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.