One way to think about the nature of things is to say that a thing’s nature is a thing’s inherent potential; the optimization of its faculties and properties, oriented and deployed in environs that are maximally suited to the bourgeoning of life. This is true whether we hold in our observation, a person, a substance, a plant, or a peacock. Each of these are proven in their nature by what they can manifest as life-giving properties in accordance with their likeness. In this, too, we can glean clues as to the purpose of a thing. In this manner, a thing is created, it is endowed with a nature, and its purpose is proven in the fulfillment of that nature—as the thing manifests into the world what it is meant to, thereby allowing life’s generative unfolding in integrated harmony.

The Modernist framework, the Grand Narrative of society in the global West, by adopting a mainly scientistic worldview, has largely dispensed with any notion of inherent purpose. To the contrary, the Christian narrative holds that all things have been created, and this, with a purpose to able to benefit the rest of the created order. A thing benefits the created order by being itself—that is, by exercising the faculties it was given—in dynamic relation to everything else in its environment. If the ‘thing’ under consideration is a person, we would add to this matter of ‘being itself’, the adverbial modifier, ‘faithfully’, for it is we, humans, who hold the singular distinction of those ‘things’ that are capable of aspiring in the direction of that which is not us; of abdicating our nature by failing to fulfill it. This “working together of all things for good”—the integrated dynamism and wonder of creation—is understood by Christians to be summarized in the term, Telos, and is wholly determined from the outset by the will of God; the purpose of things as they are ordered and issued to us. The term (telos) implies that there is an inner orientation to all things in their natural state, a holy purpose, that humans alone are endowed with the capacity, not only to receive, but to joyously comport with. However else we may understand human life, we can hold at the heart of things, that “the glory of God is man fully alive” as St. Irenaeus so beautifully exclaimed.

We are therefore saddled, along with all other things, with a nature. Given that the most essential part of our nature is our conscious capacity to choose—to reason—we thereby bear the distinction of the capacity for self-reflection. It is we alone to whom the question occurs, “By which means do I exist at all? And what is the purpose in my existence?” Here, we are summoned by the urge to know, into the other central feature of our nature: that we cannot answer this question on our own. This is proven in us in that the question exists for us at all. As a thing created, we are also a thing contingent, and the very asking of the questions above proves upon what our contingency rests. Our selfhood is contingent upon there being others to engage with, to relate with, to consciously give to and receive from in a dynamic of care. All attempts at living otherwise lead to death and affirm what in our nature is contingent on interdependency.

The primary interdependency in our human nature shows up in the very beginning in the Christian narrative and is centred on the matter of relational—that is, spiritual—intimacy; first with God, then with others. The Christian Canon holds that, in this, we are made in God’s image. The Canon holds that God, himself, is not alone, but exists in a dynamic of eternal relationship—of competent, rapturous love and perfect trust and peace—as the Godhead to which we refer as the Trinity. God, according to the Christian Canon, is therefore a dynamic of relationship unto Himself, what some have referred to as a Sweet Society.

It ought to guide our thinking that the very first thing that God determines upon having established the nature of things according to their kind, is that it is not good for man (in particular) to be alone. We take from this that we are meant to work out our nature, to fulfill it in relational bonds of unity—in “circles of sufficiency” that can sustain and steward life, under the auspices of God’s perpetual providence into still more life. We are made thus for belonging and relationship, we are not meant to be alone. Therefore, “To love perfectly is to be the end for which man was made.”