Neo-Neo-Platonism

Since I can't seem to go to any news sites or blogs today without again looking at Miss California in a bikini, it seems like a topic worth revisiting. In my attempt to intellectualize beauty pageants, it strikes me that, at least for Christians, this is one of those cases where Neo-Platonism seems...to hold up uncannily well.

Platonism (and I don't mean to insult the intelligence of our regular readers) argues that earthly matter is the shadowy, distorted reflection of some ideal form residing in some ethereal plane. It has a tendency to spill over into a form of aesthetics that then associates beauty with perfection, purity, and goodness. As a corollary, that which is imperfect, impure, and bad is generally also brutish and ugly.

For the most part, human experience, and Renaissance love poetry, proves this is horribly, horribly not true. That which is most beautiful is usually a deceptive trap, a mask concealing murky nastiness beneath.

But then you have this refreshingly Platonic case of Miss California: a moment where truth just happens to come in the form of beauty. She seems a pretty sincere, straightforward, Christian girl.
We might still have our suspicions about her as a private individual -- she might not be perfect, but she's at least appears to be one of the good guys until someone can find an incriminating Facebook photo of her.

On the other side you have her antagonist: Perez Hilton. Nasty, cruel, vindicative, ugly, and morally dubious.

It plays out like a war of Neo-Platonic stereotypes: the upstanding, sincere, attractive, heteronormalized beauty queen juxtaposed with the slimy, subversive, repugnant, gay gossip queen.

And, of course, every time potty-mouth Perez Hilton has used derogatory language and cusswords to describe his adversary, she has responded with Christian proclamations of love for those who hate her (at least on the FoxNews interviews I've seen).

But if God doesn't want us becoming to enamored of Platonic ideals, however, there's always Susan Boyle waiting in the wings to remind us that looks, in the end, can be deceiving...

Comments

[Serena]

I don't watch pageants and was only dimly aware that a beauty queen was being attacked for her faith. I guess it's no surprise that the beauty industry isn't a safe place to uphold decency -- glimpse any recent fashion magazine to see what I mean -- but it is sickening that they spew the volume of venom toward virtue that they spew this year. It struck me recently that the typical secular-liberal accusation of "hate" is a projection.