How To Be An Agnostic
However, it also perpetuates the idea that love can be com-
pleted. It feeds into the romantic myth that there is someone
out there for you, who, once found, will perfect your life. What
can be overlooked is its dark undercurrents. Should two people
fi nd their lost halves in each other, the myth says that their
embrace is total. Aristophanes imagines Hephaestus passing by
two such lovers and asking them what they want. Being the
craftsman god, they ask him to weld them together. Once so
fused, the lovers are unable to move. It is as if they are dead.
Socrates relates the second myth which was given to him
by Diotima, the priestess. It is the tale of the birth of Eros,
following the sexual congress of Penia and Poros, poverty and
resourceful cunning. This myth portrays love as a desire for
what one lacks too but, unlike Aristophanes’ myth, that lack
can never be wholly satisfi ed by fi nding a lover. Neither does it
seek only lovers, for it strives ultimately for wisdom.
Moreover, Eros himself is not a god, but moves in between
the realm of the gods and human beings. In other words, that
human beings love is simultaneously the sign that they aspire to
divine things, though they can never reach them. After all, gods
do not love, for they lack nothing. Whatever the joys of such an
existence might be, they are not the joys of what human love
can achieve, like children (a pregnancy of the body, Diotima
says) and philosophy (a pregnancy of the soul).
Socrates’ encounter with Diotima does not stop there. She
tells him that if the origins of Eros is the lower mystery of love,
the higher mystery is the upper path along which love can lead
someone. This is the famous ascent of the Symposium. What it
describes is the way that love’s continuous desire for what is
true leads the individual from loving others to loving beauti-
ful things, to eventually loving what is beautiful itself. Like the
light that leaps from a diamond, hiding the gem itself, this is a
theophany, a sense of the divine, a glimpse of something too
beautiful to grasp in its entirety. The test is the beautiful things
the vision inspires in people’s lives – the love the individual
shows.