age of reason

plural ages of reason

1. uncountableusuallyCatholicismSeven years of age, at which age a person is morally liable for the sins that they commit.

   Since the Church has traditionally understood the age of reason to be seven years old, your daughter would not be too young to receive confirmation at age eight.

   c. 2008, Michelle Arnold, "What is the correct age for confirmation?," www.catholic.com (retrieved 29 Oct 2013)

   2 more examples

   Book 1: Reason alone teaches us to know good and bad. . . . Before the age of reason we do good and bad without knowing it, and there is no morality in our actions. . . . A child wants to upset everything he sees; he smashes, breaks everything he can reach. Book 4: We hold that no child who dies before the age of reason will be deprived of eternal happiness. . . . The whole difference I see here between you and me is that you claim that children have this capacity [i.e., to recognize the divinity] at seven, and I do not even accord it to them at fifteen.

   1762, Jean Jacques Rousseau, translated by Allan Bloom, Émile, or, on Education

   On September tenth — the morning of my seventh birthday — I came downstairs to the kitchen, where my mother was washing the dishes and my father was… reading the paper or something, and I sort-of presented myself to them in the doorway, and they said “Hey! Happy birthday!” And I said “I’m seven.” And my father smiled and said “Well, you know what that means, don’t you?” And I said “Yeah… that I’m gonna have a party and a cake and get a lot of presents (?)” And my dad said “Well, yes, but more importantly, being seven means that you’ve reached the age of reason, and you’re now capable of committing any and all sins against God and man.”

   2006, February: Julia Sweeney, “Letting Go of God” performed at TED2006, 0:16–0:54

   Synonyms: age of discretion

2. broadlyuncountableusuallyAge at which a person is able to distinguish right from wrong and make their own decisions.

1. Alternative letter-case form of Age of Reason

   1 more example

   In Mozart, The Dramatist, Brigid Brophy argues that Mozart's music is epitomal of the age of reason. Tightly constructed, elaborately designed, it is complete unto itself. Like the graphic balance in a Beardsley print, or the perfectly weighted epigram of Oscar Wilde, the triumph is in the perfect union of form and content: the transcendence of the artifice, the sublimeness of the created object.

   1981 December 5, Michael Bronski, “Coming (Out) to Opera”, in Gay Community News, volume 9, number 20, page 6

alternative uncommon age of reason

1. historySynonym of Age of Enlightenment

   It suited some thinkers in the eighteenth-century Age of Reason to look down on the Middle Ages as a primitive and backward time when men believed that the world was flat.

   1999, Robert Lacey, Danny Danziger, The Year 1000: What life was like at the turn of The First Millennium, London: Abacus, published 2000, page 91

   Synonyms: Age of Enlightenment