Khomyakov and the Slavs

Abstract

IN spite of the sketchy character of his work, Kireevsky was responsible for those basic ideas of Slavophilism subsequently worked out by other members of the movement, especially by Alexey Khomyakov, the most active of them all. In his main principles Khomyakov did not differ from Kireevsky. His conception of the wholeness of existence was practically the same. And so was his insistence on the importance of the irrational or supra-rational element in life in the name of which he fought the mere logical reasoning of Hegel and his followers. Realizing that any further quest in that pan-logical direction was impossible after Hegel, he became a religious philosopher par excellence. In his reaction to Hegel he rejected also the latter's philosophy of history on the ground that by trying to construct history according to the demands of human reason, Hegel constructed a systematic ghost in which severe logical consistency and assumed determinism only serve as a mask behind which there hides the limitless willfulness of the learned systematizer himself. Like Kireevsky, Khomyakov too had passed through the mazes of German romantic philosophy in order to reject most of it and zealously cling to that religious ideal which Kireevsky had discovered in the patristic writings and in the spirit of Orthodoxy, apparently still alive among the people even after the secularizing reforms of Peter the Great. While stressing the moral and spiritual freedom of Christianity, Khomyakov was convinced-whether rightly or wrongly-that such freedom was the very essence of Orthodoxy as distinct from