Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/292

266 So cautious, however, was the Nicolaitan government that it considered the ideal of slavophil theocracy anything but flattering to the historically extant theocracy, and the slavophils were therefore placed upon the same index with the revolutionary westernisers.

Homjakov, with his "true conservatism" and his religious zeal for the faith of the church and the city of God, was unable to grasp this interconnection, although it had already become manifest to some of his opponents in the camp of the westernisers.

His personal energy notwithstanding, Homjakov was in fiine nothing more than a political and religious quietist, and a justificatory argument may be found for his quietism. He accepts autocracy, he tells us, because he feels and thinks unpolitically. The west accepts spiritual autocracy because the west detests political authority; but the Russian, the slavophil, favours civil autocracy because he will have nothing to do with autocracy in spiritual affairs.

When we read such arguments, we are seized with a doubt whether this sophistry must not have been plain to Homjakov himself. Manifestly in his polemic writings in the French tongue (translated into Russian at a later date by Samarin and others) the Orthodox church is presented to Protestants and Catholics in a better light than in the Russian essays. Homjakov, being anglophil, would gladly have induced that Anglican church to amalgamate with the Russian (it must be an amalgamation, not an alliance, for the church is one), and on this ground he was sparing in criticism.

As theologian Homjakov is a scholastic. Just as he accepts autocracy in the name of the church, so in truth does he favour the democratic principle of popular sovereignty, for he refers to the election of the Romanovs, and speaks of the sovereignty of the people in set terms. But he does not forget to insist with equal emphasis that his thought is antirepublican and anticonstitutionalist; he tells us that the obedience of the people is the outcome of its sovereignty!

ONSTANTIN AKSAKOV, son of the respected author Sergěi T. Aksakov, expounded the theocratic political doctrine of the slavophils in a number of historical sketches.