COMEDY

80 THE BODYBEAUTY AND ABJECTIONIn Western culture, the human body is subject to discourses andregulatory regimes that form and instruct it according to anideologically driven idea of how it should appear and how it may beproperly used. A key theme is its divided nature, capable at once ofstunning beauty and grace, and also disease and foul excretions, like atemple built over a sewer. The idealization of beauty in the West hasone root in the Platonic system that understood the contemplation ofphysical perfection as a necessary step on the course to absoluteknowledge. In The Symposium (c. 371 BC), Socrates encourages hisfriends to use beauty as a ladder to the truth, urging them,to begin with examples of beauty in this world, and using them assteps to ascend continually with the absolute beauty as one’s aim,from one instance of physical beauty to two and from two to all,then from physical beauty to moral beauty, and from moral beautyto the beauty of knowledge, until from knowledge of variouskinds one arrives at the supreme knowledge whose sole object isthat absolute beauty, and knows at last what absolute beauty is.(Plato, 1951:94)Beauty in human beings is therefore a partial reflection of an absolutebeauty that is good, virtuous, and metaphysically inseparable fromtruth. For Aristotle, the kernel of beauty lay in perfect orderliness,writing that ‘the chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry anddefiniteness’ (quoted in Synott, 1993:80). A parallel idea can be foundin the Old Testament’s book of Isaiah: ‘The carpenter stretcheth out hisrule; he marketh it out with a line; he fitteth it with planes, and hemarketh it out with the compass, and maketh it after the figure of aman, according to the beauty of a man’ (44:13). Classical architectureused perfect bodily proportion as a divinely gifted template for theorganization of buildings, especially temples, a principle developed bythe Roman architect and military engineer Vitruvius (fl. first centuryAD). In Book III of his De Architectura, he writes, ‘No temple can haveany compositional system without symmetry and proportion, unless, asit were, it has an exact system of correspondence to the likeness of awell-formed human being’ (Vitruvius, 1999:47). A beautiful humanform is therefore the perfect compositional template, its symmetry andproportion constituting an embodiment of the divine plan.