Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/135



“10. THE essence of everything which it has pleased God to reveal to us about himself, outside his relation to other creatures, the Orthodox Church expresses in brief in the following words of Athanasius’s Symbol: This is the Catholic creed: let us worship the one God in the Trinity, and the Trinity in the One, neither blending the hypostases, nor separating the substance.” (p. 74.)

The fundamental truth which it has pleased God to reveal about himself to the church through the prophets and the apostles, and which the church reveals to us, is that God is one and three, three and one. The expression of this truth is such that I not merely cannot understand it, but indubitably understand that it cannot be understood. Man understands through reason. In the human mind there are no laws more definite than those which refer to numbers. And so the first thing which it has pleased God to reveal about himself to men is expressed in numbers: I myself 3, and 31, and 1=3.

It is impossible that God should so answer the people whom he has himself created and to whom he has given reason in order to understand him; it is impossible for him to answer thus. A decent man, speaking to another, is not going to use to him strange, incomprehensible words. Where is there a man, however feeble in intellect, who to a child’s question would not be able to reply in such a way that the child might understand him? How then will God, revealing himself to me, speak in such a way that I cannot understand him? Have not I, without