Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/310

The incarnation of the Son of God was not only a most exalted manifestation of infinite love, a love which is the perfection, if I may so express it, of the divine perfections, but was also most excellent in virtue of other profound and sublime consequences. The supreme order of things cannot be conceived, if all things do not resolve themselves into absolute unity; now, without this prodigious mystery, creation would be twofold, and there would exist a dualism in the universe which would be the symbol of a perpetual antagonism destructive of order. On the one side was God, the universal thesis, and on the other his creatures, forming a universal antithesis. The supreme order required a synthesis, sufficiently vast and powerful to reconcile, by union, the thesis and the antithesis, the Creator and the creature. That this union of the thesis and antithesis in the synthesis is one of the fundamental laws of the universal order, is clearly seen when we consider that this same mystery is visible in man without exciting our surprise, which in God causes us so much astonishment. Man, considered under this point of view, is only a synthesis, composed of an incorporeal essence, which is the thesis, and of a corporeal substance, which is the antithesis. When we consider man as composed of matter and spirit, he is a synthesis, but when we regard him as a creature, he is only an antithesis, which must, by means of a superior synthesis, be reduced to unity conjointly with the thesis, which contradicts it. The law of the reduction of diversity into unity, or, what is the same, of every thesis with its antithesis into a supreme synthesis, is a visible and immutable law. The only difficulty in the present case is in finding this supreme synthesis. God being on one