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1 4 6 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 2a conscious “lowering of the standards of social action,” but in Dostoyevsky’scase, modernity does not begin with an official departure from Christianity,but rather with a transformation within Christianity that anticipatesMachiavelli’s moral philosophy and that will later become, in Machiavelli’sthought, an officially non-Christian—and ultimately anti-Christian—doctrine.The relationship between the transformation of the Catholic Churchinto a state and the subsequent crisis of religious faith in the West is expressedin a diatribe of Prince Myshkin, who argues that, as “the continuation ofthe Western Roman Empire,” Roman Catholicism has betrayed Christ forthe sake of “universal temporal dominion” and preaches now “a distortedChrist,” or rather “the Antichrist.” Roman Catholicism is worse than “atheism,”which “first came into being through them,” and “gained strength fromthe abhorrence in which they were held.” 117Just as Rousseau, on Strauss’s view, reacted to the first wave of modernity,so too, according to Dostoyevsky, did the Roman Catholic attempt to enforceunity at the expense of freedom trigger a major reaction in defense of freedom:the Reformation. But, unable to go beyond the level of a purely negativereaction of contestation, the Reformation has further aggravated the crisis ofthe West. Unable to find its way back to the Orthodox experience of organictogetherness (freedom and unity reconciled through love) and integralknowledge (reason raised above itself through the loving union between theknower and the known), 118 Protestantism has instead laid the foundations formodern individualism and rationalism. 119 On this new, more or less explicitlyatheist foundation, the French Revolution has attempted once again, that isfor the third time, to accomplish the forced unification of mankind. Born outof the ideals of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution has represented“the last modification and metamorphosis of the same ancient Roman formulaof universal unity.” 120 But the Western world has remained torn apart,as the conflict between the two ideologies that have resulted from the FrenchRevolution, liberalism and socialism, reproduced, as in a mirror, the conflict117Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, trans. Alan Myers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 574.However, one must underline the fact that, while Dostoyevsky believes that in the West “the mainwell-spring” of the Christian faith “has been made muddy and has been befouled forever,” he alsoargues “that faith and the image of Christ up to the present continue to dwell in the hearts of manyCatholics in all their original truth and purity” (Diary, 1:95–96).118John S. Romanides, “Orthodox Ecclesiology according to Alexis Khomiakov (1804–1860),” TheGreek Orthodox Theological Review 2, no. 1 (Easter 1956): 61, 68.119Dostoyevsky, Diary, 2:564.120Ibid., 2:729.