Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/509

Rh The philosophical and socio-political nature of nihilism has been sufficiently analysed in the preceding pages (§§ –), and we have studied the nihilist declarations of a number of representative thinkers. I may refer, above all, to Herzen; but in succession to Herzen the other writers I have analysed devoted attention to the problem.

As atheism and materialism, nihilism is a complex spiritual and social state.

For all the Christian churches morality forms an integral constituent of religion and of the religious conduct of life. Nihilism, therefore, with its atheism and materialism, with its negation of ecclesiastical morality, has moral and socio-political importance. It is, above all, the practical outcomes of nihilism which have been the subject of lively discussion in Russian philosophy and literature.

Prepetrine Russia had no secular culture, and properly speaking no spiritual culture. For this reason, when European culture made its way into Russia, it at once and necessarily took the form of opposition to what passed for culture in that land. As we have shown, Europeanisation was not effected suddenly, once and for all; but none the less the transition was too abrupt, for the intellectual leadership of the people had hitherto been in the hands of the Russian church, and the church was not only without a philosophy, but without a theology. In Constantinople, in Rome, and even in Germany and England, there had been independent developments of philosophy and theology; for centuries, scholasticism had prepared the ground for scientific and critical thought. There occurred the great spiritual movements of the renaissance and of humanism. In addition, by the reformation and by gradual developments within Protestantism, the way was paved for the coming of the new philosophy and the new science. In Europe, the ideas of Voltaire, Hume, Kant, Comte, Fichte, Hegel, and Feuerbach, were organic links in the evolutionary chain; but the introduction of these ideas into Russia signified a profound spiritual revolution.

Orthodox Russia, in a state of spiritual arrest, was overwhelmed by the flood of French anti-ecclesiastical and antireligious rationalism. Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Montesquieu, gained a footing in Russia, mainly of course at court and in "society," though some of the works of Voltaire were issued from a village printing press! German influence was