“A thousand thanks, dear friend, for the work you have sent me, and which is causing such a furor there. However, since you tell me that amidst several good things there are others that weak human understanding cannot grasp, it would seem to me rather useless to occupy myself with unintelligible reading matter; which by that very fact cannot be of any fruit. I have never been able to understand the passion certain persons have for muddling their wits by fastening upon mystical books, which only awaken doubts in their minds, excite their imagination, and give them an exaggerated character totally contrary to Christian simplicity. Let us read the Apostles and Gospel. Let us not seek to penetrate what they contain of the mysterious, for how should we dare aspire, miserable sinners that we are, to initiate ourselves into the terrible and sacred secrets of Providence, so long as we wear this fleshly husk, which raises an impenetrable veil between us and the eternal? Let us limit ourselves, then, to studying the sublim principles that our divine Savior has left us for our conduct here below; let us seek to conform ourselves to them and to follow them, let us persuade ourselves that the less flight we give to our weak human spirit, the more pleasing it is to God, who rejects all science that does not come from him; that the less we seek to delve into what he has been pleased to conceal from our knowledge, the sooner he will grant us the discovery of it through his divine spirit”. [2]
- - - - -
[1] Leo Tolstoy, War & Peace, tr. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky (NY: Vintage, 2008), p. 93.
[2] Ibid., pp. 94-5.
