Helen of Troy

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Helen of Troy is the figure of Greek legend whose beauty was held to be the cause of the Trojan War: daughter of Zeus and Leda, wife of the Spartan king Menelaus, carried off to Troy by the prince Paris. Homer makes her the still point at the center of the Iliad’s violence, watched and blamed and never quite condemned. For most of Western history she has stood simply for beauty itself — beauty as a thing worth ruin.

What gives her a place in this collection is a stranger afterlife, in which the name “Helen” came loose from the Spartan queen and was attached to a doctrine of the soul. The earliest report comes from the second-century heresiologists, who described the teaching of Simon Magus, the Samaritan named in Acts as a rival to the apostles. According to Irenaeus and the writings gathered under Clement’s name, Simon traveled with a woman called Helena, said to have been found in a brothel in Tyre, and taught that she was the incarnation of the Ennoia — the First Thought of God, the divine intelligence that had descended from the highest heaven, made the world, and then been seized and imprisoned by the powers she had made. Trapped, she passed from body to body down the centuries; the Helen over whom Greeks and Trojans had bled was, on this telling, one of her captivities. Simon presented himself as the supreme power come down to rescue her, and through her all souls. The sources are hostile, written to discredit; how much answers to anything Simon actually held is impossible to recover. But the pattern they describe — a feminine divine wisdom fallen into matter and awaiting deliverance — recurs across the second- and third-century currents, where it is told of Sophia rather than Helena. The Simonian Helen reads as the same myth wearing a famous name.

A second afterlife is literary. In the Faust legend that took shape in late sixteenth-century Germany and reached England in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the magician’s culminating prize is Helen of Troy, conjured from the dead as the perfect image of earthly beauty and embraced as a demon in a beautiful shape. Goethe, two centuries later, made the Helen of his Faust the whole of the classical past summoned into the modern soul and unable to stay. In both, Helen is what desire reaches for and cannot keep.

The two afterlives are not connected by any historical line, and the entry holds them apart. What links them is suggestive rather than genetic: in each, the name of the most beautiful woman in the world is made to carry the weight of something larger — wisdom in exile, or beauty that destroys the one who summons it. The queen of Sparta proved a durable vessel for meanings she never held in Homer.

→ In the library: Mead — Simon Magus: An Essay (1892) · Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906)

→ Related: Gnosis · Clementine Literature · Eros