Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/171

 of the divine will are (a) freedom, (b) holiness, (c) goodness, (d) truth, (e) justice. The method of the exposition is the same as in the previous parts: obscurity of expressions, contradictions, clothed in words which elucidate nothing, an abasement of the subject, its reduction to the lowest sphere, a neglect of the demands of reason, and the eternally repeated tendency to connect in an external, verbal way the most diversified judgments about God, beginning with Abraham and going on to the fathers of the church, and on that tradition alone to base all the arguments. But in this part, which has so clearly deviated from the path of common sense (from the very first statements about God, where the determination of the divine properties begin), there is a new feature: there is a composition of words which apparently have absolutely no meaning for the author. Obviously the words have been detached entirely from the thought with which they were connected, and no longer evoke any ideas. For a long time I made terrible efforts to understand what is understood, for example, by the various spiritual essences, by the distinctions of the properties and by independence, by the divine mind and will, and could not understand it, and convinced myself that all the author wanted was in an external way to connect all the texts, but that even for the author there did not exist a rational connection in his own words.

22. This article speaks of the same thing that involuntarily presents itself to one when the properties of the incomprehensible God are counted out to him. Every person who believes in God cannot help feeling the blasphemy of these subdivisions. And here the words of the fathers of the church express precisely what each believer feels, namely, that God is incomprehensible to reason, and that all those words and epithets which we have applied to God have no clear meaning and blend into one, and that the conception of God as a beginning of everything