Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/517

Rh marry, and are therefore more closely akin to laymen; only during the actual performance of his priestly functions does the priest become in a peculiar way a passive mediator in the transmission of higher forces.

To the Orthodox Russian, therefore, the church is not what it is to the Roman Catholic westerner, for the Russian does not regard his priest as an exceptionally religious personality. Roman Catholics think of their church as a mighty and all-embracing organisation; but to Russians the church is no more than the hierarchical corporation of supreme leaders, who are appointed from the monkish ascetics (more highly esteemed than the secular priests). For the like reason the centralised papacy is impossible in the east, and the existence of the papacy is the most fundamental and most keenly felt reason for the severance from Roman Catholicism. The eastern church has always been federally organised, as a patriarchate.

We are now in a position to understand why the so-called caesaropapism originated in the east. The state was gladly recognised and utilised by the church as helper and protector. In Byzantium, owing to the assaults made on the empire by Asiatic and European enemies, a strongly organised state was a national necessity; and, in view of the political and national isolation of the realm, the eastern church could not develop along the internationalist lines characteristic of the western papacy. The Roman empire of the west fell a thousand years earlier than the Roman empire of the east; not until after the lapse of several centuries was the western empire reorganised after the eastern model, reorganised by the papacy, now fortified, and grown into an independent state.

In Russia, too, the church associated itself with the state to establish caesaropapism; but the Russian Orthodox church, continually struggling against Mohammedans and Catholics, and later against Protestants as well, became national, as contrasted with the international church of the west.

N these studies I set out from the historical conception that society has hitherto been and still is organised theocratically, and that democracy puts an end to theocracy.