Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/272

246 is the good. The absolute is one, of one kind, the unifying, the one thing uniting all others; God is all-embracing and all-unifying in the sense that all parts of the world-all aspire towards him, through him, finding unity in him. God is love.

Absolute being, as absolute substance, as absolute reality, as actus purus, God taking pleasure in himself, God with his absolute autonomy, with his freedom (the only freedom in the true sense of the word)—is spaceless and timeless, is everlasting. Beside him, likewise eternal, exists chaos, the eternal potentiality, or as Hegel put it, evil infinity, multiplicity, the subdivided, the not-one, anarchy. God's wisdom (sophia) conquers chaos, displaying all might and intelligence; at the same time (displaying goodness and grace) he bestows upon chaos more than chaos deserves, namely the possibility of choosing freely the side of God.

Like God, chaos is eternal. In this fundamental point Solov'ev already diverges from Christian mythology. But, following Christian mythology, he assumes that there are three hypostases in the Godhead, the father, the son logos, and the spirit.

According to Solov'ev, the doctrine of the trinity is a revelation of God, and is the doctrine of the infallible church; but none the less Solov'ev believes himself able to expound and prove the doctrine upon grounds of reason. The existence of God being given, the trinity in unity of God immediately follows from this existence. Solov'ev considers that every living being necessarily possesses a unity, a duality, and a trinity. The unity is given by being itself. The duality arises from the conviction that this being does not merely exist, but that it is something, that it has a definite objectivity (the idea of itself, the {{lang|fr|raison d'être of itself). The trinity of the living being is comprised in the threefold relationship of the being towards this its objectivity: it possesses this objectivity simply in virtue of the fact that it exists; it possesses this same objectivity in its activity, which is the necessary manifestation of the existing being; and thirdly it possesses this objectivity in the sphere of feeling, in the enjoyment of its being and its activity.

With the aid of this scholasticism it is not difficult for Solov'ev, in accordance with the Hebrew text of certain passages from the Old Testament which he quotes word for word (betraying to us the while, that the Hebrew phrases