Abstrakt
This paper provides an interpretation of the Stoic notion of bodily beauty as symmetry of parts with respect to one another and to the whole. Symmetry is caused by the structuring activity of the rational spirit in multiplicity, making the beautiful thing an ordered whole.
This is true for particular bodies in the world and, even more so, for the cosmos as a particular world order. I follow some traces in Stoic texts suggesting that this is also (and a fortiori) true for the cosmos, in the sense of God in conflagration that somehow represents symmetry in its purest state.