Russia’s uniqueness

According to an article by the nineteenth-century Slaophil philosopher Ivan Kireevsky, the classical world represented a “triumph of formal human reason” that determined the shape of Western Europe through the Middle Ages and into the modern period.

In Western Christendom, “the pope [became] the head of the church instead of Jesus Christ . . . the whole totality of faith was supported by syllogistic scholasticism; the Inquisition, Jesuitry, in one word, all the peculiarities of Catholicism developed through the power of the same formal process of reasoning, so that Protestantism itself, which the Catholics reproach with rationalism, developed directly out of the rationalism of Catholicism.”

Classical rationalism’s influence didn’t end there: “A perspicacious mind could see in advance, in this final triumph of formal reason over faith and tradition, the entire present fate of Europe, as a result of a fallacious principle: Strauss and the new philosophy in all of its aspects; industrialism as the mainspring of social life; philanthropy based on calculated self-interest; the system of education accelerated by the power of aroused jealousy; Goethe, the crown of German poesy, the literary Tallyrand, who changes his beauty as the other changes his governments; Napoleon, the hero of our time, the ideal of soulless calculation; the numerical majority, a fruit of nationalistic politics; and Louis Philippe, the latest result of such hopes and such expensive experiments.”

Russia was blessedly free from this whole process.  It had not been conquered by Greece and Rome, escaped the Papacy’s control, and had a different trajectory in modern life.