Plotinus on the Dual Aphrodite

Plotinus · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 4 pages

Four pages from Plotinus on Eros in the translation by Stephen MacKenna and B.S. Page, followed by scholia from Thomas Taylor referring to the Orphic Hymns.

The enquiry begins with a discrepancy in Plato himself: Eros is called the child of Aphrodite, and yet the Symposium says he was not her child but was born on the day of her birth, with Penia — Poverty — as mother and Poros — Possession — as father. That forces the prior question of who Aphrodite is, and the answer is that she is twofold. There is the heavenly Aphrodite, daughter of Ouranos, who was not born of a mother and has no part in marriages because in heaven there is no marrying; and there is the daughter of Zeus and Dione, who presides over earthly unions. The heavenly one is identified with the Soul at its divinest — the immediate and unmingled emanation of the unmingled, remaining always Above because it is neither desirous nor capable of descending, never having developed the downward tendency, and so mythically called the unmothered. From this Plotinus draws the conclusion that soul could never fall from its sphere, held closer to the divine Mind than the sun can hold the light it radiates. Love is then placed precisely: the Soul, directing its act towards its author and holding to him in love, brings forth Eros, through whom it continues to look towards him — so that Love is a real being, an offspring which gazes with its mother upon Divine Mind, and is the medium between desire and the object of desire. The formulation the file turns on is that Love is the eye of the desirer, by whose power what loves is enabled to see the loved thing, and that it is filled with the sight before it becomes the vehicle of vision. Taylor's scholia close the file by defending exactly this kind of reading, arguing that the sportive conceptions about the gods — such as Venus arising from foam — can be energised intellectually by those who approach them in the right way.

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