This is the path to lead us to the discovery of the Beautiful.All other objects that attract men's love, be they never so fashionable, be they prized never so much and embraced never so eagerly, must be left below us, as too low, too fleeting, to employ the powers of loving which we possess; not indeed that those powers are to be locked up within us unused and motionless; but only that they must first be cleansed from all lower longings; then we must lift them to that height to which sense can never reach.
Admiration even of the beauty of the heavens, and of the dazzling sunbeams, and, indeed, of any fair phenomenon, will then cease. The beauty noticed there will be but as the hand to lead us to the love of the celestial Beauty Whose glory the heavens and the firmament declare, and Whose secret the whole creation sings.
The soul rising up, leaving all that she has grasped already as too narrow for her needs, will thus grasp the idea of that Magnificence which is exalted far above the heavens.
He therefore who raises himself above all low earthly ambitions, or, more than that, above the whole universe itself, will be the man to find that which is alone worth loving, and to become himself as beautiful as the Beauty which he has touched and entered, and to be made bright and luminous himself in the communion of the real Light.
~ Saint Gregory of Nyssa, De Virginitate ~
