Charlotte Ostermann recently reminded me of a wonderful passage in St Bonaventure that sums up the ancient understanding of how mathematics leads us to God:
"...since beauty and delight do not exist without proportion, and since proportion exists primarily in numbers, all things are subject to number. Hence 'number is the principal exemplar in the mind of the Creator,' and in things, the principal vestige leading to Wisdom. And since number is most evident to all and very close to God, it leads us, by its sevenfold distinction, very close to Him; it makes Him known in all bodily and visible things when we apprehend numerical things, when we delight in numerical proportions, and when we judge irrefutably by the laws of numerical proportions." - St Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind to God.
