Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/242

216 church cannot lay any stress upon either morality or love. Religion is timor Dei, Christian practice is therefore ritual, and in the ethical sphere Christianity is the consistent fulfilment of God's will, of his revelations. Leont'ev tells us that he loathes "an independent morality, a morality independent of the fear of the Lord."

Leont'ev's religion conflicts with natural human morality. Just as Tolstoi takes his Karataev from among the sectaries, so does Leont'ev seek among the raskolniki for instances of the true faith. He tells us of Kurtin the raskolnik, who slew his own son to preserve the boy from the danger of eternal damnation in the event of his losing the true faith. To Leont'ev the force of Kurtin's faith seems terrible, but it is faith, "and without this faith whither can a man turn, one who detests with all his might the soulless aspects of contemporary European progress. Whither can he turn if not to Russia where, within the Orthodox fold, the existence of such great and holy priests as Filaret is still possible?" We have learned what Filaret was.

From his own outlook Leont'ev arrives at valuations which recall Nietzsche, though not Jesus. "Everything that is beautiful and strong, is good; all one whether it be holiness or dissipation, conservation or revolution. Men have not yet grasped this."

This amoralism and the aesthetic and artistic outlook on the world were strongly developed in Leont'ev. His absolutist aristocratic leanings and his hatred of the democratic bourgeois were dependent upon this outlook, and he had learned the hatred from his teacher—Herzen. "Would it not be terrible," he exclaims on one occasion, "would it not be humiliating to think that Moses should have ascended Mount Sinai, that the Greeks should have built their lovely citadels, that the Romans should have fought the Punic wars, that the handsome and brilliant Alexander in his plumed helmet should have crossed the Granicus and fought at Arbela, that the apostles should have preached, the martyrs suffered, the poets sung, the painters painted, and the knights pranked it in the lists—only that the French, German, or Russian bourgeois in his ugly and ridiculous attire should 'individually' and 'collectively' enjoy himself amid the ruins of all these lost splendours?" And Leont'ev asks: "Which is better, the bloody but spiritually brilliant epoch of the renaissance, or latter-day Denmark, Holland, or Switzerland, tranquil, well-to-do, and smug?"