Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/283

Rh Just as there is only one God and only one truth, the truth of God, so is there but one church. This is not the visible society, the community of the faithful; it is the spirit and the grace of God living in this community. The church is holy and universal (catholic), its unity is absolute. The living, the dead, the heavenly spirits (the angels), and the generations yet to come, are all united in the one church. The church has therefore existed since the creation of the world and will endure till the end of all things.

In the forties Homjakov wrote a catechetic exposition of church doctrine, and it was characteristic that he should stress the all-embracing unity of the church. This signified that Homjakov, like Kirěevskii and Čaadaev, rejected religious individualism and subjectivism. The individual as a religious being was by him subordinated to the religious whole, for he considered such subordination to be the necessary consequence of the existence of the one God who has revealed truth to man. Homjakov thus attained to a civitas Dei wherein was abolished the distinction between this world and the next, the individual becoming already in this world a dweller in the city of God.

Subsequently, during the fifties, Homjakov wrote certain polemics against Catholics and Protestants. In these works he insisted upon the absolute character of revelation, and in one place he positively identified dogma with the church. He attained to Rousseau's formula of the universal will. For Homjakov, as for Rousseau, universality (catholicity) did not consist in the totality or in the majority of the members of society (the church). "The church," he wrote, "does not comprise more or fewer of the faithful; it is not composed of the majority of the faithful; it is not even constituted by the visible union of the faithful. The church is the spiritual bond which unites them." God, Christ, is the head of the church.

In view of these and similar formulations it has been contended that despite Homjakov's hostility to Protestantism his own idea of the church is Protestant, and above all it has been maintained that he reproduces the Protestant doctrine of the church invisible. There is considerable force in the objection, but we must remember that the doctrine of the church invisible has been very variously conceived, and that it exists in both the Catholic churches, the Roman and the Rh