Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/525

Rh but also for conscience sake." He declared, again, "Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation."

5. Paul writes as a Jew, as a man used to the Jewish form of theocracy, but at the same time he compromises with the Roman imperial rule.

Since the Christian church developed within the Roman state, absolutist theocracy was the inevitable outcome of such ethical and political views. The pagan emperors recognised the church as a state church; their Christian successors recognised the pagan apotheosis of the emperors. Theocracy originated in two forms, the Roman and the eastern, and of these the eastern was the primary.

To reflective minds, these considerations will suggest the solution of the much discussed problem whether and to what extent a Christian state can exist at all.

In our estimate of Russian Christianity and its caesaropapism, we are guided by the reflection that Russian Christianity is, as the Russians themselves contend, orthodox in fact as well as in name, is genuine Christianity. It is in conformity with historical development that the principal stress should be laid upon soundness of belief, for this is the derivative meaning of the term "orthodoxy."

"The Orthodox faith is an ascetic faith," says Archbishop Antonii of Volhynia, and caesaropapism furthered asceticism just as much as it furthered faith.

Russian Christianity is, in truth, older than western Christianity alike theoretically and practically; it is the more primitive and purer form.

But for this very reason we can understand why the leading Russian thinkers were averse to Christianity as they knew it. We can understand why Bělinskii associated the idea of God with the knout; we can understand Russian atheistic and materialistic nihilism, and the political struggle of nihilism against caesaropapism; we can understand why the radical thinkers and the revolutionaries for the most part cherish socialism, which aims at establishing the realm of justice in place of the realm of Christian love, and at establishing the republic in place of tsarism; and we can understand why the various forms and grades of anarchism have found adherents in Russia. [sic]