But to take Plato as meaning, by Eros, this Universe- and not simply the Love native within it- involves much that is self-contradictory.
For one thing, the universe is described as a blissful god and as self-sufficing, while this "Love" is confessedly neither divine nor self-sufficing but in ceaseless need.
Again, this Kosmos is a compound of body and soul; but Aphrodite to Plato is the Soul itself, therefore Aphrodite would necessarily- he a constituent part of Eros, dominant member! A man is the man's Soul, if the world is, similarly, the world's Soul, then Aphrodite, the Soul, is identical with Love, the Kosmos! And why should this one spirit, Love, be the Universe to the exclusion of all the others, which certainly are sprung from the same Essential-Being?
Our only escape would be to make the Kosmos a complex of Supernals.
Love, again, is called the Dispenser of beautiful children: does this apply to the Universe? Love is represented as homeless, bedless and barefooted: would not that be a shabby description of the Kosmos and quite out of the truth?
6.What then, in sum, is to be thought of Love and of his "birth" as we are told of it?
Clearly we have to establish the significance, here, of Poverty and Possession, and show in what way the parentage is appropriate:
we have also to bring these two into line with the other Supernals since one spirit nature, one spirit essence, must characterize all unless they are to have merely a name in common.
We must, therefore, lay down the grounds on which we distinguish the Gods from the Celestials- that is, when we emphasize the separate nature of the two orders and are not, as often in practice, including these Spirits under the common name of Gods.
It is our teaching and conviction that the Gods are immune to all passion while we attribute experience and emotion to the Celestials which, though eternal Beings and directly next to the Gods, are already a step towards ourselves and stand between the divine and the human.
But by what process was the immunity lost? What in their nature led them downwards to the inferior?
And other questions present themselves.
Does the Intellectual Realm include no member of this spirit order, not even one? And does the Kosmos contain only these spirits, God being confined to the Intellectual? Or are there Gods in the sub-celestial too, the Kosmos itself being a God, the third, as is commonly said, and the Powers down to the Moon being all Gods as well?
It is best not to use the word "Celestial" of any Being of that Realm; the word "God" may be applied to the Essential-Celestial- the autodaimon- and even to the Visible Powers of the Universe of Sense down to the Moon; Gods, these too, visible, secondary, sequent upon the Gods of the Intellectual Realm, consonant with Them, held about Them, as the radiance about the star.
What, then, are these spirits?
A Celestial is the representative generated by each Soul when it enters the Kosmos.
And why, by a Soul entering the Kosmos?
Because Soul pure of the Kosmos generates not a Celestial Spirit but a God; hence it is that we have spoken of Love, offspring of Aphrodite the Pure Soul, as a God.
But, first what prevents every one of the Celestials from being an Eros, a Love? And why are they not untouched by Matter like the Gods?
On the first question: Every Celestial born in the striving of the Soul towards the good and beautiful is an Eros; and all the Souls within the Kosmos do engender this Celestial; but other Spirit-Beings, equally born from the Soul of the All, but by other faculties of that Soul, have other functions: they are for the direct service of the All, and administer particular things to the purpose of the Universe entire.The Soul of the All must be adequate to all that is and therefore must bring into being spirit powers serviceable not merely in one function but to its entire charge.
But what participation can the Celestials have in Matter, and in what Matter?
Certainly none in bodily Matter; that would make them simply living things of the order of sense.And if, even, they are to invest themselves in bodies of air or of fire, the nature must have already been altered before they could have any contact with the corporeal.The Pure does not mix, unmediated, with body- though many think that the Celestial-Kind, of its very essence, comports a body aerial or of fire.
But why should one order of Celestial descend to body and another not? The difference implies the existence of some cause or medium working upon such as thus descend.What would constitute such a medium?
We are forced to assume that there is a Matter of the Intellectual Order, and that Beings partaking of it are thereby enabled to enter into the lower Matter, the corporeal.
7.This is the significance of Plato's account of the birth of Love.
The drunkenness of the father Poros or Possession is caused by Nectar, "wine yet not existing"; Love is born before the realm of sense has come into being: Penia had participation in the Intellectual before the lower image of that divine Realm had appeared; she dwelt in that Sphere, but as a mingled being consisting partly of Form but partly also of that indetermination which belongs to the Soul before she attains the Good and when all her knowledge of Reality is a fore-intimation veiled by the indeterminate and unordered: in this state Poverty brings forth the Hypostasis, Love.
This, then, is a union of Reason with something that is not Reason but a mere indeterminate striving in a being not yet illuminated: