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Certainly that connection is not visible except to the eyes of Faith. Vision illumined by the Faith is alone able to fathom these depths, which remain inaccessible to the natural light of reason.

Further, this connection with God is not something superimposed on the object; rather it leads us through its innermost core to God. Therefore, it becomes possible for us to entertain a full contact with the object, to accord an ample response to its specific meaning, and yet at the same time to continue dwelling in the sacral atmosphere. This comprehension of analogy alone, by virtue of which whatever thing we envisage may lift us towards God, will confer on our life a character of perfect simplicity, safeguarding our inward qualitative unity amidst the manifoldness of mundane objects and tasks.

Faith enables us to see the hierarchy of values more clearly

In this perspective, however, we shall also become aware of the vast hierarchy of values in regard to their respective connection with God. With a new clarity and certitude we shall understand that eternal truths—for example, that man is endowed with free will, or that all finite beings require a cause—reflect God more directly than do empirical and accidental truths, such as the true statement that on a certain day it was raining or that hydrogen and oxygen combine into water. By the same token, we will grasp that the sublime beauty of a landscape like the Roman Campagna or a work of art like the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, conveys to us more from God and draws us more powerfully into His world than does the beauty of a magnificent garb or a jewel. We shall no less clearly grasp the hierarchic distinction that moral values like charity, faithfulness, or veracity, refer to God in a much deeper and much more specific sense than do a man’s vital values, such as healthiness, a lively temperament, etc.

We must conform our life to that hierarchy

This gradation of values is not indifferent, either, from the standpoint of the part we intend to assign to them in our lives. To be sure, we cannot select arbitrarily the goods with which we shall or shall not occupy ourselves. Our profession, for instance, is likely to compel us to divert a great deal of attention to many objects which have comparatively little direct connection with God. Yet, so far as our free preference, our general receptivity, and our basic interests are concerned, we may well adjust these to the hierarchy of objects as determined by their measure of representing God. By keeping in mind the ideal order of values conceived from this point of view, we achieve a step in making our life simpler and bringing it to the one great denominator which is Christ.

The encounter with genuine values simplifies the soul

Every genuine value as such, however, operates towards true simplicity in him who experiences it; and it does so in proportion to its place in the hierarchy of values. Our state of mind always reveals greater simplicity when a genuine value is possessing and shaping us than when we are engrossed with neutral concerns, as are mostly the requirements of workaday life. Certainly, any dealing with creaturely goods, notwithstanding the formal simplifying power of values as such, may interfere with our disposition for simplicity; it will do so with certainty whenever we, in attending to these goods, isolate them from the world of higher values and detach them from their function of a representation of God.

Yet, however real this danger may be, considering the natural proneness of our fallen natures to let outward influences distract them from God, the created goods are also capable, on the other hand, of elevating us towards God in various ways and of apprising us of His charity and His glory. Only if we receive every good (by the methods just described) in mindfulness of God and qua gifts and tokens of God—if in all values we are anxious to discern and to meet God—then the formal simplifying power of every value as such will become operative and conducive to true simplicity.

Values elevate us above a multiplicity