Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/527

Rh before the existence of the New Testament, the first foundations of Catholicism were laid under Augustus in the religious revival he promoted. Constantine, though he remained a pagan, made Christianity the religion of the state, and only submitted to baptism on his death-bed by way of precaution. Pagan as he was, he was none the less the first emperor-pope.

Christian ritual developed in like manner out of the pagan rituals of those days. To put the matter in general terms, Catholicism is the most highly developed form of classical and Asiatic polytheism in course of transition to monotheism. Protestantism represents a higher phase of religious evolution, and is therefore more distinctively monotheistic.

Orthodox Catholicism is distinguished from western or Roman Catholicism just as Byzantium is distinguished from Rome, just as the west is distinguished from the Greco-Asiatic east. In respect of theology and philosophy, Orthodoxy owes much to Plato as well as to Jesus and the Old and New Testaments; but in the growth of Roman Catholicism the influence of Paul, of Augustine, and subsequently of Aristotle, has been predominant.

Whereas, in the Orthodox east, self-sufficient Byzantinism soon became firmly established, in the west the passivism of Catholicism weakened the power of that creed. The most notable outgrowth of western Catholicism was scholasticism with its associated development of medieval theology. Evolving from Catholicism simultaneously with the great cultural movement of the renaissance came humanism and the new science and new philosophy of Protestantism.

The Protestant reformation secured a loftier position for the moral elements of religion, and effected the abolition of the priesthood; through the growth of religious and ethical individualism and subjectivism, the new Protestant churches became something quite different from the church of Rome. The new Protestant theology was based on the teaching of Paul, and before long became so permeated with the spirit of modern philosophy that the distinction between theology and philosophy tended to disappear. From this outlook the Russian philosophers of religion (Herzen as well as the slavophils) were perfectly right when they spoke of German philosophy as Protestant; and it was from this outlook that Kant was designated the philosopher of Protestantism. Modern philosophy is, in fact, Protestant in this sense, that it has