Demons

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Any nation is a nation only as long as it has its own particular God and rules out all other gods in the world with no conciliation; as long as it believes that through its God it will be victorious and will drive all other gods from the world. Thus all have believed from the beginning of time, all great nations at least, all that were marked out to any extent, all that have stood at the head of mankind. There is no going against the fact. The Jews lived only to wait for the true God, and left the true God to the world. The Greeks deified nature, and bequeathed the world their religion, that is, philosophy and art. Rome deified the nation in the state, and bequeathed the state to the nations. France, throughout her whole long history, has simply been the embodiment and development of the idea of the Roman God, and if she has finally flung her Roman God down into the abyss and plunged into atheism, which for the time being they call socialism, that is solely because atheism is, after all, healthier than Roman Catholicism. If a great nation does not believe that the truth is in it alone (precisely in it alone, and that exclusively), if it does not believe that it alone is able and called to resurrect and save everyone with its truth, then it at once ceases to be a great nation, and at once turns into ethnographic material and not a great nation. A truly great nation can never be reconciled with a secondary role in mankind, or even with a primary, but inevitably and exclusive...