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Vladimir
Solovyov (1853–1900) A society betrays Christ if it accepts His truth as an external fact and wishes the life to remain heathen but the Kingdom of Heaven to be outside the world, as a fruitless decoration, or an addition to an earthly kingdom. Christianity is a new birth, a deed, an essence of life, a norm for the reality. The Christians transformed their faith into external works, obligatory dogms and obedience to Church authorities. The truth of Salvation became illegally fused with a clerical dogmatism, and a monstrous doctrine was born that believing in dogms is the single way of the Salvation. Ostensible Christianity degenerated into a religion of personal salvation. It considered material world to be evil and then it became possessed by evil spirits. Representatives of Pseudo-Christianity were like believing demons partly because of their dogmatism, partly because of their false spirituality. After they had lost an authentic spiritual strength and could not imitate Christ and apostles any more, they started to behave contrarily. The apostles conjured demons away in order to heal persons possessed by demons, however Pseudo-Christians began to kill possessed persons in order to conjure demons away. Since the initial authentic Christian society of the first centuries had melted into heathen environment and adapted to heathen character, the very idea of a Christian public life disappeared from minds even of the best Christians. As they had delivered the whole public life into the hands of the clerical and laical authorities, there remained individual salvation only which they reserved for themselves. They could be excused of course because the authorities were called Christians capable and obliged to care about Christian character of the public life. However /.../ any government is a product of own society and is organically connected to its society. Heathen character prevailing in societies of the Roman-Greek Empire as well of Romanic-German Europe, the state had no impetus to care about Christian character of the public life. The said task was more appropriate for Church authorities of course, however Church authorities in the West were engaged in struggle for their rights against the state, but they possessed no independence in the East. A contrast between heathendom of towns and Christianity of the desert was especially distinct in the East. With the only exception of John Chrysostom, preaching of eastern ascetics had not in mind any Christian transformations of the public order. There appeared not a single demand of such a kind in course of the whole Bysantine hystory. No wonder that the state and its laws remained heathen in the same way as the public mores were. Now wonder that the Code of Justinian is the same legislation as of the heathen Empire, only decorated with some Christian words. The resurrection of Christ in His humanity depends on us, if we really are Christians in practice, not nominally. Then the historical Thomas will put his hand to this Christianity, resurrected in the flesh, and with joy he will exclaim "My L-rd and my G-d!".
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