, this passage has very little to do with the text of
Alcibiades I ro3A on which he is supposed to be commenting:
it would be unduly polite to call its exegetical foundation 'insecure'
- it is hardly there at all). Eros here is not an acquisitive, grasping,
self-centred desire. It is a great uniting and harmonising force,
which spreads down from above through the vast complexities of
the Proclan divine universe, holding it together and inspiring it in
the ascent to its source and goal: and it is a force which moves the
gods and men who share in it to work for the perfection and salvation
of those less good than themselves. At the end of the second pas-sage
quoted it is clearly presented as a form of the divine goodness which
expresses itself as divine providence: that is, we have here the link
between eros and bonum dif!usivum sui which was missing in Plato
and Plotinus. 16
16 How positively Proclus understood the supreme Good's diffusion of itself can be
seen from the following passage of the Alcibiades commentary : 'The Good from
above - seated as it is beyond the intellectual nature - if it is lawful to say so,
proceeds to the last limits, and illuminates all things and preserves and adorns all
things and turns them towards itself' (181). The 'if it is lawful to say so' (ei thenzis
eipeiu) suggests that he thinks this is a bold use of language, which might shock
some Neoplatonists: it would probably have shocked Plotinus, especially as Proclus
goes on to make clear that by 'the last limits' he means formless matter. In his account
of the action of the Good which follows it is interesting to note that on the human level
the return to the Good comes about through fellowship and consultation, and the
uniting of the many by one good counsellor, to secure that unity and self-sufficiency
(characteristics of the good), which each individual cannot attain by himself (182).
Proclus)s dynamic conception of the divine goodness, and his idea of eros as a uniting
and harmonising force, owe a good deal to the 'Chaldean Oracles' (late second
century A.o.). These, like other theosophical literature of the period, reflect in
mythical form a type of dynamic Platonism which first appears in Philo: cp. H.
Lewy, Chaldaean Omcles and Theurgy (Cairo 1956), chap. VI, especially pp. 345-53.

II7
THE DOWNSIDE REVIEW

Jn the modern Christian account of philosophic eros with which

we started, this kind of love was presented as a desire aspiring to
its divine object with which that object had nothing to do except
precisely as object of desire, a desire, in fact, like that which moves
the heavenly spheres in Aristotle's Metaphysics (1072 a-b). It was
alleged to be a purely human aspiration, which was not God and
was not caused by God except as 'final cause' or object, and which
did not result in love of other men for God's sake. Our examination
of the ancient evidence for the Platonic doctrine of true or philo-
sophic eros has shown that Plato, Plotinus and Proclus between
them present it as a Jove which is not simply aspiration or un-
fulfilled desire, because it persists when the lover finds fulfilment
in union with the object of his love; a Jove which when it reaches
fulfilment becomes productive and creative; a love which moves
the lover to work for the good of his human beloved and find
his own good in so doing; a love which God is, and which he causes
in men in the act by which he constitutes them in being; a love
which expresses the divine goodness in uniting all beings and leading
them back to their source, and in moving gods, spirits and godlike
men to work for the salvation of those whom it is their mission
to help. As we have seen, not all these points of doctrine are to be
found in the writings of Plato himself, or in any one of his successors:
and I have tried to indicate the limitations of each. But I think it
has been shown that the pagan Platonists were able to develop all
these ideas about eros from Plato's original insights without any
help from outside the bounds of the Hellenic philosophical tradition.
And this is surely enough to make it clear that the conventional
modern Christian account is inadequate and inaccurate, and that
Origen and the Greek Christian writers who followed him in this
were right in thinking that eros in the sense in which it was used
by the Platonic philosophers was a word which could rightly be
used for the agape of God revealed in Christ.
To say that the word could rightly be used by Christians in
speaking of God's love for men means that the New Testament
and the Platonic philosophers were not talking about two essentially
different kinds oflove. It does not, of course, mean that the Christian
revelation had nothing more to tell us about love than we can find

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PLATONIC EROS AND CHRISTIAN AGAPE

in the philosophers: and if Origen ever thought that it did 17 he was

clearly wrong. In trying to state what that something more is
which the revelation of Christ has to tell us we must be careful not
to fall into the common error of Christian apologists of giving a
distorted or incomplete picture of our own beliefs in order to inake
the contrast with those of others more striking. One such possible
distortion has already been mentioned, when we were discussing
Plotinus, that of talking as if we held an extreme 'kenotic' view
of God's saving action, according to which God can really be made
to suffer in his divine nature by the creatures for whom he reveals
his love in the sacrifice of Christ. If we intend to hold the Catholic
faith, we must, in all our thought and talk about this supreme
revelation of God's love, preserve the tremendous antinomy of
the orthodox teaching about the God-Man, that, at the moment
when Christ was dying on the Cross for the salvation of the world,
he was sustaining cross and world in being in the unbroken, eternal,
peace and glory of the Trinity. And another distortion is possible
on the other side, if we lay an emphasis on the total undeserving-
ness, the worthlessness of the sinful men for whom Christ died
which can only be justified by the heretical doctrine of total depravity.
The metaphysical undeservingness of man, so to speak, is firmly
established in the Neoplatonism of Plotinus. All that he is, is given,
and he has no independent good which will justify him in saying
to the Good 'I deserve and have a right to demand my salvation'.
And according to Catholic teaching sinful man has still a created,
given, worth simply because he is man. The lost sheep is still a
sheep: the lost coin still bears the image, however dirty and defaced.
Christ died for sinners, but for sinners to whom he had given in
creating them a worth which all their efforts could not altogether
destroy. But, after all, when we have done our best to talk in terms
of sound theology and not of rhetorical piety, when we have refused
to draw an unhistorically and untheologically exaggerated contrast
between the Christian God who suffers for utterly worthless sinners
and the passionless deity of the philosophers who only gives the
good their due, the distance between the speculations of the Platonists
17Cp. Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy, pp. 89-90. I do not now feel at all as sure
as Dr Markus and most modern scholars that Origen misinterpreted the eros-
passage in Ignatius Romans vii, l.

ll9
THE DOWNSIDE REVIEW

and the revelation of God's love in Christ remains great enough

to satisfy any reasonable Christian and to convince any reasonable
unbeliever that Christianity has something to offer which cannot
be found elsewhere. The Christian revelation gives us a new kind
of assurance. Faith in Christ is something very different from assent
to the conclusion of a philosophical speculation about God's love
(though it does not destroy or contradict that assent). This would
remain true even if Christ had done no more than live out the
myth of some pagan 'saviour' and confirm with his authority the
teachings of some pagan philosophers. The fact that he, the In-
carnate Son of God, had really done and taught these things would
still have made all the difference. The essential uniqueness of
Christianity lies, not in any theory about love or anything else,
but in the fact of Christ. But the revelation of God's love in the
Incarnation and Redemption does really show us that it has a depth,
intensity and universality far beyond anything that anyone ever
thought or imagined. It far surpasses, though it does not contradict,
the conclusions of the philosophers. The proclamation of the good
news that God has shown his love for us by becoming man and
living, dying and rising again for us, made without exaggeration
and with all necessary theological safeguards, at once enlarges
our understanding of divine, and human, love beyond the limits
set to it by natural experience.

ADDITIONAL NOTE

Another late Neoplatonist who found in Plato's Phaedrus the

idea that philosophic eros should move us to work for the good
of our fellow-men was Hierocles, who lectured at Alexandria from
about 420, and had been a pupil of Plutarch the Great of Athens
who taught Syrianus, the master of Proclus, and, in his extreme
old age, Proclus himself. Hierocles was a very old-fashioned Platon-
ist, whose thought was curiously little affected by Plotinian and
post-Plotinian developments. It is probable, though not certain,
that he was influenced at some points by Jewish or Christian ideas.
But the passage in which he interprets the 'philosophic paederasty'

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PLATONIC EROS AND CHRISTIAN AGAPE

of the Phaedrus is so completely Platonic in thought and context

that it would be unreasonable to suspect any Christian influence
here. It is preserved by Photius in his Bibliotheca (cod. 251, pp.
464-66 Bekker). Hierocles takes (wrongly) the 'genuine philosopher'
and the 'philosophic lover' of Phaedrus 249A as two distinct people.
The first is a contemplative utterly detached from the affairs of this
world, according to the philosophic idea of Plotinus. The second is
identified with the philosopher-rulers of the Republic. He is just as
genuine a contemplative as the other, but he tries to impart to
others the intelligible goods he contemplates and bases a political
and educative activity on his contemplation. Being a lover means
caring for his fellow-men and bringing beauty and order into the
lives of his kindred. And, Hierocles says, the two kinds of life,
the purely contemplative and the contemplative-loving, are equal
in honour and lead those who live them back equally quickly to
the divine world (cp. W. Theiler's remarks on this passage in his
paper, already cited, in Entretiens Hardt V, p. 68, where he draws
the contrast with the teaching of Plotinus which Hierocles certainly
intended).

[Prof. Gray's article, 'Pain, Consciousness and Death', announced

for this issue, is unavoidably held over until July- Eo.]

12!