To Descartes God was the prime mover of the first matter. The universe was a machine. There was neither love nor mystery nor life, nothing except reason, which is reflected in all worlds, as light is reflected in the transparent crystals of the ice. Tichon was frightened by this lifeless God.
“Nature is full of life,” asserted Leibnitz in his Monadology, “I will prove that the origin of every movement is the spirit, and the spirit is a living monad, which is made up of ideas, as the centre is made up of angels.” All monads are united into a whole by the pre-established harmony of God. “The universe is God’s clock, horologium Dei.” “Again instead of life, a machine; instead of God, mechanics,” thought Tichon, and once more dread took hold of him.
But the most dreadful, because the most lucid, was Spinoza. He expressed what the others dared not say. “To assert that God took on Himself the nature of man, is as foolish as to assert that a circle had assumed the nature of a triangle or a square. ‘The word became flesh’ is an Eastern phrase, which has no meaning whatever in the light of reason. Christianity is distinguished from other religions not by faith nor by love, nor by its gifts of the Holy Spirit, but only by the fact that it is founded on a miracle, that is ignorance, which is the source of all evil, and in this way the faith itself is transformed into superstition.” Spinoza revealed the secret thought of all modern philosophers: either with Christ against reason or with reason against Christ.
One day Tichon spoke of Spinoza to Bishop Feofan.
“This philosophy is based on absurdities,” declared the bishop with a disdainful smile. “He has woven his reasoning out of contradictions and hid his lack of intelligence in pompous and sonorous words.”
This abuse neither convinced nor tranquillized Tichon. The works of the foreign theologians also helped him but little; they dismissed all ancient and modern philosophers as easily as the Russian bishop had done Spinoza.
Sometimes Feofan would let Tichon copy papers concerning the affairs of the Holy Synod. He was struck by the wording of the oath in the Ecclesiastical Regulations: “I swear to recognise as supreme judge of this College the Monarch of all the Russians, our most gracious Sovereign.” The Sovereign—the head of the Church, the Sovereign in the place of Christ!
“Magnus ille Leviathan, quae Civitas appelatur, officium artis est et Homo artificialis.” Tichon remembered reading those words in “Leviathan,” written by the English philosopher Hobbes, who asserted that the Church should be part of the Empire, a member of the great Leviathan, the gigantic automaton. “Is it not the image of the beast created in the image of the god-beast, which is spoken of in Revelation?” Tichon wondered.
The cold reasonableness of this lifeless church of a lifeless God chilled Tichon and became as unbearable to him as the fire of passionate madness, the fire of the Red and White Death.
The day had been fixed when Tichon should be solemnly anointed with holy baptismal oils in the Troïtsa Church, as a mark of his return to the Orthodox Church.