Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/248

222 radical philosophy of history and philosophy of religion bring the facts so clearly to light that democracy, no less than theocracy, has and must have a philosophical foundation.

Thus philosophy opposes theology in the political field, the philosophy which is above all associated with the ideas of Feuerbach, in whose name, from the middle forties onwards, the theoretical and practical resistance to tsarism was conducted. [sic] Without circumlocution, the nihilistic terrorists proclaimed atheism and materialism as the main pillars of their political program. Bělinskii, Herzen, Bakunin, Černyševskii, Dobroljubov, Pisarev, Lavrov, Mihailovskii, one and all (and it is no less true of Marx and the Marxists) start from Feuerbach. Now Feuerbach tells us bluntly that God is the anthropomorphic likeness and phantasmagoria of king, emperor, and tsar; he tells us, to quote Bakunin's harsh formula, that heaven is the dram-shop sub specie æternitatis.

"Feuerbach" on one side, "monk" on the other, are the slogans of the political opponents; in the eyes of the theocrats, atheism is treason to state and country.

Homjakov desired a true conservatism. The system of Uvarov and Leont'ev is not conservatism, but the blind acceptance of tsarism and tsarist administration. Bismarck distinguished between conservatism and governmentalism, but the Russian conservatives were far from having advanced to this point. The Russians aimed at absolute arrest, at the repristination of prepetrine Moscow. In Europe, conservatism admits of progress, but Russian conservatism absolutely negates progress; it was natural, therefore, that the reactionaries should find themselves opposed to Peter and his reforms. The practical meaning of this was that tsarism was in conflict with itself.

The theorists of theocracy vigorously opposed nihilism and nihilist negation, but they themselves were merely negative and repressive, were uncreative.

V. Rozanov, who studied for a time under Leont'ev, characterised Pobědonoscev as a sceptic. All that Rozanov meant was that the deceased procurator did not believe in mankind or in the present, but for my part I feel justified in adding that Pobědonoscev, Leont'ev, and Katkov all suffered from the canker of unbelief, and that this explains their scholastic warfare against unbelief. Medieval faith was half interred with the bones of scholasticism, and the same statement applies to modern scholasticism alike in Europe and in Russia. He who