Principle and Foundation
1^st Part

Points for Consideration:

Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord and by this means to save his soul.  Man is made for God; not God for man. Let us consider more in depth the being we call God.

Knowing that God exists is a natural fact that comes to man.  For many reasons, which we cannot discuss here, there is a mental attack against the existence of God.  Even if there are many that still believe in Him, these wrong ideas still tend to do violence to our idea of God.  Maybe I believe, but I have a watered-down belief. 

The error of Agnosticism says it is impossible to demonstrate God’s existence because he is beyond our experience.  It says, man can’t know God with certainty. 

What happens if someone thinks God may exists — he quickly becomes indifferent to the question of God and risks becoming lost in his own limitedness.  These are the words of Fr Cornelio Fabro[i], who says that to exclude God from the picture means that a person will become absorbed and lost within himself.

So it is not a matter of justifying a need for God.  The existence of God is something natural to man — something he can know with certainty.  If God is denied, it is the creature that is affected, not God.  But if God is known, it is the creature that benefits.

In 1870, at the First Vatican Council, the Church made the interesting but very important affirmation that God’s existence can be known with certainty by the light of natural reason.  You might expect the Church to be arguing points of revealed truth, but in this instance, she was defending the capacity of human beings to know God.  “The definition that God can be certainly known by the light of natural reason, through the medium of created beings…was deemed necessary because of the wide-spread error that the process of human reasoning can reach the certainty of [God’s existence]”.

Now it is presumed that you believe in God (otherwise you would not be taking the Spiritual Exercises) but it is also necessary to purify our ideas of Who God is. 

What are my ideas of God?  Do they resonate with the Principle and Foundation: man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God…and by this means to save his soul.  During the meditation it could be a very nice prayer to repeat the petition several times:  asking the grace to know the end for which I have been made. 

Saint Thomas Aquinas gives an interesting observation about man’s final end. 

…man is directed to God, as to an end …But the end must first be known …Some truth can only be known only when God reveals.  There are other truths that man might discover on his own, but it was to man’s advantage that he be given Divine Revelation.  If God had left man to his own strength, truth would only have been known by only a few, and only after a long time and with many errors mixed in-between. Man’s whole salvation depends upon the knowledge of this truth.

(I.q1.a1)

The fruit that we should ask for during this meditation is that we come to know the difference between God, man, and the other creatures. 

Do not be rushed when considering the points here.  Take your time to go over the material and to reflect on it.  If you find something that becomes clearer or better understood, remain there, without feeling any obligation to consider other things.

At the end of the hour, you can finish with an Our Father.

[i] Thomistic Philosopher and Priest