Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/176

 order to exalt our past history in the spirit of orthodoxy. П. Милюковъ,  C.-Пб.}} Orthodox conceptions predominated, moreover, at least in a speculative sense, in the scheme expounded in the "Domostroi" and in political theories acknowledged by the Muscovite government: the Tsar was regarded as the vicegerent of God, and his autocratic power as coming from a divine source. Moscow was represented as the "third Rome," which, after the decline of the first and the second Rome, i.e., Constantinople, was considered to be the principal centre of the Orthodox world. These theories, developed by the monk Philotheus and Joseph Volotsky, were acknowledged by the Tsar Ivan the Terrible and his successors. They had some influence on our political relations with other Orthodox Slavonic nations.

This unifying orthodox conception of the world was, however, a dogmatic construction: it suppressed the varieties of religious experience and fettered the development of Russian thought. This is the principal reason why the Orthodox system could not endure: it was crippled by the great Schism (Raskol), which embodied a protest in regard to some religious rites, and it was unable to stifle the growing power of secular thought in Russia.