Sect. 2The Nature and Subject-Matter of Natural RevelationThe Nature and Subject-Matter of Natural Revelation

Natural Revelation is the principle of ordinary knowledge, and therefore belongs to the domain of philosophy. We touch upon it here because it is the basis of Supernatural Revelation, and also because at the present day all forms of Revelation have been confused and have lost their proper significance.

I. All natural knowledge of intellectual, religious, and ethical truths must be connected with a Divine Revelation of some kind, and this for two reasons: to maintain the dependence of these truths upon God, and the better to inculcate the duty of obeying them. This Revelation, however, is nothing else but the action of God as Creator, giving and preserving to nature its existence, form, and life. Created things embody Divine Ideas, and are thus imitations of their antitypes, the Divine Perfections. The human intellect, in particular, is an image of the Divine Intellect: the Creator endows it with the power to infer, from visible nature, the existence and perfections of its Author; and, from its own spiritual nature, the spiritual nature of the Author of all things. The revealing action of the Creator, then, consists in exhibiting, in matter and mind, the image of Himself, and in keeping alive in man the power of knowing the image and, through the image, Him who is represented. Theories which confound this Natural Revelation with Positive Revelation, like Traditionalism, or with the Revelation of Glory, like Ontologism completely misapprehend the bearing and energy of God’s creative operations and of created nature itself.

II. The following propositions, met with in the Fathers, and even in Holy Scripture, must be understood to refer to a Natural Revelation. When rightly explained they serve to confirm the doctrine stated above.

1. “God is the Teacher of all truth, even of natural truth,” i.e. not by formal speech nor by an inner supernatural enlightenment, but by sustaining the mind and faculties with which He has endowed our nature (cf. St. August. De Magistro, and St. Thomas, De Veritate, q. XI.).

2. “God is the light in which we know all truth,” that is, not the light which we see, but the Light which creates and preserves in us the faculty of knowing things as they are.

3. “God is the truth in which we read all truth,”—not as in a book or as in a mirror, but in the sense that, by means of the light received from God, we read in creatures the truths impressed upon them. The same idea is sometimes expressed by saying that God impresses His truth upon our mind and writes it in our souls.

4. It is particularly said that God has written His law upon our hearts (Rom. 2:14, 15) and that He speaks to us in our conscience. This, however, does not mean a supernatural intervention; through the light of reason God makes known to us His Will in a more vivid manner than even human language could do.

III. Natural Revelation embraces all the truths which we can apprehend by the light of our reason. Nevertheless only those which concern God and our relations with Him are said to belong to Natural Revelation, because they are the only truths in which He reveals Himself to us and which He commands us to acknowledge. Thus St. Paul (Rom. 1:18–20 and 2:14–15) points out as naturally revealed “the invisible things of God,” especially “His eternal power and Divinity,” and also the Moral Law.

It must not, however, be thought that all that can be or ought to be known about God, His designs, and His works, is within the sphere of Natural Revelation. The unaided light of reason can attain only a mediate knowledge of God by means of the study of His creatures, and must consequently be imperfect. Both the subjective medium (the human mind) and the objective medium (creation), are finite, whereas God is infinite. Moreover, the human intellect, by reason of its dependence on the senses, is so imperfect that it knows the essences of things only from their phenomena, and therefore only obscurely and imperfectly. And lastly, the study of nature can result only in the knowledge of such truths as are necessarily connected with it, and can tell us nothing about any free acts which God may have performed above and beyond nature, the knowledge of which He may nevertheless require of us.

Thus, even if the knowledge of God through the medium of nature without any special help were sufficient for our natural vocation, there would still be room for another and a supernatural revelation. But Natural Revelation is, in a certain sense, insufficient even for our natural vocation, as we shall now proceed to prove.