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.
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