God's Handmaiden

In Plato's Symposium, love is viewed as a daimon, a go-between or mediator between humans and gods. (202e). That makes some sense, for we think of love as desire for something or someone, a yearning for union with a good. The daimons or spirits "fill up the space between heaven and earth and help bind the whole universe together, enabling gods and men to connect." (203a). Diotima, who explains this to Socrates, describes the daimon Love as "always barefoot and homeless, sleeping under a roof or sky or in the doorways of strangers." (203d). In fact, this is an image of Socrates, who performs this function in Athens.

As Adriaan Peperzak explains in "Erotics"at p. 209 of Platonic Transformations, "Plato thus places [Socrates] in the center of the cosmos. The demonic nature of Socrates (whose discourses would in a Christian context perhaps have been called angelic) is inspired, but its universal message is carried out in a conduct both everyday and extraordinary that holds together and holds apart the dimensions of the divine and the human. In the Gorgias, a text less ecstatic than that of the Symposium, it is expressed in this way: 'All the sages say, Callicles, that heaven and earth, gods and humans, are bound together by solidarity and friendship and decency and moderation and justice. Therefore they call the universe a kosmos, i.e., a well-ordered and splendid whole, not a chaos or mess" (507e-508a).'"

Who could claim that love is unimportant?! It is the glue that gathers the cosmos into one. Still, Peperzak stresses that love is not a god, and it is a mistake to confuse eros, desire, or love itself with what is desired or loved. In other words, the god of love is God, whereas love is God's handmaiden, His angel.

I read a poem by Osip Mandelstam in his book "Stone" (1913) called Silentium (no. 14) (Silence), which seems to address the same subject. Here it is (in English, not Russian) (quoted in Mandelstam, Clarence Brown, pp. 165-66):

It has not yet been born,
it is music and the word,
and thereby inviolably
bonds everything that lives.

The breast of the sea breathes tranquilly
but the day is brilliant, like a fool,
and the pale lilac of the foam
lies in a bowl of cloudy blue.

May my lips acquire this
primeval quietness
like a crystal note
congenitally pure.

Remain foam, Aphrodite;
and return to music, word,
and heart, be ashamed of heart
when blent with life's foundation!

Silence? Love? "It" in Russian (Oha) can be both "it" or "she." Ibid. Aphrodite, goddess of love, like silence, "bonds everything that lives," like the harmony of music, the dialogue of words. Love (and silence) fills the spaces, the interstices, of parts to make a whole. And it keeps the parts distinct, respectful of each other, even "ashamed" in the presence of life's foundation, the good (or God) who lies beyond all.