What would be perfect nature?
Interesting question!
Corollary: Can nature be perfect? Can anything?
Ontologically, we're reflected back on Christ's comment: "And Jesus said to him: Why dost thou call me good? None is good but God alone" (Luke 18:19).
But does that mean that nothing else is, or can be, good? I don't think so. Rather, 'good' infers that which is according to its cause and its principle. Good in that sense is contextual.
It's a drum I like to beat, but I really think sometimes our view of religion is skewed because our view of the world is skewed. Which came first, I'm not sure, although I see plenty of evidence of a skewed religious sensibility offering a skewed vision of the world as somewhere bad, evil, etc — very gnostic, in fact — and as a place to be escaped and abandoned, a place that has only a provisional place in the Divine Scheme of Things.
Technically, if the Infinite does not bring forth this world — of finite and contingent nature — then it's not actually infinite, so if it is in the nature of the Infinite to realise every possibility, then this world is an inevitability.
Also, of course, God looks back on His work at the end of each day of creation and sees that it is 'good' — that is, it is as He wills according to its nature, and it's nature is to be finite, contingent, etc. There will be suffering, not because God wills suffering per se, but because of the nature of things.
A question then, perhaps, is what was nature like before the Fall?
And this reflects us to RJM's post directly above, and the view of some of the Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa for one, that prior to the fall the physical was subject to the spiritual, that the soul lives in the world, and the body is the instrument of its presence. We were not bodies as we are now, there was no gender distinction as there is now, and so forth.
In our prelapsarian state, the soul is the active principle of our being and activity and shapes the body accordingly. After the fall, there is an inversion and the soul becomes a passive and involuntary presence.
We feel trapped in a world of pain.
I'm suggesting a whole different order of Quantum Entanglement, an order of 'being' that St Paul refers to as something seen 'as through a glass, and darkly' ...
