Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 13.djvu/190

 it is right that God should be one and three, I am unable to say that I understand what it means, although the dogma is expounded in all its fulness, as the author avers. In all its fulness the dogma is expounded as follows:

“‘Let us worship the one God in the Trinity and the Trinity in the One, neither blending the hypostases, nor separating the essence.’ Neither blending the essence, that is, recognizing the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost not merely as three names, or forms, or manifestations of the selfsame God, as the heretics have represented him, nor as three attributes, or forces, or actions, but as three independent persons of the Deity, since each of them, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, possessing a divine mind and the other divine attributes, has his own, personal properties, ‘for one is the hypostasis of the Father, another, of the Son, and still another, of the Holy Ghost.’ Nor separating the essence, that is, affirming that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are one in essence, exist inseparably one in the other, and, differing from each other only in their personal attributes, have an identity of mind, will, and all the other divine attributes,—not at all as there exist three entities of any class of beings among the creatures, entities that have one nature. ‘Among the creatures,’ let us speak with the words of St. John Damascene, ‘the common nature of the entities is perceived only by the mind, for the entities do not exist one in the other, but each separate and distinct, that is, in itself, and each has much to distinguish it from the others. They differ in place and time, in disposition of the will, in firmness, in external appearance or form, in habits, in temperament, in worth, in the manner of life, and in the other distinctive properties, but most of all, because they do not exist one in the other, but each exists separately. For this reason we say: two, three, many men. But in the holy, transubstantial, all-surpassing, incomprehensible Trinity we see something different. Here the universality