Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/280

254 Plato, that that which really exists is in truth God. Above all else, mystical contemplation apprehends God; but in addition we directly contemplate individual things; apprehending them believingly, imaginatively, and creatively.

OLOV'EV believes himself able to reconcile experience and thought with theology. In all seriousness, he believes himself able to apprehend, not God only, but the triune God and the God of revelation.

Solov'ev turns away from Kant and Comte to revelation; the critical and sceptical philosopher becomes a scholastic and a mythagogue who with the aid of analogies and images desires to rationalise the content of revelation. For Solov'ev, too, philosophy becomes ancilla theologiae, free theosophy becomes scholasticism. "To justify the faith of our fathers by raising that faith to a new level of the rational consciousness; to show how this old faith, freed from the shackles of local separatism and national self-complacency, can be harmonised with eternal and universal truth—such, in general terms, is the aim of my work." Such is the program of Solov'ev's History and Future of Theocracy.

The faith of our fathers, where has this faith been precisely formulated, and who are these fathers? Where has the eternal and universal truth been formulated? Like many orthodox theologians, Solov'ev frequently insists that Christ is the head of the church and of Christianity; but this means that the New Testament, supplemented by the Old Testament, constitutes the decisive authority in matters of faith. Solov'ev stresses this consideration against Tihomirov above all, for Tihomirov had referred the cultured to the authority of the clergy. Solov'ev quotes against him Platon, the metropolita of Moscow, for whom the authority of Holy Writ was the sole and ultimate appeal. It is not the clergy, continues Solov'ev, but the folk, which is to be regarded as the bearer and custodian of Christian verity. Thus we are told that Jesus Christ, Holy Writ, the folk, our fathers, and the church, all furnish us with eternal and universal truth. This wealth of sources and criteria of truth is really somewhat embarrassing!

Solov'ev clings to the idea of catholicity, but in the end the formal principle of catholicity leaves him in the lurch, as