Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/244

218 his inner consciousness, but learned it from the study of reality. Leont'ev's theology is an involuntary criticism of the regime of Alexander II and Alexander III. To Leont'ev it seems that atheism is tantamount to treason to the tsar and to the state.

Leont'ev's nature was an extremely complex one; he himself describes it as "intolerably complex." He suffered from a spiritual disintegration; his body was inhabited by two souls; he had a Faust nature, or was as he put it "a spiritual Icarus." Artist and aristocrat by temperament; realist and materialist by scientific and medical training; pupil of Herzen, Černyševskii, Danilevskii and the Russian nihilists; admirer of Turgenev and the great Russian and European writers—he turned his back on his training and his natural gifts. Desiring to stifle doubt, he sought the gloomy monastic cell, he became a monk. Yet it took him long to make up his mind, and he became a monk in secret only, for he who has eaten of the tree of knowledge can never wholly forget. This explains the internal struggle, the cleavage, the disintegration, the unceasing self-torment, and the ever-renewed thirst for absolute satisfaction. But the torment grew to become a need, and thus Leont'ev conceived God as a punishing Jehovah, as a Russian tsar, whose unrestricted arbitrariness develops into metaphysical freedom. Homjakov saw in Christ the head of the church, but to Leont'ev the head was the tsar. Religion became politics; yet again and again the strong individuality of the man who wished to believe but could not believe rose in rebellion against the God-tsar. He would like to take courage, and to cast down the terrible god from his throne, but energy fails, and his tortured soul longs for eternal peace. The world, mundane life, vanishes before the image of eternity. Life seems so null, man seems so powerless, that Leont'ev has no need of morality; he needs merely religious practice, and for him religious practice is nothing but fear and ascetic inactivity. It is pessimistic renunciation of will, complete moral and political nihilism, directed, however, not against God but against God's victims—a believing and theistic terrorism!

Leont'ev hates democracy and hates socialism. Essentially he is the egoistic aristocrat, who requires the whole church, the whole of heaven, for himself alone. Leont'ev spoke of his own religion as "transcendental egoism," and it was, in fact, a crude religious individualism carried to the pitch of anarchism.