Faith and reason -- Christianity; Immortality -- Christianity; Tragic, The -- Religious aspects -- Christianity
The logical theory of the opposition between the extension and the
comprehension of a concept, the one increasing in the ratio in which the
other diminishes, is well known. The concept that is most extensive and
at the same time least comprehensive is that of being or of thing, which
embraces everything that exists and possesses no other distinguishing
quality than that of being; while the concept that is most comprehensive
and least extensive is that of the Universe, which is only applicable to
itself and comprehends all existing qualities. And the logical or
rational God, the God obtained by way of negation, the absolute entity,
merges, like reality itself, into nothingness; for, as Hegel pointed
out, pure being and pure nothingness are identical. And the God of the
heart, the God who is felt, the God of living men, is the Universe
itself conceived as personality, is the consciousness of the Universe. A
God universal and personal, altogether different from the individual God
of a rigid metaphysical monotheism.
I must advert here once again to my view of the opposition that exists
between individuality and personality, notwithstanding the fact that the
one demands the other. Individuality is, if I may so express it, the
continent or thing which contains, personality the content or thing
contained, or I might say that my personality is in a certain sense my
comprehension, that which I comprehend or embrace within myself--which
is in a certain way the whole Universe--and that my individuality is my
extension; the one my infinite, the other my finite. A hundred jars of
hard earthenware are strongly individualized, but it is possible for
them to be all equally empty or all equally full of the same homogeneous
liquid, whereas two bladders of so delicate a membrane as to admit of
the action of osmosis and exosmosis may be strongly differentiated and
contain liquids of a very mixed composition. And thus a man, in so far
as he is an individual, may be very sharply detached from others, a sort
of spiritual crustacean, and yet be very poor in differentiating
content. And further, it is true on the other hand that the more
personality a man has and the greater his interior richness and the more
he is a society within himself, the less brusquely he is divided from
his fellows. In the same way the rigid God of deism, of Aristotelian
monotheism, the _ens summum_, is a being in whom individuality, or
rather simplicity, stifles personality. Definition kills him, for to
define is to impose boundaries, it is to limit, and it is impossible to
define the absolutely indefinable. This God lacks interior richness; he
is not a society in himself. And this the vital revelation obviated by
the belief in the Trinity, which makes God a society and even a family
in himself and no longer a pure individual. The God of faith is
personal; He is a person because He includes three persons, for
personality is not sensible of itself in isolation. An isolated person
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