Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/289

Rh the power of the monasteries, and it is important to remember that the hierarchy of the Orthodox church is drawn from the world of monks.

When Homjakov finds fault with Protestant cæsaropapism, he forgets that the reformation did away with priesthood and the hierarchy, and that for this reason in the Protestant church and in Protestant society there no longer exist priests to form with their hierarchy a state within the state in that they constitute a peculiar religious and political aristocratic element.

Homjakov fails to understand that the reformation, by abolishing priestly intermediaries between the believer and God, transforming religion into religious individualism and subjectivism, made it more a true matter of the heart and of inward conviction. The church lost its significance as an objectively given external authority as soon as it ceased to be possible for this authority to derive spontaneously and by tacit consent from the living faith of persons holding like beliefs. The development of hundreds and hundreds of larger and smaller Protestant churches is a natural process of evolution in the modern religious world, for it was essential that religion should be de-ecclesiasticised. The church undergoes transformation into a comparatively free religious community, and a small free church suffices for religion and the genuinely religious life.

In contrast therefore with medieval theocracy, Protestantism tends towards emancipation from the church. Rothe, a theologian of the Hegelian school, has formulated the tendency by saying that the growth of the modern state as a comprehensive organisation of moral and religious life has rendered the church superfluous.

Homjakov was forced to admit this, or at least to recognise it, for such is the sense of his own formulas concerning the invisible church; but his belief in revelation, and the objective formulation of that belief, leading him to rank the Bible and the church side by side, impel Homjakov towards Catholic ecclesiastical imperialism, more especially since he whole-heartedly accepts the institution of the priesthood ("talismanism") and its hierarchy. Neither Christ nor the Bible, but the church, is for Homjakov the decisive religious authority, and in the concrete world of political life the hierarchy and its most notable leaders constitute the church.