Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/139

 tirely God, and others, that he is entirely man, and so we teach that he is so and so.

In the doctrine about the church and grace, about the creation, about the redemption, there is everywhere one and the same method. Never does the doctrine result from itself, but always from a dispute, where it is proved that neither one opinion nor the other is correct, but both taken together.

Here, in the exposition of the dogma about the unity of God, this method is particularly striking, because the impossibility of polytheism, or rather arithmotheism, is so indubitable to us and to all men who believe in God that the disclosure of the dogma about this, where it says. that God is trine, acts directly contrary to the aim which the author has in view. That low sphere of disputing with the polytheists, to which the author descends, and those false methods, which he uses in doing so, almost destroy the concept of God, which every believer in him has.

The author says that God is one, not in the sense in which any pagan god, taken separately from all the other gods, might be. “But he is one in the sense of there being no other God, neither equal to him, nor higher, nor lower; but he alone is the only God.” (p. 77.)

Farther on the words of some father of the church are adduced: “When we say that the Eastern churches believe in one God the Father, the Almighty, the one Lord, we must understand here that he is called one not in number, but in totality (unum non numero dici, sed universitate). Thus, if somebody speaks of one man, or one horse, one is in this case taken as a number; for there may be another man, and a third, and equally a horse. But where we speak of one in such a way that a second and third can no longer be added, there one is taken not as a number, but in its totality. If, for exam-