Some people can think their way to theories in which contingency and certainty are compatible terms (modern physicists, for example); a rarer few—mystics and artists, mostly—can on occasion actually feel it. (“Time violence rends the soul,” says Weil, “by the rent eternity enters.”) But in both instances the insight is partial and fugitive, disabling as well as enabling, because the flash of insight reveals a vastness no human insight will ever reach, and painful precisely because of how intimate that distance suddenly seemed. That intimate distance is God, in whom we move and live and have
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