Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/132

 In the Introduction we had the same. After long discussions about what a dogma was, the whole business was brought down to this, that a dogma was a truth, because it was taught by the church, and the church were the men who were united by the faith in these dogmas.

We have the same thing here: God may be comprehended in part, a little bit, and how to know him “a little bit” the church alone knows, and everything which it will tell will be a sacred truth.

In the question of the dogma we had a double definition of the dogma, as an absolute truth and as a teaching, and so the contradiction consisted in this, that the dogma was now one unchangeable truth, revealed from the very beginning, and now a teaching of the church, which was evolved by degrees.

Here, in the question of comprehensibility, by which is understood knowledge on trust, as taught by the church, the author contradicts himself. To the word “comprehensibility” a double meaning is ascribed: the meaning of comprehensibility and of knowledge taken on trust. Neither St. John Damascene, nor Filarét, nor Makári can help seeing that for the greater comprehensibility we must have a greater clearness, and the affirmation that what I am told, I am told through people who by the church are called prophets, in no way can add any comprehensibility to the mind, and that we can only comprehend “in part” what is comprehensible, and so they substitute for the concept of comprehensibility the concept of knowledge, and then they say that this knowledge has been transmitted by the prophets, and the question of comprehensibility is entirely set aside; thus, if the knowledge transmitted through the prophets makes God more incomprehensible than he has been to me before, this knowledge is still true. But, in addition to this double definition, we have here also a contradiction between the expressions of the church Tradition itself.