Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/526

500 Herzen abandons Christianity because in its contempt for the world and in its cult of asceticism he discovers the apotheosis of death; he seeks the religion of life, and he finds this religion in positivist scientific disillusionment and in socialism.

The oppression exercised by the Russian theocracy is so strong and so coercive that none but the social democrats and social revolutionaries have made the separation of the church from the state a definite part of their program, for the liberals merely demand that the Russian church and the other creeds shall be freed from state tutelage. We find that it is the reforming theologians to-day who are more inclined to demand the abolition of caesaropapism in religion's own interest.

NE of the most important tasks of the philosophy of history is to demonstrate the development and explain the significance of the three great ecclesiastical systems, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy, and to elucidate their reciprocal relationships. Important, likewise, in relation to social evolution as a whole is the peculiar relationship which, since the days when Greek influence became predominant, has existed between theology as the organon of myth and philosophy as the organon of science.)

Theology is Greek metaphysics with a mythological gloss (§ 41 ), or it is the mythology of the Greco-Roman cultural syncretism elevated into a metaphysic. From the very first, the relationship between philosophy and theology (mythology) has been one of mutual hostility; the general evolution of thought in these matters has been characterised by the increasing vigour of criticism and science, and by the corresponding decline in the strength of mythology; the process has sometimes been spoken of as "disanthropomorphisation."

But not merely is Christian theology the issue of classical and Asiatic mythology and philosophy, the church too is the work of the pagan, emperors and philosophers of Rome, as well as being the outcome of Jewish theocratic tradition. Even