Again, that duality or breach manifests itself under two aspects. First, man in his earthly existence is a mixed act, as scholastic philosophy puts it; he is partly in act, partly in potency. In other words, we constitute actual, accomplished, fulfilled reality on the one hand; potentiality and becoming—unfulfilled beings—on the other.

Only God, who is absolute Being, is pure act—full and infinite Reality, to which no shadow of mutability attaches.

In eternity only shall we, too, be accomplished: not pure act, to be sure, for even there our being will be dependent on God; but sharers in the immutability of God insofar as we shall no longer contain any element of mere potentiality but have our whole being realized in one eternal moment. There (and there alone) we shall be past all becoming, having attained to a being free from all changeableness. All values in us will have matured to full actuality, with no room left for any potential ones. All that we are will be set out in its definitive shape.

It is not owing to original sin alone that in our earthly existence we are subject to the law of becoming. The state of man in the Garden of Eden, too, was no status finalis but a status viae. Man with his nature still unsoiled by sin was also meant to develop and was confronted with a task. He was meant to mature in knowledge and to supplement creation with a spiritual culture of his own devising; and again, to people the earth with his progeny. Yet, this was to take place in an undisturbed organic order—without any disharmony, labor or suffering.

But for original sin, there would have been no death. Instead of the painful and terrifying separation of soul and body, mankind would have known only an uncatastrophic passing on to a higher form of being—that status finalis in which “God is all in all.”

Nevertheless, immense as is the contrast between the state of the fallen world and a paradisiac mode of existence, the latter too would have borne the sign of that duality which lies in the mixture of act and potency, and which essentially sets apart the status viae from the status finalis.

Earthly man suffers a tension between original sin and his redemption

Owing to original sin, however, earthly life is subject to the law of duality in yet another sense: a duality which even subsists after Christ’s redemption of the world. On the one hand, we still suffer from the effects of original sin; on the other hand, we are redeemed beings: “reconciled to God,” that is, through the most sacred Blood of Christ, By holy Baptism we are given participation in the life of Christ. So long as we remain in the state of grace, nothing can separate us from God: but yet we are still wanderers in a valley of tears.