Nature

This chapter reconstructs Pascal’s view that created nature, incoherently struggling to separate itself from God, weakens and yields to fragmentation and disorder: a tragic and unbridgeable split between high and low, the necessary and universal estranged from the contingent and particular. Without the God of the first distinction, disclosed in the incarnation, nature is a “paradox.” The tragic heterogeneity of nature appears also in each human being: man is both great and wretched, participating at once in the lowliness of nature’s contingency, finitude, and mortality and also in the loftiness of its necessity and self-sufficiency. Without the God of the first distinction, disclosed in the incarnation, man and nature alike are a “paradox.” Philosophy alone is unable to resolve the paradox. The unification of high and low, universal and particular, without reduction or subsumption, requires what is both in and beyond nature, both in and beyond man, able to enter into the world at both its levels, to ground the reality and integrity of each alone and both together. Only the incarnate God of the Infini rien distinction is sufficient to restore the reality of the world, effecting the reintegration of a heterogeneous assortment into a true cosmos by elevating nature, linking it from the bottom up to what lies beyond it as its condition, its creating origin, its ground. God’s entry into the world at the low level of contingency and particularity transforms nature not only by reconciling its oppositions but also by opening the possibility of human participation in the higher horizon it discloses. The incarnation points to a human destiny beyond the necessities of nature. Man is shown to be not merely an instance of a nature but something more: a person who has a nature.