Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/137

 comprehended God (and I am sure not I alone). But now I am taught that God is one. My perplexity before the expression that God is one and three is not only not cleared away, but my conception of God is almost lost when I read the fourteen pages which prove the unity of From the very first words, instead of elucidating that terrible statement about the unity and trinity of God, which has crushed out my idea of God, I am carried into the sphere of discussion about those Christian and pagan doctrines which have denied the unity of God.

It says there: “As opponents of the Christian doctrine about the unity of God have appeared (a) first of all, naturally, the pagans and polytheists who were to be converted to Christianity; (b) then, beginning with the second century, the Christian heretics, known under the general name of Gnostics, of whom some, under the influence of Eastern philosophy and theosophy, recognized the one supreme God, but at the same time admitted a multitude of lower gods, or æons, who emanated from him and created the existing world; and others, also carried away by the philosophy which, among other things, endeavoured to solve the origin of evil in the world, assumed the existence of two hostile, coeval principles, the principle of good and the principle of evil, as the prime causes of all good and evil in the world; (c) a little later, with the end of the third, and still more beginning with the middle of the fourth, century, the new Christian heretics, the Manicheans, who, with the same idea, assumed two gods, a good and an evil god, to the first of whom they subordinated the eternal kingdom of light, and to the second the eternal kingdom of darkness; (d) from the end of the sixth century, a small sect of tritheists, who, not understanding the Christian doctrine of the three persons in the one Divinity, assumed three distinct gods, who were as distinct as, for example, three persons or entities of the human race, although they all had the same substance,