Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/290

264 It need hardly be said that I have been referring only to the principle of Protestantism and to its general evolutionary tendency. It is not to be denied that here and there intolerable forms of cæsaropapism have prevailed under Protestantism, as in England in earlier days, in Prussia, etc.

For Homjakov, who laid so much stress upon the unity of the church, it should have been a matter of importance to demonstrate these concrete historic differences between the churches. Had he done so, he would have grasped the difference between the monarchical centralised papacy, the federation of the orthodox and so-called autocephalic churches, and the temporarily unorganised free alliance of the Protestant churches; he would have understood the nature of the various theocracies. Such a comparison would have enabled him to understand why popery with its centralisation was impossible in the east, and why the Greek emperor acquired more influence over the church than the Roman emperor. Under similar conditions to those which prevailed in Byzantium, the Russian tsar as protector of the church became its master, until Peter, by abolishing the patriarchate completed the transformation of the church into a state institution. Homjakov might have detected the similarities and differences between the three leading churches, and it would have interested him greatly to note the marked resemblances between the Russian church as a priestly church and the Roman; he would have understood, for instance, why Gallicanism was possible, and why the French king gained so much power over the church. Moreover, after the reformation, despite the papacy those sovereigns who opposed the reformation became masters everywhere of their respective state churches. The counter-reformation was analogous in the political field to the defence of Orthodoxy against unorthodoxy at home and abroad by the Byzantine and Russian state. In like manner there are numerous resemblances between Protestant and Russian theocracy.

The most important point, however, is that Homjakov, like the Catholic theorists, conceives the relationship between state and church as a relationship between body and soul, and that, like these theorists, he refers to the body as a negligible quantity. From this in practice it is but a step towards the toleration and recognition of the existing state.

This step was taken by Homjakov. Although he could not bring himself wholly to recognise the Petrine state, in