To me, Helen and Paris’ relationship sounded like vital love. It did not seem to me (I may be wrong) that it had the pure love and devotion like that of Sita-Ram, Radha-Krishna and Savitri-Satyavan. In movies also, it seems like that. If vital love is so bad, then why does Sri Aurobindo glorify it so much in the Illion? I don’t doubt Him. I’m sure He has a reason for it. But I can’t understand why.
Also, with due respect, I don’t understand what the qualities in Helen are and why she is considered great. Yes, she was very beautiful, but her other qualities don’t stand out much. Could you please tell me why she is considered great?
Psychic and spiritual love is anyways very rare. But vital love, as we see in the story of Urvasie and Pururavas, Ruru and Pramadvara, or Uloopie and Arjuna, can have its own human beauty as we discover in Sri Aurobindo’s poems on these themes. Greatness need not be confined to the psychic alone. There can be beauty and the spirit of sacrifice in vital love, for example, in the story of Padmavati or Subhadra. Vital is an aspect of nature. It needs to be ennobled in humanity. It is only when one takes to the yoga that it needs to be sublimated and uplifted, eventually transformed. But these epics are not about that. They are about the spirit of man through all the challenges of life.
The love between Paris and Helen is no doubt largely a vital love. Yet it is not vital alone. There is in it a touch of higher idealism wherein both Paris and the Trojans decide to fight back for their love putting everything at stake instead of simply returning her back. Ilion was not meant to be a story of love anyways. It was the story of the collapse of a civilisation that had developed along lines of military might and introduce there the seeds of beauty and love. That is how a new culture, Hellenism, was born and spread from Greece to Europe in the aftermath of the war, destroying the Kshatriya class growing mighty in power.
Helen did not stand for love, nor did she come to Troy as a goddess of love. No doubt Paris loved her passionately but Helen embodied the force of destruction behind a beautiful face. She was Kali, to put it in the Indian context. She accomplished her mission of destroying the old civilisation and clear the ground for a new dawn, from the Age of codes and rule-based order in the Bronze Age to the rule of the common man, the Dark Age of Iron.
However, the real story of love, a deep psychic love is there between Odysseus and Penelope, to which Homer dedicated the second epic, The Odyssey. The movie was more about that rather than about Helen and Paris who were hardly given enough space.
Hope it is bit clearer now.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
