Anna Karenina - Part 8 - Page 20/52

These doubts fretted and harassed him, growing weaker or stronger

from time to time, but never leaving him. He read and thought,

and the more he read and the more he thought, the further he felt

from the aim he was pursuing.

Of late in Moscow and in the country, since he had become

convinced that he would find no solution in the materialists, he

had read and re-read thoroughly Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling,

Hegel, and Schopenhauer, the philosophers who gave a

non-materialistic explanation of life.

Their ideas seemed to him fruitful when he was reading or was

himself seeking arguments to refute other theories, especially

those of the materialists; but as soon as he began to read or

sought for himself a solution of problems, the same thing always

happened. As long as he followed the fixed definition of obscure

words such as _spirit, will, freedom, essence,_ purposely letting

himself go into the snare of words the philosophers set for him,

he seemed to comprehend something. But he had only to forget the

artificial train of reasoning, and to turn from life itself to

what had satisfied him while thinking in accordance with the

fixed definitions, and all this artificial edifice fell to pieces

at once like a house of cards, and it became clear that the

edifice had been built up out of those transposed words, apart

from anything in life more important than reason.

At one time, reading Schopenhauer, he put in place of his will

the word _love_, and for a couple of days this new philosophy

charmed him, till he removed a little away from it. But then,

when he turned from life itself to glance at it again, it fell

away too, and proved to be the same muslin garment with no warmth

in it.

His brother Sergey Ivanovitch advised him to read the theological

works of Homiakov. Levin read the second volume of Homiakov's

works, and in spite of the elegant, epigrammatic, argumentative

style which at first repelled him, he was impressed by the

doctrine of the church he found in them. He was struck at first

by the idea that the apprehension of divine truths had not been

vouchsafed to man, but to a corporation of men bound together by

love--to the church. What delighted him was the thought how much

easier it was to believe in a still existing living church,

embracing all the beliefs of men, and having God at its head, and

therefore holy and infallible, and from it to accept the faith in

God, in the creation, the fall, the redemption, than to begin

with God, a mysterious, far-away God, the creation, etc. But

afterwards, on reading a Catholic writer's history of the church,

and then a Greek orthodox writer's history of the church, and

seeing that the two churches, in their very conception

infallible, each deny the authority of the other, Homiakov's

doctrine of the church lost all its charm for him, and this

edifice crumbled into dust like the philosophers' edifices.