Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/350

324 (notably that of Schelling) find acceptance. Orthodoxy inidealised form is presented as the measure of thought and action. Within Orthodoxy, orientalist and Russian mysticism are made supreme, and rationalism is rejected. Kirěevskii distrusts reason, and Homjakov and Samarin feel this mistrust still more strongly. Samarin considers rationalism analogous to absolutism. For the rationalist, he says, everything is subject to rules and regulations; tradition and personal inspiration go by the board; a general lassitude results from the autocracy of the understanding. From time to time, however, doubts arise as to the accuracy of this logic. Homjakov once wrote to Samarin saying that while Granovskii did not walk hand in hand with the slavophils, Zagoskin was perfectly willing to do so, and that this was proof that acceptance of slavophilism was a matter not of understanding but of instinct.

By a logical sequence, the passive Christian virtues were esteemed; even suffering was a good thing; conciliatory, patient, pious humility and lowliness (smirenie) was posited as the chief Christian virtue of Orthodox Russians.

Quite in the sense and after the model of the restoration in the west, a secure foundation for antirevolutionary absolutism was sought in the doctrine of revelation and tradition. Religious irrationalism was deliberately opposed to philosophic rationalism. It was for this reason that the slavophils turned away from the phiIosophy of Hegel, the philosophy cultivated by the westernisers, and based their position upon Schelling, Baader, and the French philosophers of the restoration. Homjakov armed himself against historical relativism, and attacked Hegel's dictum of the reality of the rational and the rationality of the real.

Slavophil conceptions of history were inspired by the romanticist flight from the present into the past.

In the sphere of practice the slavophils aimed at theocracy. The state was subordinate to the church precisely as the natural and the human were subordinate to the divine.

Primitive slavophilism was non-political. The slavophils themselves (Homjakov) expressly declared it, whilst the westernisers (Kavelin) pointed it out as a slavophilist principle.

It was natural that from their theocratic outlook the slavophils should despise the state, or should at least tend to thrust it into the background. They endeavoured to justify their nonpolitical program with reference to the inborn qualities