Symbolic Cosmos

Jean Hani (The Symbolism of the Christian Temple, 10) illustrates her concept of “vertical” cosmic symbolism with a quotation from Bonaventure: “Everything, in each of its properties, shows the diverse Wisdom, and he who knows all the properties of beings will see the Wisdom clearly. All the creatures of the sensible world lead us to God, for they are the shadows, pictures, vestiges, images, representations of the First, All-Wise, and excellent Principle of all things; they are images of the Source, of the Light; of the eternal Plenitude, the sovereign Archetype; they are the signs given to us by the Lord Himself.”

And to summarize her notion of “horizontal” symbolism – the mutual signification of everything with everything, she quotes this from Jean-Francois Landriot: “Symbolism is an admirable science that casts a marvelous light on the knowledge of God and the created world, on the relations of the Creator with His work on the harmonious correspondences binding all the parts of this vast universe together. . . the key to high theology, to mysticism, philosophy, poetry, aesthetics, the science of the relationships uniting God and Creation, the natural and supernatural worlds, the science of the harmonies existing between the different parts of the universe and constituting a marvelous whole, each fragment of which reciprocally supposes the other, a center of clarity, a source of luminous doctrine.”