148 struggling with the worldcould be seen to anticipate, by the light of natural reason, the relation
between divine spirit and natural reality for a believer. Within this way of
thinking, nature and grace could not be sundered as distinct orders, im-
penetrable to each other. It was this precarious and hopeful synthesis
that the fi rst wave of the doctrine of the two regimes tore apart.
Th e message of nominalist theology had been prefi gured early in the
history of Christianity by the Nestorian heresy, which held there to be an
insuperable chasm between the human and the divine natures of Christ.
Th e foreshadowing of a supposed orthodoxy in an indisputable heresy
should alert us to the larger problem at issue in this aspect of nominalist
theology. Th e problem is the breaking of God’s promise to pour out his
spirit onto all fl esh. Either man is embodied spirit or he is not. Either the
spirit can take possession of the material world or it cannot.
Th e second wave broke with the philosophy of Descartes and with
its revolutionary eff ect on the program of much modern Western phi-
losophy. In his quest for a self- grounding of human knowledge able to
withstand even the most radical doubt, Descartes equated the province
of humanity with the realm of mental life. It is only to consciousness,
he argued, that we have immediate and undeniable access. Everything
else, including all our corporeal life, is represented to us only at a re-
move and subject to skeptical questioning. It is through consciousness
that we resemble God. Moreover, only God, the opposite of a malevo-
lent demon in charge of the universe, can ensure the convergence of
our repre sen ta tions of the world with the world itself.
Although the immediate occasion, or the fi rst step, of this philosoph-
ical revolution was epistemological, its larger signifi cance becomes ex-
plicit in the universal distinction, and the unbridgeable divide, between
res cogitans and res extensa: mindful being and stuff in space. We un-
dertake all our pursuits, including our moral and po liti cal endeavors, as
res cogitans. In so doing, however, we encounter res extensa. Th e most
troubling instance of res extensa is the body as a stranger to the con-
scious self. For indeed the self is, in this view, simply individuated
consciousness.
Th e par tic u lar arguments that Descartes advances for what he de-
scribes as the real distinction between mind and body may all be fl awed
or even fallacious. Th e implications of this diff erence for the explana-
tion of our experience, including our experience of freedom of the will,