Page 53 - GALIET BEAUTY´S LURE: WAR Helen of Troy and Margareta of Germany IV

Nazism begins to tyrannize the disfranchised and Europe with its romantic neo-classical ideologies of ideal beauty.
In this despotic bacchanal, and perverse lesson of literature and history, Paris’ love of Helen’s beautiful body does not whatsoever lead to lovely Diotima, the wise woman of Mantinea whose mysteries of love draw Socrates on high. Neither will Hitler’s passion for his ideal Platonisms will lead to her wondrous ladder, and neither Paris nor Hitler, nor Troy nor Europe will ascend towards the contemplation of the ideal, wondrous, eternal, unchanging Form of Beauty itself,97 by loving the physical beauty of another first, or by aspiring to enforce the envisioned beautiful form of Beauty and the Good in itself as Plato envisioned while dreaming of Diotima, his own eternal feminine, in the dark hours of Athens’ moral fall and decay. Sadly, Lady Beauty’s dreadful gaze transfixes, and leads humanity astray, not to the ideal Form, but to a shapeless form. Sadly, humanity descends towards an abominable formlessness, an abyss of uncanny blindness, and darkness, a Dantesque Inferno, or modern Tartarus, a wasteland as dreadful as T.S. Eliot’s, or as dreary as Auden’s Shield of Achilles. No, Diotima’s beautiful dream, and her ascending ladder collapses in Troy and Nazi Germany. Plato’s theory of Love and Forms succumbs in practice: falling in love with a beautiful body does not lead to an anabasis towards noble thoughts, nor to loving two bodies, and “from two to [loving] all beautiful bodies,” and from these, in turn, to loving the beauty of soul, and thereafter to loving moral beauty, and then
97 Plato. Symposium. 209e-212c.
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