Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/130

 From all this the author concludes that God can be comprehended “in part,” meaning by the word. “comprehend” to receive the knowledge of him on faith, and proceeds to the exposition of the dogmas which will be a revelation of how God is to be comprehended in part. Like the Introduction, this Art. 9 does not expound the subject at all, but prepares us for the exposition of what follows. The purpose of this article consists apparently in preparing the reader to renounce his conception of God as God, as incomprehensible by his essence of the beginning of everything, and in preventing his daring to deny that information about God which will be imparted to him as truths based on tradition. This article concludes with a quotation from St. John Damascene, which expresses the idea of the whole:

“The Deity is unspeakable and incomprehensible, for no man knoweth the Father, but the Son, and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father (Matt. xi. 27). Even so the Spirit of God knoweth the things of God, just as the spirit of man knoweth the things of a man (1 Cor. ii. 11). Outside of the first blessed being no one has known God, unless God has revealed himself to him,—no one, not only of men, but even of the primordial forces, of the Cherubim and the Seraphim. However, God has not left us in complete ignorance of himself, for the knowledge of God's existence God himself has implanted in the nature of each. And creation itself, its keeping and management, proclaim the Deity (Wis. of Sol. xiii. 5). Besides, at first through the law and the prophets, then through his only-begotten Son, our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ, God has communicated to us the knowledge of himself, in so far as we are able to comprehend him.”

(p. 73.) In this conclusion, which expresses the idea of the whole, the internal contradiction is very startling. In the first part it says that nobody can comprehend God, nobody knows