Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/270

244 to the frontier. In course of time, however, Latin peculiarities gained the upper hand, and this resulted in schism, in great historical dualism of east and west.

The Latin half of the world was unable to withstand its ancient juristic and formal fondness for the syllogism, for logic; it modified its dogma ("filioque"), and it evolved scholasticism, which was to make Christian teaching comprehensible to the reason. Yet precisely by this logical route did scholasticism and the Roman church become hostile to reason, and despite their rationalism they submitted blindly to the authority of the hierarchy and of the pope.

Not merely the church but culture as a whole came to the west in an exclusively Latin form. In all its elements, therefore, this culture has a juristic and formal, outwardly logical character. In the moral sphere, the western character manifested in the Roman pride which constitutes the essence of patriotism, the greatest of the Roman virtues. The Greek loved his home, but the patriotism of the Roman was the pride of one who, in loving his fatherland, loved in truth his party and his own egoistic interest. In a word, the acceptance of the Roman system gave its peculiar stamp to the whole of western culture—and that culture was confined to externals.

To a degree the reformation saved religion for the west. In the main, however, Roman rationalistic scholasticism continued in force, Protestantism engendering modern Teutonic philosophy. Through the work of Hume, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, western thought, essentially Roman, western syllogistic rationalism, was brought to its term. The old unity of Catholicism was disintegrated through the triumph of individualism and subjectivism, whereby too, the west was socially atomised. Just as in the middle ages every knight in his castle was a state within the state, so now in the modern age we have the cult of unrestricted individual authority, the proclamation of personal conviction; revolution, as typified in the French revolution, has become the precondition of progress.

Very different was the development of eastern Christianity. Kirěevskii fails to give us as precise a demonstration of the essence of Greek and Byzantine civilisation and culture as he has given us of the development of the west. He contents himself with explaining the Greek conception of religion, which, in contrast with the outwardly logical rationalism of the west is characterised by an intensity of mystical contemplation.