Natural and Divine Revelation

A Brief Catechesis on CCC, §31-43; §51-53

Note: This is a slightly modified catechesis I wrote for the Stella Maris Become Catholic program.

Picture this. You’re viewing a painting in an art gallery and you notice all sorts of things about the painting. Color. Form. Lines. Curves. You see brush strokes. You see the whole picture, a landscape for example, and you see minute details.

After a time, you notice the painting makes you feel things, too. You might feel open and at peace, or, something else altogether depending on the painting. Memories and desires emerge. When this happens, we’ll call it a second level of viewing—an interior level—you realize that you’re not simply engaging with a medium of art (i.e., the painting) in a transactional or aesthetic way, but you are engaging with a person, with the painter himself. You are engaging with an artist and his qualities and his story and his perspective. You are engaging not with something, but with someone.

Now, imagine that you’re standing there, taking in the painting, and someone stands next to you and begins pointing out elements of the painting you could have never perceived on your own. He begins explaining the meaning behind particular features of the painting, why the painting approaches the subject a given way and why it makes you feel a certain way. Naturally, you would ask how this person knows so much—not only about the painting, but about you, the viewer. Let’s imagine the person you’re talking to, this person who reveals more about the painting than you could ever have known on your own—and even more about yourself in relation to the painting—let’s imagine that person is the painter himself. The one who painted the image, with his artistic genius and ability to cut through reality and perceive its essence in such a way, he painted this image with you, his viewer, in mind. And you know this because he told you so.

This experience would radically change your understanding of the painting. Sure, it would deepen it. But, more importantly, perhaps, your relationship with the painting would change by degrees of magnitude. It’s one thing to encounter a painting. It’s another thing to encounter the painter and speak with him about his painting. It’s one thing to stand in front of a painting. It’s another thing to be in relationship with the painter himself.

Natural Revelation

These imaginings can serve as a kind of analogue for how the Church understands God’s revelation. With regard to God’s ways of revealing himself to us, we can say there is natural revelation and then, supernatural revelation. Both are ways of coming to know God, because he has provided us with these ways of coming to know him. Let’s consider each in turn.

Natural revelation has to do with perceiving the hand of the Creator in the world around us. This is like viewing a painting and trying to take in all its magnificence. The order we see in the world (and universe) outside ourselves is simply magnificent. The movement of the universe from a definitive point in time (literally when time began), the order written into the whole of the design, the inherent relationality that holds all of creation together, the sense of purpose and meaning behind even the smallest of details. An excerpt from a self-published book by an anonymous Orthodox priest captures this beautifully:

The cosmos is an icon, a picture. The man who looks upon this vast and beautiful creation sees a representation of God. But a good icon does more than merely represent: it in some way makes present the person who is depicted. And so the cosmos actually makes God present to us: it is transparent, so to speak, and God shines through…The cosmos is a sacrament, a visible, eternal sign (i.e., outside of and beyond ourselves) that God has made and given to us, by which He makes Himself powerfully present to us.

Science will never mine the mystery of the created order, nor can it explain why any of this is here to begin with. But faith can and does.

But not only that, if we can perceive the hand of God in the created order, we can also perceive God within us. We could liken this to how the painting elicited certain feelings and desires and brought about a deeper self-awareness. When I consider my own created being, I can perceive within myself an openness to beauty, a desire for moral goodness, the potency of freedom, the voice of my conscience, and a longing for infinite happiness that nothing in the world seems to satisfy. Through this self-awareness, I come to realize that the origin and destiny of my spiritual soul is God. It’s like the Maker of my very being gave me an internal homing device that will not quit, will not achieve its end, until it brings me to rest in God.

So, there you have it. Natural revelation is like looking at a painting outside of ourselves, while considering how the painting moves us internally, all the while coming to realize there is a painter behind this entire experience. God’s natural revelation in the created order (which includes us, human beings, his creatures) provides human beings with converging and convincing arguments for his existence. Natural revelation provides reasons, it shows us that it's reasonable to hold to the existence of God.

Divine Revelation

You can see here how the Church exalts the gift of our intellect. The human mind is capable of perceiving God’s activity in the created order, his natural revelation, thus building up a reasonable case for the existence of God through intuition and logic. But, the Church also acknowledges that the human intellect is limited in its ability to perceive God. We are often distracted, we do not understand things, our senses fail us, our feelings can obscure reality, and sin darkens our intellect. We cannot fully fathom God. If we could, then he would not be God. So our knowledge of God is limited and our ability to speak about God equally so.

Natural revelation can take us pretty far, but we stand in need of help from God himself if we are going to have any real relationship with him. Knowing God exists is one thing. Being in an intimate relationship with him, a relationship we long for with all our heart, is another. And this requires a different order of revelation. We call this supernatural or divine revelation. Divine revelation refers to another order of knowledge, which we cannot possibly arrive at by our own powers. Divine revelation is an utterly free decision on the part of God to disclose parts of his own divine life to us that we otherwise would not know. You couldn’t look at the world around you or the world inside of you and intuit that God is a Trinity of persons, for example.

Go back to our painting analogy from the beginning. In that daydream, the painter himself revealed truths about his painting, you, and himself by speaking directly to you about these things. These are elements of knowledge you would not have accessed and would never have accessed if it weren’t for that encounter and the relationship the painter formed with you—if it weren’t for the gift of the painter’s revelation. Obviously the analogy is limited, but it does help us to get at how divine revelation works. Divine revelation is like having access to the Painter and what the Painter wants to say. Divine revelation is all about God’s words and deeds in time and space—what he did in the course of human history that only he could do, and what he said that only he could say—such that we have access to truths that far exceed our natural capacities, yet ones that expand our natural capacities.

There is only one source of Divine Revelation and that is God himself. That which God has revealed about himself is a sacred treasure, the contents of which go by the name “deposit of faith.” His revelation, this one, singular revelation, reaches us—even today—in a way that’s alive. God’s revelation cuts through time and space, it runs through the course of time via three streams, so to speak: Sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture, and the Magisterium of the Church. God’s one revelation reaches us through Tradition and Scripture, distinct modes of transmission that have been entrusted to the teaching authority of the Church—the Magisterium.

Receiving God’s divine revelation goes by the name of faith. When we exercise faith, we believe in someone that what they are revealing is true. Think about the painter analogy—you came to trust the individual next to you such that when he revealed that he was indeed the painter, you believed him without a doubt. Faith is trust in God, the firm belief that what he reveals is true.

A Series of Alien Communications

I’d like to close with a story that might put divine revelation in perspective.¹ In 1972 and 1973, NASA launched the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 space probes respectively. These probes had the velocity to exit our own solar system and head far out into the universe. We’ve since lost contact with these probes. Before their launch, NASA, with the help of Carl Sagan, installed what have now been called Pioneer Plaques on both of the probes. These gold-anodized aluminum plaques contained a pictorial message about the origin of the spacecraft and some symbols of life found on earth. The thinking was that if the space probe happened to bump into intelligent life somewhere in a neighboring galaxy, the intelligent life would have key information about us and a means to navigate to us.

Now, this is interesting. On one hand, it sounds like a great idea. On the other hand, do we want that intelligent life to find us? Might have been a terrible idea. I’ve seen too many alien movies, perhaps. But, as I heard this story, I was more thinking that it would have to be practically impossible for that tiny space probe to actually happen upon intelligent life as it floated aimlessly out into the expansive universe. The odds would have to be essentially zero. And, even if it did happen to bump into intelligent life, there would be no saying the rudimentary pictures would be intelligible, or that our life forms would be compatible enough that a message would even be communicable.

Just think about this. It would be totally crazy, complete chance, for the Pioneer Plaque to actually communicate with intelligent life somewhere in the known universe. But if it did, it would all still happen within the universe itself—whether it was intragalactic or intergalactic—a message from one set of intelligent beings to another within the universe.

Okay, all of this may sound like science fiction, but, in fact, something like this has already happened.

We have received a series of communications not merely from outside our solar system, but from outside our galaxy. And not even from outside our galaxy but from outside the cosmos. These communications began arriving a few thousand years ago and not from an alien civilization but from a source that cannot be mapped on any grid of being. The source is entirely Other, completely alien. I am speaking of the Trinitiarian God who created the world and everything in it. This God is completely transcendent is outside time, outside the created universe, and outside the human mind’s ability to completely comprehend it. Well, almost. Being created in God’s image and likeness, the human mind is logos-like, and thus capable of receiving the seemingly alien communications from the Word (Logos) and understanding them.

When we stop and think about how far out divine revelation is, we might just have a better appreciation of God’s concern and care for those of us who inhabit this pale blue dot known as the planet earth.

1. I owe this section to the Chicago Benedictines, “Oblate Podcast #2: The Church Fathers.”