Alongside with the emergence around us in Nature of reason,
harmony and beauty, we also see the appearance of a contraposition. We observe
frightening catastrophes in Nature, which inflict suffering and death to living
matter, we watch the blindness and deceitfulness of
instinct in the animal kingdom; hostility, the devouring of the weak by the
strong, and finally, illness and death. These manifestations open our eyes to
Nature’s true character, and they do not permit us to deify it. Thanks to them,
we recognize the falsity of pantheism. It is inherent for a person to seek a
higher beginning and worship it. However, although he sees the presence and
activity of this beginning all around himself, Nature itself cannot be taken as
that higher beginning: it possesses the positive and the negative,
it has reason and irrationality, good and evil. By this, Nature itself suggests
to us that there is another Beginning above it that is perfect and complete.
And how can we acknowledge the deity of Nature when man himself becomes its
master? The poet Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoy expressed the duality of
Nature — good and evil — in artistic form:
"Only God is light without shadow,
Fused in Him
Is the indivisible unity of all manifestations,
The fullness of everyone’s brightness;
But God’s radiating power
Battles with darkness;
And around Him in times of alarm,
Is the majesty of peace.
The separation of creation
Vengeful chaos doesn’t sleep;
Disfigured and overturned
God’s image in him trembles:
And always full of deceit,
Against God’s goodness
He attempts to raise
Turbid splashing waves.
And the efforts of the evil spirit
To whom the Almighty gave a will,
And the conflict of hostile beginnings
Is enacted once again.
In the struggle of death and birth,
Divinity has established
The eternity of creation,
And its continuance
Through the glory of eternal
life."
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