Fourth Maccabees-Reason

Inspired Reason
The philosophy of Inspired Reason in the first century before the Christian Era. The Christian Church carefully preserved this book as a work of high moral value and teaching. We can learn from the ancient Scholars, I pulled out a few parts to share:
The subject generally necessary as a branch of knowledge, is whether the Inspired Reason is supreme ruler over the passions, it includes the praise of the greatest of virtues which is self-control.
If the Reason is master of the passions, why does it not control forgetfulness and ignorance? Their object being to cast ridicule, the answer is that Reason is not master over defects inhering in the mind itself, but over the passions or moral defects that are adverse to justice and manliness and temperance and judgment; and its action is their case is not to extirpate the passions, but to enable us to resist them successfully.
Reason is the mind preferring with clear deliberation the life of wisdom.
Wisdom to the knowledge of things, divine and human, and of their causes, which leads to culture acquired under the Law, through which we learn with due reverence the things of G-d and for our worldly profit the things of man.
Wisdom is manifested under the form of judgment and justice, and courage, and temperance. But judgment or self-control is the one that dominates them all, for through it, in truth, Reason asserts its authority over the passions.
But of the passions there are two comprehensive sources, namely, pleasure and pain, and either belongs essentially also to the soul as well as to the body. Both to pleasure and pain there are many cases documented where the passions have certain sequences.
While desire goes before pleasure, satisfaction follows after, and while fear goes before pain, after pain comes sorrow. Now anger, if a man will retrace the course of his feelings, is a passion in which are blended both pleasure and pain.
Under pleasure comes that moral debasement that exhibits the widest variety of the passions. It manifests itself in the soul as pretension, and covetousness, and vain-glory, and contentiousness, and backbiting, and in the body as eating of strange meat, and gluttony, and gormandizing in secret.
Now pleasure and pain being as it were two trees, growing from body and soul, many offshoots of these passions sprout up; and each man’s Reason as master-gardener, weeding and pruning and binding up, and turning on the water and directing it hither and thither, brings the thicket of dispositions and passions under domestication.
Reason becomes supreme over the passions in virtue of the inhibitory action of temperance. Temperance is the repression of the desires; but of the desires some are mental and some physical, and both kinds are clearly controlled by Reason; when we are tempted towards forbidden meats, how do we come to relinquish the pleasures to be deprived from them? Is it not that Reason has power to repress the appetites?
The pretensions of our appetites are checked and inhibited by the temperate mind, and all the movements of the body obey the bridle of Reason. With mental effort one can check the carnal impulse by one’s Reason of his passions.
The rule of Reason has proved to extend through the more aggressive passions or vices, ambition, vanity, pretension, pride, and backbiting. For the temperate mind repels all these debased passions, even as it does anger, for it conquers even this, it is able to win the victory over the passions, modifying some, while crushing others absolutely.
In the day when G-d created man, He implanted in him His passions and inclinations, and also, at the very same time, set the mind of a throne amidst the senses to be His sacred guide in all things; and to the mind He gave the Law, by the which if a man order himself, he shall reign over a kingdom that is temperate, and just, and virtuous, and brave.
Reason can enable you to escape being made a slave by desire for it is not extirpate of the passions, but their rival. The temperate mind is able to conquer the dictates of the passions, and to quench the fires of desire, and to wrestle victoriously with the pangs of our bodies though they be exceeding strong, and by the moral beauty and goodness of Reason to defy with scorn all the domination of the passions.
Have you become slaves to your passions and desires?
Are you searching out the meanings of G-d’s Law, which are the instruction of how to live our lives and develop a temperate mind?
Or do you choose like so many to just get by – do what ever feels good?
One day we will be held accountable for our choices – the decision is yours, its called free will.