ABSTRACT
To understand anything in any depth, a person has to experience it and identify with it. The Czech sociologist, Thomas Masaryk was one of the earliest social scientists to gather and use quantitative data. Along with a young Russian monk, Masaryk reestablished contact with a part of his own past that he had abandoned. The monk huddled in the past, and he peered fearfully, timidly into the fascinating future. The spiritual contrast between Russia and Europe is displayed in its fullest significance in the Russian monastery. Here we find the most genuine and the oldest Russian life, the feeling and thought of Old Russia. We see this already in the monasteries of Petrograd, but we see it yet more clearly in remoter monasteries and hermitages. Russia has preserved the childhood of Europe; in the overwhelming mass of its peasant population it represents Christian medievalism and, in particular, Byzantine medievalism.
