Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/291

Rh practice he recognised the state and the government of Nicholas. In the end he acted like Photius, who, as we have learned, made Christ a minister of state and church. Homjakov accepted the autocracy, and he condemned the decabrist revolt. He regarded a military revolt as an absurdity, seeing that the army is intended for the defence of the nation. Homjakov was but twenty years of age when he first naïvely put these views before Rylěev, but he continued to hold them in later life, as we learn from his polemic against the Jesuit Gagarin in the year 1858. In a pamphlet entitled La Russie sera-t-elle catholique? published in the year 1858, the editor of Čaadaev's writings attacked Uvarov's formula, and could see therein nothing beyond the revolutionary idea of the nineteenth century. In his view those who advocated this formula were light-heartedly sacrificing Orthodoxy and autocracy to nationalism and to radical, republican, and communistic doctrines. Homjakov contemptuously rejects the "religious Machiavellianism" of the Russian Jesuit, stigmatising it as quite unfounded. He might have reminded the Jesuit of the Jesuit advocates of tyrannicide. His withers would have been unwrung had Father Gagarin rejoined by speaking of Protestant apostles of tryannicidetyrannicide [sic], for the Jesuit could not have mentioned any Orthodox Russian defenders of regicide. But under Nicholas it was inexpedient even to talk about regicide, and Homjakov therefore let the argument alone.

Like many theocrats, logically and upon the abstract plane Homjakov regarded the state when compared with the church as an imperfect and earthly institution, but none the less the concrete, historic state was to him "holy and sublime," for it protected against enemies from without and within. One who idolised the Orthodox church as did Homjakov, one who demanded faith and humility before tradition and authority as insistently as did he, was able to reconcile himself even with the Nicolaitan state, although he might at times express his dissatisfaction with certain state institutions and functions. Occasionally Homjakov expressed energetic condemnation of the censorship. There were times when "holy" Russia seemed to him no longer holy. For example, he thanked God for the reverses in Crimea, taking them as a sign that Russia must be converted. In the end, however, he invariably returned with satisfaction to his ideal of Orthodox Christianity, discoverable in pristine purity in some monastery or elsewhere.