Natural Beauty Reflects the Beauty of the Creator

During this past week, we have been reading from the Book of Wisdom which was written perhaps as few as fifty years before the advent of Jesus.  The sacred author was a faithful Jew who was living in Alexandria, Egypt.  He was concerned about the young Jewish men of his community who were ignorant of and losing their Jewish heritage.  So he wrote the Book of Wisdom which is in large part a commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures.  The book is sometimes called The Wisdom of Solomon because it often employs the voice of Solomon, regarded as the wisest of the kings of Israel. 

In today’s passage, the Alexandrian influence is the context in which the writer expresses his concern.  Living in Egypt among a people who regard as gods elements of nature as well as various animals, he expresses his opinion that these people have failed to look beyond the creature to discover the creator: Instead either fire, or wind, or the swift air, or the circuit of the stars, or the mighty water, or the luminaries of heaven, the governors of the world, they considered gods.  (Wisdom 13:2)  Many a museum of natural history will bear out this contention.  The people of Egypt, indeed many of the various nations that surrounded Israel, worshiped idols that often looked like the heavenly bodies or creatures with the heads of animals. 

In some ways, the sacred writer sounds very much like St. Bonaventure who taught that we could come to know the Creator through his creatures.  St. Bonaventure called them “vestiges” of God.  The writer of the Book of Wisdom states that while God’s creation is beautiful and worthy of our appreciation of its beauty, we must remember that this beauty is but a reflection of the beauty of God.  Indeed, in his “Praises of God,” St. Francis of Assisi states unequivocally, “You are beauty.”

Autumn is considered by many as the most beautiful of all the seasons as we are treated to displays of color as the natural world prepares for winter.  The beauty which we behold in nature is a foretaste of the beauty which we will experience when we come face to face with God, the Beatific Vision.

As we listen to the sacred writer today, we look for vestiges of God’s beauty in our created world, remembering always that the source of that beauty will be visible only after we have passed from this world.

Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator