Napoleon filled every corner of the earth; when German philosophy, poetry
and music emphasised personality and individuality when the whole
continental theology followed the way of Cæsar and interpreted Christianity
as a teaching and promotion of individualism in human life. Yea, it
happened in the time when Carlyle, fascinated by German theories, ended the
matter and pressed the whole world's history into some few biographies.
Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero-Worship"--curiously enough--was published about
the same time as Tolstoi's "War and Peace." Two antipodes! Dostojevsky's
"Brothers Caramazov" was published nearly at the same time as Nietzsche's
"Zarathustra" with its message of the Superman. Again two antipodes! You
will in vain try to find such contrasts in the world as the Russian and
Germano-Carlylean literature. Petronius and Seneca could read and
understand very well Goethe and Carlyle, but they could not read and
understand Tolstoi and Dostojevsky, nor could they understand the
Christianity of their own time.

"Great men!" exclaimed the Roman world on their dying beds.

"Great men!" exclaimed rejuvenated Western Europe in the nineteenth
century. History consists of great men. The very aim of history is to
produce great men.

"No," answered Holy Russia, who kept silent for a thousand years. The ideal
of the great man is the fast ideal of the childhood of mankind, of the
youthful Pagan world. We are grown up in the Christian spirit; we can no
longer live in the childish illusions and dreams of great men. We see them
as they are. There has never existed and does not yet exist a great man. No
one great man ever existed.

On this point Tolstoi and the Holy Synod were in agreement with each other