Insofar as Beauty is considered as a Form, it is difficult to understand how the "shapelessness and ugliness of matter" that the vulgar lover rushes towards should be graced with a peculiar kind of beauty, viz "material beauty".
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But the material beauty that vulgar love seeks to appropriate is not some form that he can grasp with his mind, but a material body that he grasps and clutches and fumbles at with his hands. How can this be considered beautiful if beauty is only a Form?
If we consider, however, that there is ultimately a God of beauty, (or stated otherwise, and slightly misleadingly, that Beauty is a God) we have a solution.
For unlike Forms, gods are present in the perceptual world not only through images that are like them but through symbols that can very well be unlike them." -
@philoantonio.bsky.social, in "The Beautiful World and the Beautiful Helen: on the Ambiguity of Beauty in Proclus"
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@philoantonio.bsky.social, in "The Beautiful World and the Beautiful Helen: on the Ambiguity of Beauty in Proclus"