The Equinox (Volume I, Number X)

ARTICLE III SOLUTION OF THE THIRD PROBLEM THE RATIONALE OF THE MYSTERIES Fartu being the aspiration to the unknown, the object of faith is absolutely and necessarily this one thing—Mystery. In order to formulate its aspirations, faith is forced to borrow aspirations and images from the known. But she specializes the employment of these forms, by placing them together in a manner which, in the known order of things, is impossible. Such is the profound reason of the apparent absurdity of symbolism. Let us give an example: If faith said that God was impersonal, one might conclude that God is only a word, or, at most, a thing. If it is said that God was a person, one would represent to oneself the intelligent infinite, under the necessarily bounded form of an individual. It says, ‘‘God is one in three persons,” in order to express that one conceives in God both unity and multiplicity. The formula of a mystery excludes necessarily the very intelligence of that formula, so far as it is borrowed from the world of known things; for, if one understood it, it would express the known and not the unknown. It would then belong to science, and no longer to religion, that is to say, to faith. 77