Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/580

554 message I brought to him was that God was nothing more than himself, the monk who stood greatly in need of help

What I moot here as a possibility, has in truth been a reality for Russia. Since the days of Peter, German culture, German science, and German philosophy have steadily been invading Russia; and, abstractions apart, we have to consider the personal influence of the German, Swedish, and Finnish Protestants who secured official appointments at court, in the bureaucracy, in the army, and in the navy. The French, at first, were the foreign teachers of Russia; but during the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I, and still more during subsequent decades, German influence greatly predominated.

This German influence acted without transitional stages; the Russian was quite suddenly awakened from Orthodox mysticism and myth. Russia and the Russian church represent the intellectual trends of the third century, and it will suffice to realise how the Russian, habituated to the passive acceptance of Christian revelation, was all in a moment confronted with the results of European progressive thought! Hitherto the Russian had lived quite objectivistically, believing the authority of church and state, the authority of the theocracy, to be supreme. All at once he found it necessary to depend upon himself and upon his natural intellectual forces. By Kant and Kant's successors he was referred to his own mental energies; he was assured that his own intellectual activities, and not divine revelation, had given birth to science, philosophy, and religion; it was made clear to him that man, not God, was the creator of social life in its entirety.

This crisis which Russia has experienced may be compared with the process of decomposition and solution affecting the so-called savage peoples that suddenly come into contact with European civilisation, though doubtless in the latter case, owing to the gulf between the two civilizations, the process of decomposition is more acute and more intense. Medieval Russia thus exposed to the decomposing influence of modern civilisation is far more spiritually akin to Europe than are the Australian blacks and other quite uncivilised peoples. Nevertheless the crude desecration of official sanctities effected in Russia by Feuerbach's influence, does bring about a process of decomposition; Russian Orthodox passivism and objectivism is revolutionised by European Protestant activism and subjectivism.