Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/428

416 beauty and delightfulness of things, we pass to the thought of number and proportion, and judge of their irrefragable laws, wherein are God's wisdom and power.

"The creatures of this sensible world signify the invisible things of God; in part because God is the source and exemplar and end of every creature; in part through their proper likeness; in part from their prophetic prefiguring; in part from angelic operations; and in part through superadded ordainment. For every creature by nature is an effigy of the eternal wisdom; especially whatever creature in Scripture is taken by the spirit of prophecy as a type of the spiritual; but more especially those creatures in the likeness of which God willed to appear by an angelic minister; and most especially that creature which he chose to mark as a sacrament."

From these first grades of speculation, which contemplate the footprints of God in the world, we are led to contemplate the divine image in the natural powers of our minds. We find the image of the most blessed Trinity in our memory, our rational intelligence, and our will; the joint action of which leads on to the desire of the summum bonum. Next we contemplate the divine image in our minds remade by the gifts of grace upon which we must enter by the door of the faith, hope, and love of the Mediator of God and men, Jesus Christ. As philosophy helped us to see the image of God in the natural qualities of our mind, so Scripture now is needed to bring us to these three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love), which enable the mind of fallen man to be repaired and made anew through grace.

From this fourth grade, in which God is still contemplated in his image, we rise to consider God as pure being, wherein there is neither privation, nor bound, nor particularity; and next in his goodness, the highest communicability (summam communicabilitatem) of which may be contemplated, but not comprehended, in the mystery of the most blessed Trinity. "In whom [the persons of the Trinity] it is necessary because of the summa bonitas that there should be the summa communicabilitas, and because of the latter, the summa consubstantialitas, and because of this the summa configurabilitas, and from these the summa coaequalitas, and through this the summa coaeternitas, and