Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/172

 and incomprehensible to reason, is simply indivisible, and that to divide God according to his essence and properties is the same as destroying the idea of God.

The essence and the essential properties of God are not distinguished or divided among themselves in reality: on the contrary, they are one in God. This idea necessarily results from those passages of Holy Scripture where God is represented as the purest spirit and from him are removed all materiality, corporeality, and complexity. If the essential properties in God were indeed separate and distinct from his essence and from one another, he would not be simple, but complex, that is, he would be composed of his essence and of his properties which are distinct among themselves. Thus reasoned the fathers of the church: “The Deity is simple and uncompounded,” says St. John Damascene, “for what is composed of many and various things is composite. If we shall thus take uncreatedness, uncommencedness, incorporeality, immortality, eternity, goodness, creative power, and similar properties as essential distinctions in God (οὐσιωδειοφόρας ἐπὶ θεοῦ), the Deity, being composed of so many properties, will not be simple, but composite; but it would be extreme infidelity to affirm that.” (p. 145.)

Other extracts are quoted from the holy fathers in confirmation of this idea, so that one only wonders what all those former subdivisions and definitions were for. But these clear, incontestable arguments, which recho in the heart of each believer in God as full of truth, are preceded by just such an unexpected discussion as was given in the case of the comprehensibility and incomprehensibility of God, and such as those which precede the disclosure of each dogma. In the dogma about God the statement is made and proved that God is incomprehensible, and then there is a pretence at a proof that he is comprehensible. For the solution of this contradiction there is invented the doctrine about comprehensibility in