Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/269

Rh Before death he received communion from an Orthodox priest (no Catholic priest was available).

None the less it remains significant that the most notable modern philosopher of religion should have been an admirer of Catholicism. It is not enough to suggest that Solov'ev was won over by the efforts towards union made by Leo XIII, for the existence of a whole series of Catholicising Russians before and since the days of Alexander I gives a more general significance to attempts towards union.

It need hardly be said that the slavophils censured Solov'ev in strong terms for his attitude towards Catholicism and towards Orthodoxy. Ivan Aksakov frequently wrote against Solov'ev, and polemic writings emphasising the slavophil views concerning Orthodoxy and concerning the impossibility of a union, exercised a notable influence upon Solov'ev. He was less affected by the controversial opinions of Strahov and the other demi-slavophils and demi-westernisers.

Solov'ev's sociological and philosophical estimate of nationality likewise distinguished him from the later slavophils. The early slavophils had not attained to perfectly clear views concerning the relationships of nationality to religion, church, and culture; although Kirěevskii had subordinated nationality to spiritual culture and religion; whilst Homjakov did the same thing, though he endeavoured to arrive at a more independent conception of the historic function of nationality. It was only the later slavophils who made common cause with the Old Russians in proclaiming nationality as coequal with state and church.

For Solov'ev, race and nationality were entirely subordinate to religion and church. The idea of a nation, said Solov'ev, is not.constituted by what the nation thinks about itself in time, but by what God thinks about the nation in eternity. It was his fundamental idea of the God-man and God-humanity which led him to view as essentially different the roles of the individual nations in the theocratic organisation of mankind.

When Solov'ev accepted the idea of Russian messianism, he was not thinking of the national qualities of the Russian folk, but of the Russian church and religion. He went so far as to declare that the qualities of the chosen people were a minor matter, seeing that this people, in fulfilling its function of saviour, would not be realising its own ideas, but the divine ideas. He spoke of the God-nation as an organic member of