No Bright Line on the Horizon

I've been having a conversation on Facebook about the difference between the cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance) and the theological virtues (faith, hope, and love); and also talking to lots of people about health care (both on-line and off), and in both cases I've found people looking for a bright line dividing one thing from another. With virtue, it's a line separating nature from grace. With health care, it's a line separating "basic" health care from "extraordinary" care. I've seen the same kind of search for bright lines in defining torture, the status of a fetus, the viability of a terminally ill patient, environmental impact, and so on.

But I'm not sure if such lines really exist. Or, at least, I'm not sure that looking for such lines really help us out. After all, whenever we try to define something too strictly, we can always find exceptions, or we look at "hard cases", or we just plain find that strict lines or rules force us away from our own everyday lived experience.

I'm not trying to do away with definitions -- far from it! I'm simply saying that the more our definitions try to attain abstract mathematical perfection, the more they will depart from the reality of the world. Instead of trying to fit the world into our definitions, I think we need to fit our definitions to the world as it actually is.

I don't have a perfect answer for how to do that. In fact, I'm hoping that some readers out there will have some good ideas to contribute. But I'd suggest, as a starting point, a recognition that every thing and every event and every person in all of God's creation is absolutely and utterly unique; there never has been, nor ever will be, the same thing or event or person again. At the same time, every thing and event and person is truly and deeply related to every other -- some more closely, as family members, and some more distantly, as a butterfly's flight in China affects the weather in Bolivia. Searching out the ways in which a thing is unique, and also the ways in which a thing is connected and related to other things, I hope, will bring us closer to understanding the world around us.

Clear as mud? Any thoughts or ideas?