Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/284

258 Orthodox, side by side with the doctrine of the church visible.

Homjakov found it difficult to establish a precise distinction between the material and the spiritual, between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. He conceived the unity of the church as the spiritual unity of divine truth, losing sight in this conception of the individual members of the church. But since he was unable to ignore these individual members completely, he helped himself out with the concept of a living body or organism. The church, since it had to be spiritual, was not in Homjakov's view authoritative in character, seeing that every authority is something imposed from without. To him the church was truth itself, the grace of God, living in all. By this route Homjakov attained to a species of pantheism. The individual understanding could grasp divine truth in no other way than through "a moral harmony with the all-existing understanding." Christ is head of the church; but the bodily, the visible Christ, says Homjakov, would be an imposed truth, whereas truth must be free, must be voluntarily accepted.

Thus the problem of individualism involved Homjakov in great difficulties. He vacillated between the Catholic and the Protestant outlook, and was unable on the epistemological plane to formulate clearly the relationship between the individual and the church as a whole.

The concept of faith, so important a part of Homjakov's doctrine, is involved in like obscurity. In this case he was unable to master the epistemological relationship between subject and object. If truth be objectively given as divine revelation, how does the individual become aware of this truth? In the letter to Bunsen, Homjakov terms the Bible the written church and speaks of the church as the living Bible.

In the letter to Samarin, written in 1859 and 1860, Homjakov attempted an epistemological exposition of the idea of faith in the form of a critique of philosophy from Kant to Hegel. It is important for our understanding of Homjakov that we should recognise how incapable he was of dealing with the real problems of the theory of cognition and how he attempted to formulate his own outlook quite illogically by derivation from certain positions of the German philosophers. Homjakov set out from Kirěevskii's assumption that faith is the central