If Eros Is a God
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Socrates — εἰ δʼ ἔστιν, ὥσπερ οὖν ἔστι, θεὸς ἤ τι θεῖον ὁ Ἔρως, οὐδὲν ἂν κακὸν εἴη.
But if Eros is — as indeed he is — a god, or something divine, he could be nothing evil. Yet the two speeches just now spoke of him as though he were.
Stopped by the daimonion and made to see his offense, Socrates puts his finger on exactly what was wrong with both speeches — his own and Lysias's — in a single logical step.
This is the argument that turns the whole dialogue around, and it is disarmingly simple. The daimonion stopped Socrates at the ford and named his fault an 'offense against the divine' (242c); now Socrates spells out the offense in one syllogism. Both speeches so far — Lysias's cold dismissal of the lover, and Socrates's own first speech defining love as a species of appetite and hubris (238a) — treated Eros as something to be avoided, a sickness, a danger, in a word <em>kakón</em>, bad. But Eros is a god. And a god cannot be <em>kakón</em>; the divine is by definition good. Therefore both speeches were not merely mistaken but <em>blasphemous</em>: they slandered a deity. The whole recantation, the whole soaring palinode about to come, is generated by this small, rigorous point of piety. Socrates does not decide love is good because he has changed his feelings; he deduces it from the premise that Eros is divine.<br><br>The reasoning rests on a conviction the dialogue never argues for because, for a Greek of Plato's cast, it needs none: the divine is good, entire and without remainder. This is the same theology as the gods without envy at 247a and the maker of the world in the <em>Timaeus</em> who, 'being good,' made all things as good as possible. It marks the great divide between Plato's philosophical religion and the older popular one, where gods were as capable of malice as of favor — the very Eros of the poets could be cruel, a torturer, 'bittersweet.' Plato will keep the bitterness (the palinode's love is agony, the wing sprouting like a fever) but refuse the badness: love hurts, but it is never <em>evil</em>, because it comes from a god, and gods are good. Everything the palinode builds — that the maddening pain of love is the greatest gift heaven gives — stands on this one deduction. Correct your theology, and your whole account of the human heart must follow.
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