"The phrase is entirely yours, not mine. Your own, and not merely the conclusion of our conversation. There wasn't any 'our' conversation: there was a teacher uttering immense words, and there was a disciple who rose from the dead. I am that disciple and you are the teacher."
"But, if you recall, it was precisely after my words that you joined that society, and only then left for America."
"Yes, and I wrote to you about it from America; I wrote to you about everything. Yes, I could not all at once tear myself bloodily from what I had grown fast to since childhood, to which I had given all the raptures of my hopes and all the tears of my hatred ... It is hard to change gods. I did not believe you then because I did not want to believe, and I clung for the last time to this filthy cesspool... But the seed remained and grew. Seriously, tell me seriously, did you read to the end of my letter from America? Perhaps you didn't read it at all?"
"I read three pages of it, the first two and the last, and glanced quickly over the middle as well. Though I kept meaning to..."
"Eh, it makes no difference, to hell with it!" Shatov waved his hand. "If you've now renounced those words about the nation, how could you have uttered them then?... That's what weighs on me now."
"But I was not joking with you then, either; in persuading you, I was perhaps more concerned with myself than with you," Stavrogin said mysteriously.
"Not joking! In America I lay on straw for three months next to a certain... unfortunate man, and I learned from him that at the very same time as you were planting God and the motherland in my heart— at that very same time, perhaps even in those very same days, you were pouring poison into the heart of this unfortunate man, this maniac, Kirillov ... You confirmed lies and slander in him and drove his reason to frenzy... Go and look at him now, he's your creation... You've seen him, however."
"First, I shall note for you that Kirillov himself has just told me he is happy and he is beautiful. Your assumption that all this happened at one and the same time is almost correct; well, and what of it? I repeat, I was not deceiving either one of you."
"You are an atheist? An atheist now?"
"Yes."
"And then?"
"Exactly the same as then."
"I wasn't asking your respect for myself when I began this conversation; with your intelligence, you should have understood that," Shatov muttered indignantly.
"I didn't get up at your first word, didn't close the conversation, didn't walk out on you, but have sat here all the while humbly answering your questions and... shouts, which means that my respect for you is still intact."
Shatov interrupted him, waving his hand:
"Do you remember your expression: 'An atheist cannot be Russian, an atheist immediately ceases to be Russian'—remember that?"
"Really?" Nikolai Vsevolodovich seemed to want the question repeated.
"You ask? You've forgotten? And yet this is one of the most precise indications of one of the main peculiarities of the Russian spirit, which you figured out. You can't have forgotten it? I'll remind you of more— you said at the same time: 'He who is not Orthodox cannot be Russian.’”
"A Slavophil notion, I suppose."
"No, the Slavophils nowadays disavow it. People have grown smarter nowadays. But you went even further: you believed that Roman Catholicism was no longer Christianity; you affirmed that Rome proclaimed a Christ who had succumbed to the third temptation of the devil, and that, having announced to the whole world that Christ cannot stand on earth without an earthly kingdom, Catholicism thereby proclaimed the Antichrist, thus ruining the whole Western world. You precisely pointed out that if France is suffering, Catholicism alone is to blame, for she rejected the foul Roman God but has not found a new one. That is what you were able to say then! I remember our conversations."[91]
"If I had belief, I would no doubt repeat it now as well; I wasn't lying, speaking as a believer," Nikolai Vsevolodovich said very seriously. "But I assure you that this repetition of my past thoughts produces an all too unpleasant impression on me. Couldn't you stop?"
"If you had belief?" Shatov cried, paying not the slightest attention to the request. "But wasn't it you who told me that if someone proved to you mathematically that the truth is outside Christ, you would better agree to stay with Christ than with the truth?[92] Did you say that? Did you?"
"But allow me also to ask, finally," Stavrogin raised his voice, "what this whole impatient and... spiteful examination is leading to?"
"This examination will end forever and you will never be reminded of it."
"You keep insisting that we are outside space and time..."
"Be silent!" Shatov suddenly shouted. "I'm stupid and clumsy, but let my name perish in ridiculousness! Will you permit me to repeat before you your main thought of that time... Oh, only ten lines, just the conclusion."
"Repeat it, if it's just the conclusion..."
Stavrogin nearly made a move to look at his watch, but refrained and did not look.
Shatov again leaned forward a little on his chair, and even raised his finger again for a moment.
"Not one nation," he began, as if reciting line by line, and at the same time still looking menacingly at Stavrogin, "not one nation has ever set itself up on the principles of science and reason; there has never been an example of it, unless perhaps only for a moment, out of foolishness. Socialism by its very essence must be atheism, because it has precisely declared, from the very first line, that it is an atheistic order, and intends to set itself up on the principles of science and reason exclusively. Reason and science always, now, and from the beginning of the ages, have performed only a secondary and auxiliary task in the life of nations; and so they will to the end of the ages. Nations are formed and moved by another ruling and dominating force, whose origin is unknown and inexplicable. This force is the force of the unquenchable desire to get to the end, while at the same time denying the end. It is the force of a ceaseless and tireless confirmation of its own being and a denial of death. The Spirit of life, as Scripture says, the 'rivers of living water,' whose running dry is so threatened in the Apocalypse.[93] The aesthetic principle, as philosophers say, the moral principle, as they also identify it. 'Seeking for God'—as I call it in the simplest way. The aim of all movements of nations, of every nation and in every period of its existence, is solely the seeking for God, its own God, entirely its own, and faith in him as the only true one. God is the synthetic person of the whole nation, taken from its beginning and to its end. It has never yet happened that all or many nations have had one common God, but each has always had a separate one. It is a sign of a nation's extinction when there begin to be gods in common. When there are gods in common, they die along with the belief in them and with the nations themselves. The stronger the nation, the more particular its God. There has never yet been a nation without a religion, that is, without an idea of evil and good. Every nation has its own idea of evil and good, and its own evil and good. When many nations start having common ideas of evil and good, then the nations die out and the very distinction between evil and good begins to fade and disappear. Reason has never been able to define evil and good, or even to separate evil from good, if only approximately; on the contrary, it has always confused them, shamefully and pitifully; and science has offered the solution of the fist. Half-science has been especially distinguished for that—the most terrible scourge of mankind, worse than plague, hunger, or war, unknown till our century. Half-science is a despot such as has never been seen before. A despot with its own priests and slaves, a despot before whom everything has bowed down with a love and superstition unthinkable till now, before whom even science itself trembles and whom it shamefully caters to. These are all your own words, Stavrogin, all except the words about half-science; those are mine, because I myself am only half-science, and therefore I especially hate it. As for your thoughts and even your very words, I haven't changed anything, not a word."