Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/150



I. Of the essence of God.

Of the essence of God? It was said that God is incomprehensible in his essence. Then it was said that he was a trinity. But I receive no reply to my answer, and get a new problem: God, who is incomprehensible in his essence, will be disclosed to me in his essence.

“The question of what God is in his essence (οὐσία, φύσις, essentia, substantia, natura), became, even in the first centuries of Christianity, a subject of especial attention for the teachers of the Church, on the one hand, as a question in itself of great importance and close to the mind and heart of each man, and, on the other hand, because at that time the question was taken up by the heretics, who naturally provoked against themselves the defenders of Orthodoxy.”

Again, in order to disclose the truth to me, I am introduced to discussions and to the exposition of the opinion of this man and of that, and all of them are false, and:

“Avoiding all similar finesses, the Orthodox Church has always held only to what it has pleased God to communicate to her about himself in his revelation, and not having at all in mind the determination of the substance of God, which it recognizes to be incomprehensible and, therefore, strictly speaking, indeterminable, but wishing only to teach its children as precise, exact, and accessible an idea about God as is possible, it says about him as follows: ‘God is a Spirit, eternal, all-good, omniscient, all-just, almighty, omnipresent, unchangeable, all-sufficing to