will be strewn with "catastrophes", most of them dealing with the "revolution of Spirit." The consequence of such revolution would bring about gradual change in the nature of religion itself, the latter taking under its spacious wing not only man's sensual liberation but also the latter's "freedom of rebellion." "We are human only as long as we're rebels," Merezhkovsky insisted, expressing what some saw as a proto-existentialist idea. One result of the "revolution of Spirit" should be the severing of ties between state and religion, according to Merezhkovsky. "The Church – not the old, but the new, eternal, universal one – is as opposite to the idea of the state as an absolute truth is opposing an absolute lie," he declared in an open letter to Berdyaev. B.Rozental, analyzing Merezhkovsky's political and religious philosophy, thus summed up the writer's position: "The Law amounts to violence... The difference between legitimate power that holds violence 'in reserve' and violence itself is but a matter of degree: sinful are both. Autocracy and murder are nothing more than the two extreme forms of exhibiting [criminal] power." Interpreting the Biblical version of the human history as a sequence of revolutionary events, Merezhkovsky saw religion and revolution as inseparable. It is just that for a social revolution to succeed, spiritual revolution should always come one step ahead of it. In Russia the lack of the latter brought about the former's fiasco, with Antichrist taking hold of things, he argued. In the 1920s Merezhkovsky lost interest in the religious anarchism doctrine. In his later years he became close to ecumenical ideals, prophesying the Kingdom Come as a synthesis of "Peter, Paul and John's principles", that is, bringing Catholic, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox traditions together. Legacy Throughout his lifetime Dmitry Merezhkovsky polarized opinion in his native Russia, bringing upon himself both praise and scorn, occasionally from the same quarters. According to Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Merezhkovsky became Russia's first ever "new-type, universal kind of a dissident who managed to upset just about everybody who thought themselves to be responsible for guarding morality and order":{{quote|Tsarist government saw Merezhkovsky as subverting the state foundations, patriarchs of official Orthodoxy regarded him a heretic, for literary academia he was a decadent, for Futurists – a retrograde, for Lev Trotsky, this ardent global revolution ideologist, – a reactionary. Sympathetic Anton Chekhov's words came and went unnoticed: 'A believer he is, a believer of an apostolic