Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/243

Rh Leont'ev defends "the unlimited rights of the individual spirit, into whose depths the general regulations of the laws and the universal and customary opinions of mankind cannot penetrate." It is true that this amoralism was Leont'ev's standpoint before his conversion, but it was one which he was not able to transcend even after he had become a monk. Whereas before conversion he had contemplated history and human life aesthetically, as if he had been among the audience at a tragedy, after conversion he withdrew to his "moon" from which, with no less objectivity and equally as a spectator, he could express the opinion that for the development of great and strong characters it was essential that there should be social injustices, that there should be class oppression, despotism, dangers, mighty passions, prejudices, superstition, fanaticism—essential, in a word, that there should be everything against which the nineteenth century has fought. "Without forcible constraint no good thing happens."

In his literary studies as, for example, in the work on Tolstoi written shortly before his death, the artist of early days, the artistic observer of mankind and history, once more comes into his own.

It is Leont'ev's amoralism which misleads him into effecting a radical severance of religion from morality, and which induces in him the conviction that "politics has nothing to do with ethics." For the same reason he detests democracy, because democratic politics has in the last resort an ethical sanction (cf. Mihailovskii), Leont'ev's political thought has a religious trend, and for him the fear of the Lord is at the same time fear of the temporal ruler. Ivan Aksakov says of Leont'ev's philosophy of religion that it is "the voluptuous cult of the cane." Similarly de Maistre, long before the days of Darwin; left the weak to be the prey of the strong, and extolled the soldier and the executioner side by side with the pope.

Leont'ev's central thought is the necessity for theocracy. Augustine's city of God appears in Russian guise; God becomes tsar and tsar becomes God. Feuerbach and all those who conceive the essence of religion to consist in anthropomorphism and sociomorphism may well be content with Leont'ev. The historian of civilisation and the philosopher of history will see in his crude dottrines a reflex of the political conditions that prevailed during the reaction under Nicholas and his successors. Leont'ev did not evolve his theocratic ideal from