"This Beauty is the source of all friendship and all mutual understanding. It is this Beauty… which moves all living things and preserves them whilst filling them with love and desire for their own particular sort of beauty. For each one, therefore, Beauty is both its limit and the object of its love, since it is its goal…and its model (for it is by its likeness to this Beauty that everything is defined). Thus true Beauty and Goodness are mixed together because, whatever the force may be that moves living things, it tends always towards Beauty-and-Goodness, and there is nothing that does not have a share in Beauty-and-Goodness… By virtue of this reality all creatures subsist, united and separate, identical and opposite, alike and unlike; contraries are united and the united elements are not confused… by virtue of Beauty-and-Goodness everything is in communion with everything else, each in its own way; creatures love one another without losing themselves in one another; everything is in harmony, parts fit snugly into the whole… one generation succeeds another; spirits, souls and bodies remain at the same time steady and mobile; because for all of them Beauty-and-Goodness is at once repose and movement, being itself beyond both."
DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE Divine Names, IV, 7
