Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/68

42 its climax at the close of the fourteenth century and the opening of the fifteenth, at the time when in Europe the splendid religious revolution of Bohemia was inaugurating the new age, and when Rome was beginning to give way upon all fronts.

The Byzantine church became petrified, although it was the Greeks who had elaborated its doctrines and its morality. The Byzantines contented themselves with an almost mechanical tradition, their religion consisting mainly of ritual observances. The Russians took over dogmas, ritual, morality, and ecclesiastical organisation ready made from Byzantium. Since they did nothing further for the development of ecclesiastical and religious life, in Russia petrifaction was if possible more marked.

This applies to the clergy, for the laity was content with the passive acceptance of eccclesiasticalecclesiastical [sic] discipline, and with a blind belief in miracles such as is characteristic of the earlier stages of the mythical outlook on the world.

The Byzantines were scholastically trained, the philosophical tradition of the Greeks being preserved in a sort of theosophical gnosis. The Russians endeavoured to follow their teachers in this respect also, but found fuller satisfaction for their religious needs in ritual. In Moscow, mysticism was not so much theosophical contemplation as practical mystagogy.

This religiosity must be sharply distinguished from morality. Morality is a subordinate element of religion. The ideas of holiness and righteousness are by no means coincident. Ritual, and individual ritual practices, rather than the moral relationships between man and man, are the primary constituents of religion. John the Terrible, an assassin already in his thirteenth year, was a religious man.

Owing to a lack of critical faculty and a deficiency of culture, among the Russians as among most primitive peoples, it was possible for pathological states of nerve and mind to be regarded as manifestations of a religious inner life, to be accepted as divine revelations, and this not solely by isolated sects condemned by the church, but generally. Even to-day in Russia, and not by peasants alone, jurodivye (psychopaths—idiots and imbeciles) are regarded as God-inspired individuals.

The history of many of the Russian sects manifests to us this low level of religious sensibility, and displays at the same time the defects of the official church. Europeans were apt