Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/551

Rh to explain autocracy as the outcome of Russian or Slavic traits, so, in the west, noted jurists attempted to deduce monarchy, as contrasted with democracy, from certain reputedly Teutonic juridical characteristics. The theocratic sanction of autocracy is a deduction from the ecclesiastico-religious sanction. As far as Russia is concerned, Count Uvarov impressed this upon the tsar (§ 24); and before Uvarov, Karazin had energetically defended the divine right of the great landed proprietors (§ 15).

Emperor William is more realist than his crown jurists when he insists that his absolutism is a revealed divine right, and when in his well-known letter on religion he defends revelation against liberal theology. In these matters the views of Emperor William coincide with those of Tsar Nicholas II; Metternich, voicing the sentiments of Emperor Francis of Austria, spoke in almost identical terms (§ 36); and the founders of the holy alliance all felt themselves and declared themselves to be instruments in the hands of providence (§ 15). Such differences as exist between Prussian monarchy and Russian monarchy can be accounted for by the differences between Prussia and Russia in respect of ecclesiastical and religious institutions.

Wherever it has existed, theocratic absolutism has endeavoured by coercive means to maintain the conditions whereby subjects were shut out from political activities. Isolation from human contact led to the moral and biological degeneration of aristocracies and dynasties, the universal result being revolution. But aristocracy and absolutism are not based solely upon coercion, for they are maintained in addition, as Herzen rightly insisted, by general recognition, by the opinions in the minds of men.

Since the days of Peter, philosophy, and above all European philosophy, has revolutionised thought. Peter was himself a revolutionary. The regime of Nicholas I made the philosophical revolution radical; it was from political even more than from philosophical need that atheism and materialism were counterposed to Uvarov's theocratic principles. Materialism in its radical negation was always a political weapon.

In opposition to theocracy and to its mythopoeic and