The virtue of understanding “humbles the soul and purifies it from clouded thoughts, that it may not loiter among the passions but press forward to contemplation.”
This contemplation brings the mind close to its primal nature and is called “immaterial contemplation.” It is a “spiritual virtue,” for “it lifts the soul up above the earth, bringing it close to the primal contemplation of the Spirit, introducing the mind to God and to the contemplation of His ineffable glory… holding the mind apart from this world and the perception of it.” The life of the Spirit is an activity in which the senses have no part.
The holy fathers wrote about this: “As soon as the intellects of the saints have made this life their own, material contemplation and the opacity of the flesh fall back, and spiritual contemplation takes their place.”
St Justin Popovich
