developed in Protestant countries and upon a Protestant foundation. Catholic lands, and France in especial, have sent forth reechoes of Protestant philosophy: but their own independent philosophy is anti-ecclesiastical; and precisely owing to its animosity to church doctrine, this philosophy is more revolutionary, and in many respects more negational, than the philosophy of Germany or England.
As we have learned, Russian Orthodoxy and the Russian church, the inheritors of Byzantinism, have remained far more stagnant than Roman Catholicism—to say nothing of Protestantism. The third Rome, therefore, had to borrow from the west, not only for its general culture, but also to promote its ecclesiastical and religious growth (§§ 4 and 5).
Since the days of Peter, Russia has been unceasingly influenced by Catholicism and Protestantism. Theology, too, was fertilised by Peter's reforms; but, as we recognised when we were considering Javorskii and Theofan Prokopovič (§ 9), the influence of Protestant and Catholic theology was comparatively superficial. The first aim at this date was the acquirement of knowledge. Theology was studied in Europe as well as other subjects, a notable figure in this respect being that of Damaskin, who subsequently became a bishop, and died in the year 1795. But it was not until the reigns of Alexander I and Nicholas I that the theological and religious aspirations of the Russians were rendered more intense by the spread of French and German philosophy, and as an outcome of the religious revival of European romanticism. It was typical of the new movement that Russian scholasticism was not initiated by theologians but by secular thinkers, by such men as Čaadaev, the slavophils, Dostoevskii, Solov'ev, and Leont'ev. Homjakov, the ex-soldier, became a "father of the church" (§ 55). Quite recently (just before and after the revolution of 1905), the ideas of these writers and the influence of progressive Protestant theology and of the Catholic modernists have led to the development of a comparatively independent Russian theology. Its leading representatives, Tarěev for instance, may be regarded as the founders of Russian modernism.[1]
