Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/145

 everything would turn into disorder and become chaos; then each god would govern his own part, or the whole universe, according to his will, and there would be eternal conflicts and strife.”

“(3) For the creation and government of the world one almighty, omniscient God is sufficient; what, then, are other gods for? It is obvious that they are superfluous.”

Those are the cosmological proofs. What is this? A bad joke? Ridicule? No, it is a Theology, the disclosure of God-revealed truths. But that is not all. Here are the ontological proofs:

“(1) By the common consent of all men, God is a being than whom there can be nothing higher or more perfect. But the highest and most perfect of all beings can be only one, for, if there existed others, too, equal to it, then it would cease being the highest and most perfect of all, that is, it would cease being a god.”

Here the sophism proves nothing, and only makes us doubt the strictness and exactness of the thoughts of the holy fathers, especially of St. John Damascene.

The first proof that there can be but one most perfect and highest being is the only correct reasoning on the attribute of him whom we call God, but is by no means a proof of the unity of God; it is only an expression of the fundamental concept of God, which by its very essence excludes the possibility of uniting this idea with the conception of number. For, if God is what is highest and most perfect, then all the previous proofs from the Old Testament and others about God being one only impair that idea. But, again, as in the discussion of comprehensibility and incomprehensibility, the author obviously needs here, not clearness and agreement of thought, but the mechanical connection with the tradition of the church; this connection is preserved to the detriment of the idea, and at all cost.