Love | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

The goodness that God sees in his creation is its beauty and to feel the beauty of the world is to love it and its Creator.

Classical Mythology

The word eros as it is found in Homer is not the name of a god but simply a common noun meaning "love" or "desire." In Hesiod's Theogony Eros becomes one of the three primordial gods, the other two being Chaos and Earth. Although Eros has no offspring and seems to play no role in the genealogy of the gods, he has the greatest power over his fellow immortals. He unnerves the limbs and overcomes the reason of both gods and men. When Aphrodite is born from the sperm of Uranus (Heaven), Eros and Himeros (desire, longing, lust) accompany her into the council of the gods. Whether Hesiod was talking in terms of personalized abstractions or was actually thinking of anthropomorphic beings is not clear, for the Theogony is a curious mixture of both kinds of expression. For the history of philosophy, the importance of Hesiod's brief mention of Eros lies in the attribution to him of a power that is the enemy of reason. Something similar is to be found in Sophocles' Antigone in the chorus that is sung just after Creon has announced that Antigone must die for having buried her brother's body.

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