We must thank God for all things

A more profound connection between the genuine goods of the world and God will arise from our consciousness of possessing every such good as a gift from God, of the fact that everything we have is bestowed upon us by His charity. Thus, in a spirit of gratitude, through the medium of creaturely things we again and again hark back to the “Father of all lights”; and by all gifts we are reminded of the Giver: “In all things give thanks” (1 Thess. 5:18). For all the multiformity of our pursuits and cares, we are yet governed by the one great absolute Theme, and our life assumes the habitus of true simplicity.

We must see God reflected in created goods

There is, finally, a third way of instituting a connection between God and all goods, tasks, and activities. It consists in a comprehension of the profound analogies that inhere in the universe of things. In a sense, according to a certain gradation of the modes of being, all that is, is somehow representative of God. In this rich hierarchy of levels, the sharpest distinction is that between vestigium and imago. The created person alone is an image of God; every other created thing is merely a vestige of Him. We may propose to divine the analogy contained in every being, advancing up to the focal point where the inward relation between that thing and the causa exemplaris—the primal idea or exemplar—becomes discernible. Not that we ought to search, in a schematic fashion, after the specific analogy proper to each entity or type of being, taken individually; nor is such a strict allegorical interpretation possible. What we have in mind is rather a general vision of creation as something which has not only been made by God but which somehow reflects God.

The Christian is to discover God in the cosmos, not only as its author (causa prima) but as its primal exemplar or paragon (causa exemplaris). Once he is touched by the lumen Christi, man will see the world with new eyes.

A new light falls on everything, disclosing the secret ties of all reality to the divine essence. Now, against the background of this general vis ion, as a next phase the analogy of being, in the concrete, will reveal its broad lineaments. So far as the inferior (the material, the vital) spheres are concerned, a differential manifestation of analogy according to special objects will scarcely be present except in a vague and accidental manner. In higher spheres of being, marked by a more condensed substantiality, the analogy will tend to take on more characteristic forms in a closer coordination to concrete types or even individual entities. With man, in particular, an entirely new plane of representation is introduced. In this new vision, created being becomes transparent, as it were: reaching beyond its own limits, it points towards God and speaks of Him directly.

However, we can derive that vision not from an empirical contemplation of the universe but from Revelation alone. For the analogy that is meant here is not confined to a representation by concrete reality of absolute being as such, the ens a se in the sense of rational metaphysics, which we might approach from below upwards by the natural light of reason; it is conceived as representing the nexus of created things with God as He reveals Himself to us in the features of Christ.