Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/550

524 transformation in the following words: "The epoch of agrarian serfdom is closed; the epoch of the serfdom of the toil-stained operative has opened." In the radical camp, the bourgeoisie soon came to be regarded as the real enemy. Stepniak's theory that the revolution is of advantage, not to the community at large, but to the bourgeoisie, is in conformity with the German-made theory of historical materialism. "The philistine" [the bourgeois], said Marx, "is the substratum of the monarchy, and the monarch is nothing but the king of the philistines."

We have rejected as unsound the contention that the Russians and the Slavs in general are by nature peculiarly democratic. This alleged democratic tendency is negative merely, not positive (§ 1. ii). Modern democracy is a conscious and purposive opposition to theocratic aristocracy. In this sense, democracy is the new outlook, is the philosophy to which Bakunin first gave expression in his program of 1842.

The Russian theocracy is founded upon the Catholic Orthodoxy that was adopted from Byzantium. What was written above concerning the cultural inferiority of western Catholicism, applies still more forcibly to the Orthodox Catholicism of the "third Rome." The very fact that eastern Catholicism lays so much stress upon religious orthodoxy, is an indication of the spiritual absolutism which presses so heavily upon the Russians. Orthodoxy signifies stagnation, as the inevitable outcome of the mythopoeic fiction of revelation, and this is why the enlightened Russian protests so vigorously against Orthodoxy.

Count Uvarov proclaimed autocracy no less than Orthodoxy to be a typically national Russian development, and the slavophils endeavoured to provide a philosophico-historical foundation for Uvarov's theocratic practice. In actual fact, however, a critical analysis of ideas and historical data necessarily leads us to the recognition that the Russian autocracy was a caesaropapism. It cannot be justly regarded as peculiarly national, for autocracy was established upon a similar basis in Byzantium and inthe west. The church provided a religious sanction for monarchical absolutism. All attempts to discover national qualities as the foundation of autocracy, and all the conceptual idealisations of the brute facts (idealisations which official philosophy and jurisprudence is ever ready to furnish), are pure illusion. Just as the slavophils endeavoured