The Beauty of Reason

Reason is the natural beauty of rational beings, and the beauty of reason is the precise understanding that beauty of such understanding is a fertile state of mind in which virtue is joined to reason. The beauty of this state is the unerring contemplation of true knowledge, the consummation of which is wisdom, since wisdom is obviously the fulfillment of understanding as well as the perfection of reason according to nature. Reason thus perfected is a pure intellect that, through union with its divine Cause, has acquired a relation transcending intellection, according to which the intellect¬—having ceased from its multiform natural motion and relation to things subsequent to the Cause, and having reached the ineffable limit—cleaves in a manner beyond cognition solely to the all-blessed silence that transcends intellection [paraphrasing Dionysios the Areopagite, Divine Names 1.1]. Reason and intellection cannot in any way give expression to this silence, which is revealed only to those who have experienced it through direct participation, having been counted worthy of spiritual joy transcending all intellection. The sign of this joy, which is readily discernible and distinctly clear to all, is the soul’s disposition of absolute imperturbability and detachment with regard to this age.

1.1.2. Knowing, then, that nothing is more proper to rational beings than reason, and that nothing is more fitting for the spiritual nobility of those who love God than the understanding and exercise of reason—and when I speak of “reason” I am not referring to a reasoned discourse [logos], fashioned through mere rhetorical artifice and cleverly concocted to please the ear through lovely speech, which even immoral men are capable of producing. Rather, I am speaking of the hidden reason that nature—essentially and independently of any learning—possesses by its inner character, which it has received for the unerring examination of beings and for the true comprehension of their inner principles [logoi]. Once this reason has been well formed by means of the virtues, the Holy Spirit of God naturally becomes its intimate companion, and fashions it into a divine image, according to the likeness of the Spirit’s own beauty, so that by grace it lacks nothing of the attributes that belong to the Divinity by nature. For reason is the instrument that with consummate skill gathers together the whole manifestation of the divine goodness, which like lightning intelligibly flashes forth in beings. Through this manifestation, reason enters into the magnificently wrought realm of beings, and bears to the generative Cause of beings (to which reason itself is borne) those who have fully transformed the whole impulse of their innate desire, no longer held captive by any of the things sequent to the Cause.

1.1.3 When we take care to honor reason and live according to it, we become expert tamers of all the evil passions. And when we are no longer enslaved by anything contrary to nature, we are shown forth as practitioners of all the divine virtues, stripping away, by means of all that is beautiful, the ugliness arising from the soul’s attachment to matter, so that the soul appears in spiritual beauty. For where reason predominates, it naturally prevails over the combination of sensation, in which the power of sin has somehow been mixed, and which through pleasure moves the soul to pity for its kindred flesh, to which the soul is related in a union according to hypostasis. It follows that the power of sin—having made the impassioned and pleasure-seeking indulgence of the flesh the soul’s natural instrument—diverts the soul from a life according to nature, and induces it to become the creator of evil, which has no substantive existence. For it is evil when a soul endowed with intellect, through an impassioned attachment to the flesh and the world, becomes oblivious of realities that are beautiful by nature. But this condition is removed when reason is in command and with spiritual understanding investigates the origin and nature of the world and the flesh, directing the soul to its kindred realm of intelligible realities. Into this realm the “law of sin” [Rom. 7:25] cannot enter in any way at all, for it no longer has sensation as a kind of bridge conducting it to the intellect, for sensation’s hold over the soul has been dissolved and dispersed among the objects of sense perception; and the intellect, having passed beyond its relation to such objects and their nature, no longer so much as even perceives them.