Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/281

Rh example. The westernisers drew the slavophils' attention to the fact that extremely harsh and inhuman corporal punishments were inflicted in Byzantium, the cradle of the pure faith. Homjakov replied that Byzantium was Roman before it became Christian, and might well therefore have acquired its severities from Rome. He failed to observe that if we accept this derivation of Byzantine cruelties we have to admit that in an important respect Christianity proved too weak; but he agrees that Byzantium was far from setting a good or beautiful example in social matters, and here he differs from his friend Kirěevskii; at the same time he endeavours to save the slavophil position by the contention that pure Christianity withdrew into the monasteries and hermitages.

Samarin spoke of Homjakov as "a teacher of the church," declaring that it had been his transcendent service to initiate a new era for Orthodoxy. Homjakov did in fact desire, with the help of philosophy, to secure for Russian theology an equal rank with Catholic and Protestant theology. With this end in view he carried on a species of philosophic polemic against Catholicism and Protestantism.

In philosophy and history Homjakov's opinions were derived from those of Kirěevskii. It was his endeavour to carry Kirěevskii's teaching a stage further in the fields alike of psychology and epistemology, but I cannot think that he was successful. There are many points of detail wherein Homjakov differs from Kirěevskii, but these differences are of no essential significance.

With Kirěevskii, Homjakov starts from the thesis that human life as a whole finds its true fulcrum in religion. He regards history as the history of religious development; and to him religion, or to speak more precisely faith, is the motive force of history. History is itself a continuous struggle between freedom and necessity. If religion be the true historic energy, it follows that there must be a struggle between two divergent religious outlooks, the religion of material necessity and the religion of spiritual freedom. This struggle ends with the establishment of the religion of the spirit and of freedom.

Homjakov did not systematically elaborate this fundanmentally Hegelian doctrine, but expounded it in numerous annotations for a universal history.

In the most primitive forms of fetichism, down to the philosophy of Buddhism with its apotheosis of non-existence,