The Journey of the Mind to God
(1)We can first and most readily encounter God in the
reality He created us to sense. We can find something of the Creator in the
creation via the “portals” of our senses: diverse, simple, elegant, ordered, intelligible,
and harmonious. It is through our senses and God’s presence within our being that
we are formed mentally and spiritually, just as food and water form us physically.
(2)Our ability to imagine, which is a consistent mutation in thought, is
incongruous to nature and speaks to our connectedness to God. It is through
this ability that we can abstract commonalities from the creation to the
Creator. (3)Reason, an ability fully present in the animal kingdom only to
humans, joins us to Truth Itself. Through reason, we can be guided by Truth. It
is through reason that understanding is joined to Truth. Reason acts in accord
with God naturally because it is the law that guides us to being perfected in
God’s likeness, which is imprinted in our minds and hearts. (4) We are given
insight from the first three steps; this guides us to intuit what God is like.
We have hitherto become aware of God’s existence and His actions in time and
space. At this fourth step, we begin to experience God in his mystery and thus
begin our relationship with Him. Our relationship at this point is servile and
robotic, as the start of any relationship is, because we recognize God’s
loveliness and, reflectively, our lack thereof due to sin. (5) Our intellect is
then ready to be transformed and enlightened by the life of the “new” heart.
Our faculties begin to be healed from the effects of sin and brought from the
darkness of ignorance. (6) Our acts, words, and thoughts are fundamentally
influenced by the lux Christi. We thence enjoy the freedom, clarity, and joy
which comes from a life lived in union with Christ, and our disposition towards
the good makes us grow ever deeper in love with God and ever disgusted by sin
and its prospects. Having completed this sixth step, man is moved to love God
with the fullness of one's heart, mind, and soul, so that Christ abides in us
and we in Him. (cf. Deuteronomy 6:5, cf. Matthew 22:37, cf. John 15:4 RSVCE).
Interestingly, the first three steps pertain to the mind and
then heart coming to awareness and some knowledge of God. The final three are
more concerned with a contemplative and prayerful development of the newfound
relationship with God. In especially the last two, one begins to assume their
vocation of holiness and divine filiation through unity with Christ. We,
thenceforth, become bone of God’s bone and flesh of God’s flesh(cf. Genesis
2:23, cf. Isaiah 62:5, cf. Matthew 28:20, cf. Revelation 19:7-10, RSVCE).
Thence we “ascend to the superessential gleam of the divine darkness by an
incommensurable and absolute transport of a pure mind.”[2]
In conclusion, at the beginning of the spiritual steps (4), the mind, heart, and soul are united in their conversion toward God and away from the lesser/shallower realities. At the said stage, one is awakened to the theological virtues and is thus directly pursued by God toward union. At this stage, thus, man is only hindered by imperfection, sin, ignorance, and thereby closedness of heart, which is ultimately “wrestled” with by God’s grace. Therefore, it is only through cooperation with Grace (helped by the dispelling of sin and ignorance) that we can progress from step four to the culmination of step six. The greatest saints witness to the strangeness that ensues through living in accord with God. Would that your faith becomes your fundamental premises.
- cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 27.
- Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind to God, trans. Philotheus Boehner, ed. Stephen F. Brown (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993), 39.