Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/276

250 mischievous "the panegyric of Old Russia published by Kirěevskii in the year 1852. To Kirěevskii, faith was no mere belief in a conviction imposed from without, but was a genuine devotion of the inner life bringing the individual into direct communion with a higher world. The official state church, with its authoritarian creed, could not tolerate such a view. Obviously, moreover, it was mere self-deception for Kirěevskii to restrict to Catholicism and Protestantism his demonstration of the religious inadequacy of the churches.

In the gross and in detail Kirěevskii's philosophy of history is imperfect. His concepts are unduly abstract, and he does not analyse historical facts with sufficient precision. But the same criticism applies to Kirěevskii's German teachers, and Kirěevskii's work was important notwithstanding all its defects. For Russian ecclesiastical historians, the imposing institution of theocracy constitutes the true content of history. By Kirěevskii, in the spirit of these historians, the disastrous dichotomisation of the church and of mankind is regarded as a new Fall (schism), reproduced. with triﬂing alterations, in Russia (the Russia of Peter).

In his exposition such concepts as church, state, nation, and people are unduly abstract, whilst historical facts are distorted, often in the most ingenuous manner. To Kirěevskii, Plato and Aristotle seem typical representatives of two distinct outlooks on the universe, Plato being a mystic, Aristotle a syllogist and rationalist. Kirěevskii utterly fails to remember that these two thinkers were Greeks and contemporaries, and that between Hellenism and Romanism there was no such simple contrast as that which he assumes to have existed; the difficulty is not overcome by assigning Aristotle to the west. Kirěevskii fails to recognise that his Greeks systematised theology and scholasticism. He does not endeavour to ascertain how and when classical Hellenism developed into Byzantinism. We are not told how in respect of national character the Russians and the Slavs are more closely akin to the Greeks than are the Teutons and the Romans. It need hardly be said that the concepts west and east are very loosely formulated. But there are even graver difficulties in Kirěevskii's philosophy of history. Above all, we have to ask ourselves how the true and unitary church universal could have been defeated so disastrously by Roman pride, the divine overthrown by the human. Kirěevskii himself moots the question why Russian