Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/274

248 we have Vinet, Pascal, and similar writers. He considered Schleiermacher. to whom he had listened in Berlin, too rationalistic. Of Hegel's work he would accept only the introduction to the philosophico-historical dialectic. As has already been explained, he rejected the Kantian criticism in toto.

Rejecting modern philosophy, he is likewise opposed to scholasticism, which he regards as the mother of modern philosophy. Consistently enough he condemns Byzantine scholasticism as well as the scholasticism of the west, and in general has much that is critical to say of Byzantinism.

Kirěevskii wishes religion and revelation to be kept perfectly pure, and therefore, in common with Schelling,he advocates a peculiar mystical receptivity, a mood of immediate contemplation. Catholicism and Protestantism are for him no religion at all because they aim to make faith comprehensible dogma is in Kirěevskii's eyes revealed truth, and he therefore considers that theism, in its revealed form of the trinitarian doctrine, is the essential Christian doctrine. (The essay of 1856 was designed as the introduction to a treatise on the doctrine of the trinity.)

Of course mystical contemplation does not suffice Kirěevskii. Nolens volens he requires a theory of religion, and he therefore decides in favour of Joannes Damascenus (Chrysorrhoas) and Schelling. Kirěevskii conceives mysticism as a species of gnosis; he is akin to those medieval scholastics who were simultaneously mystics; it was by this trend that he was led towards Schelling, a Protestant thinker, under whose influence he remained to the end.

Kirěevskii did not experience any such mystical crisis as had been passed through by Čaadaev. He had a great affection for the Greek fathers of the church and helped his monastic friends in the publication of their works, but he knew that the contents of these works could not suffice for modern times. Himself no mystic, he endeavoured to immerse his mind in Old Byzantine mysticism and to explain that mysticism psychologically, but as far as his personal attitude was concerned he got no further than a revival of the spirit of antique faith and the acceptance of ecclesiastical fomts of piety.