I foresee two objections. In the first place, I will be told that science (isn't it sociology?) can predict future stages of development, as a solar eclipse predicts. It is useless to fight against such a belief in science, characteristic of poorly educated people, and I consider it inappropriate for the twentieth century to refute fetishism. "Secondly, the stones of the intelligentsia will cry out against the depreciation of all activity. Since Abraham's children can be made of stones, I will answer them in a few words. I should not be concerned here with the question of what are the ideals and aims of social activity, although one can write about the "social ideal" with more brevity and intelligibility than Prof. Novgorodtsev. If the intellectual social ideal turns out to be a naïve faith, so much the worse for this ideal. But the main thing is that I do not at all deny the possibility of realizing a better future and the moral necessity of realizing it. I only assert that it is realizable only through the present and in the present, it is realizable only by the utmost exertion of effort in the solution of the immediate tasks that lie ahead. It can exist if we want it not only verbally, but also effectively.

Thus, the understanding of the "Russian idea" can be approached from any moment of Russian reality, dialectically revealing it and verifying the conclusions by studying other moments, but mainly by studying moments of undoubted significance. And only in the latter case is it possible to make your conclusions reliable and convincing. Of course, it is not difficult to find many of these moments in our history, concentrating, for example, on such phenomena as the growth of statehood, literature, and art. I think that to this day Russian religiosity, which includes Russian militant atheism, cannot be considered a secondary moment, and consequently not indicative, not rich in potential. In any case, it is as legitimate to proceed from religiosity as from anything else. And this makes my position methodologically justified, and my legitimate conclusions acceptable even to readers of the most atheistic way of thinking, which, incidentally, are the least interesting to me. But there are other reasons that force us to take religiosity as a starting point.

Our task is to at least somewhat understand the Russian idea in its relation to the West and the East. Obviously, we need to take as a starting point what we know best in Russia, in the West, and in the East. But if we turn to the history of the East, we can easily see that it is almost unknown to us, with the exception of its two aspects, religion and art. We have no history of the East. The East still employs mainly philologists who have their own special interests and tasks, very important and fascinating, but who simply do not know and do not understand what history is. Until recently, the East was approached statically, ethnographically; Oriental peoples were not included in the number of historical peoples. And, of course, one cannot consider the confused enumeration of the kingdoms of your kingdoms and the dynasties of sovereigns in China as the history of China. Undoubtedly, the Orientalists have at their disposal a very rich amount of material, but they partly do not know how to approach it historically, and partly do not want to. If a historian undertakes the history of the East, he, lacking the necessary knowledge, is unable to penetrate into the nature of things, and most often approaches his task with the schemes of Western history, begins to discuss Japanese feudalism, Kantianism in Indian philosophy, etc., with a zeal worthy of better use. about the history of a particular state or people) is revealed only in art and religion. A vast amount of material is available to everyone here, and in fact the most has been done here. Why religion and not art? — First of all, Oriental art is largely religious. And, secondly, religion is the most significant area of life. In one way or another, religion gives the relation of man to the absolute, which is expressed in the close connection of all life with it. Religiosity, both practically and in essence, is the richest and most convenient starting point.

II.

The Mediterranean basin, Western Europe and Russia represent the core of the Christian cultural world. Of course, on the one hand, Christianity, mainly through Asia Minor and Asiatic Russia, leads us to the East, on the other hand, the eastern part of the Mediterranean basin was in previous epochs in Hellenism, the Asia Minor states and Egypt one of the most striking expressions of non-Christian and Eastern culture, as it became, already in the Christian era, the place of flowering of Muslim culture. And Christianity itself revealed itself on the very border of the West and the East. Precise geographical boundaries are impossible and unnecessary here. But, in general, everything that lies outside the Russian-European world today belongs to the periphery of Christianity. And it should not be forgotten that Christianity is nothing but a kind of "synthesis" of Hellenism, Judaism and Eastern religions with the religiosity of the West (here I give the term "synthesis" a somewhat specific meaning, indicating not the origin, but only the content). In its imperishable value, the paganism of Greece, Rome, Asia, and the barbarian West outlives itself and completes itself in Christianity, which makes the world embraced by its idea an organic whole. Thus we have two cultures, the Christian and the non-Christian ("Eastern"), whose boundaries roughly coincide with the vague boundaries that divide the West and the East in our vague conception. But our division has a very important advantage of distinctness, which, unfortunately, is not distinguished by the ordinary. In our terminology, the East is the land of Islam, Buddhist culture, Hinduism, Taoism, ancient naturalistic cults, Hellenic, Roman and barbarian religions. It goes without saying that both cultures mutually condition each other, sprout each other. But all these are easily taken into account details that do not change the overall picture and allow us to give a synthetic understanding of each culture. Of course, in order to fully appreciate the cultural development of mankind, it is necessary to take into account other parts, but it is unlikely that our immediate topic will suffer especially from neglecting them, neglecting them in the present state of knowledge, especially since America can be regarded as the most important for us as an offshoot of Christian-Western culture, which, incidentally, is very instructive precisely in its religious-philosophical discoveries. It would be very tempting to dwell on some analogies in the development of American and Russian philosophical thought. However, humbly confessing my ignorance, I deliberately evade the analysis of American relations and leave them to people who are more knowledgeable about "Americanism" to talk about them.

Let us now try, on the basis of the criterion already established above, to define the Christian cultural world (the West and Russia) in relation to the non-Christian (the East). In order to protect ourselves as much as possible from erroneous and one-sided conclusions, let us concentrate on the most vivid and typical manifestations of religiosity.

A threefold understanding of absolute being or of God in relation to His relation to the world is possible: theistic (including monotheism, dualism and polytheism), pantheistic and Christian, which is not quite successful, apparently out of a tendency to external scientific likeness, is called panentheistic.

In theism, the Deity (God or gods) is thought to be completely detached from the world possessing a certain intrinsic existence, extra-worldly. From this it inevitably follows that the relationship between God (gods) and the world, and in particular people, is represented by the type of external relations between people or between man and a thing. Even if theism recognizes the creation of the world by God, it presupposes the pre-existence of matter (i.e., it is dualistic), or it becomes theism only after the act of creation and to the extent of the originality of the world. Theism is fundamentally mechanistic, although to emboldened mechanics God may seem to be an "unnecessary hypothesis." Theism, if it is permissible to say so, is the most "spatial" of religious worldviews, and therefore, since spatiality (or rather, the empirical limitation of spatiality) cannot be overcome by thought, the theistic element cannot be eliminated from the sphere of religion. It is self-evident that the conceptions of the Divine (and without them religion cannot do without themselves) are inevitably conditioned by visible reality: by nature, by the animal world, and, above all, by man, the highest known and predominantly religious being. All theism is necessarily anthropomorphic (in zoolatric cults the animals themselves are represented anthropomorphically), sometimes in the concrete material images of the Hellenic religion, sometimes in the less perceptible assimilations of God and the gods to the human spirit, examples of which are the ancient Roman religion, Judaism, and the philosophical forms of theism. <>Therefore, theism is the cult of the sun and heavenly bodies, the cult of natural phenomena, and most of all the cult of ancestors, family, society, and the state.

However, in theism, by its very ideological essence, there can be no genuine knowledge of the absolute. After all, otherwise the absolute is not outside the world, not external to the world and man. Theistic religion must be defined as religious representationism; And this is not a simple analogy, but the very essence of the matter, which is inseparably intertwined with theism and philosophical representationism, i.e., skepticism, as is especially clear in the example of Jewish religiosity or in the example of skeptical currents in the philosophy of the Arabs. By virtue of this, the system of theistic religious ideas is doomed to self-decay: sooner or later, it will be recognized as a construction of the human mind. Partly in connection with the feature of its nature that we have noted, theism, along with its expression in a developed and colorful mythology, is expressed in the abstract religion of an incomprehensible Spirit or spirits, as in the American Indians, in the ancient Romans, in Judaism, among the Arabs and Chinese. It is also natural that such a spiritualization of theism and its inclination towards agnosticism are considered a progressive phenomenon: anthropomorphism is not so noticeable. But I allow myself to hold a special opinion on this matter.

Peering into the religiosity of the non-Christian world (the "East"), we easily find in it a strongly expressed theistic element. It is before us in the zoolatrical polytheism of Egypt, in the anthropomorphic polytheism of Hellas, the ancient Germans and Slavs, in the spiritualism (actualism) of ancient Rome, in India, in China, in Japan. And if Hellenism gives us the most developed expression of polytheism, China, in its traditional religion and Confucianism, most vividly and consistently develops theism's consciousness of the transcendence of the Godhead, while at the same time displaying a characteristic indifference to any specific ideas about Him. In this respect, only Judaism can be placed "above" the Chinese religion. I formulate my statements cautiously: I am not talking about theism, but about the theistic element of the East, the meaning of which will become clear later.

Whether theism strives for a conception of the Divine or confines itself to a human attitude towards it, the structure of its religiosity will remain in general the same. Theistic religiosity does not go beyond the boundaries of the immanent world. It lives by the needs and tasks of the surrounding reality, one way or another, depending on a variety of conditions. And where can she get the otherworldly, since the otherworldly is driven by the incomprehensible? It associates itself with beneficial or terrible phenomena of nature, sanctifies the family, clan, state, the life of the farmer or nomad, sedentarism and peaceful labor, as in China, or the desire for conquest, as in Islam. On the other hand, the more concrete the culture, the stronger its attention to the concrete and only the concrete, the closer religiosity is to theism. It is clear that theism easily degenerates into ritualism, often cold, narrowly formalistic, as in ancient Rome, into the ritualism of everyday life, as among the people of Ezdra. The norms of theistic religion seem to be, and indeed are, a formal deification of the established, traditional life and the past. In this sense, the example of Confucius, who began his religious development in childhood by imitating the ceremonies of the cult and never departing from the golden mean and the rules of decency, is extremely indicative. Confucius is a conscientious and conservative public and political figure, a keeper of antiquity and etiquette, a lover of history, as revered in China as neglected in India. But he did not teach or talk about the supernatural, nor about spirits, and was not distinguished by the special zeal of a man of prayer. And we understand why concrete life is so dear to theistic culture, why the concrete, the earthly lies at the heart of Hellenic art, and what explains the separation of the world of ideas from empiricism in the philosophy of the greatest genius of Greece, Plato. True, the Hellenes are unhistorical in spirit, indifferent to their past, as Spengler wittily shows. But historicity is not at all a necessary element of theistic culture, which can equally live in limiting itself to the present and in worshiping its past. In any case, the historicism of Christian culture is fundamentally different from the historicism of theistic cultures. In the first, the understanding of unity and integrity, the organicity, and not the mechanicality of the historical process, is most clearly manifested, and the guiding metaphysical ideas appear. In the second, attention is directed to external consistency, and history is often replaced by a search for the natural lawfulness of development, sociologism (let us recall Aristotle and Thucydides), which is also characteristic of theistic-positive trends in Christianity itself. The concreteness of culture in art is especially clear. I am only reminding you of the keen observation of a Chinese or Japanese artist, of the charm of the clearly conveyed flight of a bird, of a characteristic stylistic device — some small piece is snatched from the world: a leaf on a twig with a bug crawling on it. Realism in art is correlated with theism in religion, and grows from the same root.

The goal of human life is the well-being on earth of oneself – then the best expression of the ideal will be the ancient "seize the moment!" – or of one's people, future generations, which, under certain conditions, leads to the theory of progress. Traditional forms of life are jealously guarded to the point of ossification in the caste system, although it is justified only in a different way, by appealing to the non-theistic aspects of religiosity. Or, on the contrary, rationalistic experiments on reality are carried out, as in the Greek polities. The state existence of culture fences itself off from the world with a great wall or tries to assert itself and blossom in the evil infinity of conquests, examples of which are the histories of Rome and Islam.

Theism is a kind of religious positivism. By virtue of his inner dialectics, he easily degenerates into pure positivism and, denying himself, becomes atheism. Theistic culture ends with atheism and perishes in it, revealing its primordial vice, relativism. The purpose of earthly existence and order cannot be determined by Him himself, which at least the Greek philosophers, even the Epicureans, understood better than we do, and what our hotbed philosophers, or rather the philasopists, i.e., those who are "friends with wisdom," who with youthful enthusiasm and touching naivety see something unheard-of new in the hysterical cry: "Forward, with the banner of Epicurus!" how to lift yourself over the lanes. And the attempt to create and maintain a purely empirical unity must inevitably end in failure and lead to the disintegration of the already existing unity. For there is no unity in empiricism: its distinguishing feature, without which it would not be empiricism, is disunity. As will be clear from the whole context, theism is a certain limitation, and consequently a separation of religiosity, which is why, bearing within itself the principle of decay, it must disintegrate itself and, through itself, the culture it contains. The self-understanding of theistic culture leads it to the realization that it is not one by absolute unity. The absolute is at best incomprehensible and unworldly. Relative unity, the unity of the mechanical sum, is pure chance, absolutely unsubstantiated, and, moreover, as has been pointed out, the unity is not complete. It can only be a moment. In fact, the history of every theistic culture (Roman, Muslim, etc.) shows how this culture, after a more or less long flowering, loses its short-lived value and becomes an element of a new, already non-theistic cultural world.

In the relative purity of its manifestations, in its relative separateness, theistic culture is typical of the East or the non-Christian world. In Christianity, it is something foreign, not yet overcome and corrupting, or a conditioned aspect of Christianity. This moment is justified by the whole and, as a moment, is necessary, since rationality is necessary and inevitable; religiosity. Thus, the categories of theism are useful in analyzing the problems of the relationship between will and grace, guilt and punishment, although they do not contain the solution to these problems. However, one should not exaggerate the purity and peculiarity of theism in the East, much less consider it the only category of non-Christian religiosity. The very idea of the transcendence of the Divine to the world already presupposes a certain non-theistic comprehension of the Divine, i.e., a certain immanence of Him. Otherwise, where would the idea of transcendence come from? The absolute is so irremovable from religious experience that even atheism cannot do without it, as evidenced by its emotional imbalance and naïve absolutization of such concepts as "humanity," "state," "the good of all," etc. Looking attentively at the historical forms of theism, we encounter a number of facts that are incompatible with its nature. Thus, with the affirmation of the incomprehensibility and transcendence of the Deity, the mysticism of the incomprehensible coexists, which, for example, in the Kabbalah and among the Arabs, imperceptibly leads to pantheism. In the same way, the deification of the forces (by the way, in empiricism forces as such are not given) of nature draws into that realm of religiosity which is characterized by direct contact with the Divine, or at least by the feeling of such contact, and hence by the consciousness of a certain immanence of the absolute. And for the interpretation of the relationship between God and man, not only external relations between people, between people and things are involved. Love-physical fusion is no longer an external juxtaposition, but needless to say: what significance does it have in the interpretation of the connection of the Divinity with the world? Let us recall the first part of the myth of the birth of Aphrodite from the foam of the sea, the very part about which textbooks are shamefully silent. It is enough to point to naturalistic myths and cults, to the role of the phallus, easily traceable in architecture, to orgiasm. And all this is observed in the bosom of any theistic religion. On the basis of a very abstract understanding of the Deity in Judaism, the sexual theories of the Kabbalah grow. On the other hand, the creation and dissolution of organisms draw thought to the idea of a unity closer than the external, and this idea finds expression in the religion of a dying and resurrecting god. Very often it is difficult to recognize this or that religion as theistic, despite the undoubted signs of theism. Such is the case with Mazdaism, with Manichaeism, which is related to it. In the depths of theistic religiosity, another powerful element reveals itself. Often, if theism is polytheistic, it appears in a monotheistic tendency, for example, among the Greeks, among the Chinese in Taoism; if it is monotheistic, it is manifested in a polytheistic tendency, for example, in the development of angelology among the Jews; why neither monotheism nor polytheism in themselves testify to the highest form of religiosity. However, please do not understand me in the sense that the possibilities of the "other element" are exhausted by the ways indicated above: it manifests itself in everything and everywhere. And like theism, it is found in a purer form.