The reconstruction of South-Eastern Europe

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF

found this great synthesis in regenerated Christianity. For him the universality of Christianity is positive, not negative. He did not believe in the essential supremacy of the Orthodox Church. His cherished idea was the reunion of the Churches. He strongly opposed the national exclusiveness of the earlier Slavophils and put as the first article of his social and political credo: “In accepting the essential unity of the human race, we must regard humanity in entirety, as a great collective being, a social organism of which the different nations represent the living members. It is evident, from this point of view, that no people can live in itself, by itself, or for itself, but that the life of each one is merely an individual share in the general life of humanity.”

All his work had the tendency to reconcile and to unite instead of to divide and separate. For him the dignity of philosophy is equal to that of religion. Without philosophy religion cannot find an issue outside itself. That which is revealed by the mystic insight, the philosophical reasoning elaborates and gives value. ‘ That God exists we believe, what God is we make the experience and we know.”

Following in the footprints of Soloy’ev, the writers of Neoslavism find that Christianity, like Buddhism, recognises no absolute value except in eternal life, and places the moral ideal in universal love; but in harmony with the Aryan spirit, it denies neither the material and temporal world nor the labour of man. Christianity

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