Icon and Axe

2. The Anti-Enlightenment

A CENTRAL QUESTION haunts any consideration of Russian thought in the aristocratic century: Why was political reform, so much discussed under Catherine and Alexander I, so decisively removed from the intellectual agenda under Nicholas I? This waning of political interest among the upper class proved not just a temporary change of fashion but an enduring malady of the late imperial period. The aristocratic passion for political discussion all but died with the Decembrists. Lonely survivors of the movement, like Nicholas Turgenev, could not arouse interest in political questions even among fellow exiles. The reforms which were eventually enacted by Alexander II in the 1860’s touched on administrative and legal procedure rather than political authority. Reformers were preoccupied with the legal and economic bondage of the peasantry, not the political servitude of the entire country. There was no important modification of autocracy until the flood tide of twentieth-century war and revolution swept across Russia in 1905 and 1917. By then interest in political reform had lost all its connections with aristocratic culture, and was largely the province of harassed nationality groups within the empire, full-time revolutionaries, and the demimonde of urban and professional workers.

The narrow fears and insular perspectives of court life may explain why the imperial family and most of its immediate entourage proved incapable of creative involvement in domestic politics after the reign of Alexander I. But the general abdication of interest by the educated and well-traveled aristocracy seems difficult to understand, particularly when so little had been accomplished of what they had been led to expect from the Tsar. Nicholas I frankly confessed his dependence on the landed aristocracy serving as “unsleeping watchdogs guarding the state.” Why then did the aristocrats remain content in their kennels and not extract in return at least some of the political concessions they had long demanded?

Some of the explanation lies in the absence of external stimulus, a perennially important factor in initiating movements for reform inside the amorphous Russian realm. Under Nicholas no discussion was launched from above by the Tsar as under Catherine and Alexander I. Nor was Nicholas’ reign shaken from without by a sudden invasion either of foreign reformers (as under Catherine) or of military conquerors (as under Alexander). Yet the landed aristocracy would seem to have had enough contact with the outside world and enough domestic stimulus from peasant unrest and economic insolvency to sustain the pressure for political reform.

To understand why this pressure was not sustained—and why the reactionary rule of Nicholas I was in fact idolized by most educated aristocrats —one must look beyond the usual psychological and economic arguments for conservatism, and behind the predictably Prussian figure of Nicholas. He merely formalized developments which he had neither the ability to initiate nor the imagination to understand. The foundations of his reactionary rule were laid during the late years of Alexander I’s reign. This turn to obscurantism under Nicholas’ mystical and visionary predecessor is one of the most fateful developments in modern Russian history: it coincided with the increase in national self-consciousness that followed the Napoleonic wars to produce in Russia an identification of nationalism with social conservatism which did not become widespread in the rest of Europe until the late nineteenth century.

Many figures and interests were involved in Alexander’s reactionary turn: Arakcheev, the new military leader and author of plans for the military colonies; Photius, the spokesman for the xenophobic Church hierarchy; and Rostopchin, the vulgar, anti-intellectual spokesman for much of the higher civil service. But to understand more fully this decisive turn of events, one must consider the dominant ideological current of the age: the powerful surge of religiously tinged reaction against the rationalism and scepticism of the French Enlightenment.

The main force behind this anti-Enlightenment was higher order Masonry. The Moscow “Martinists” had created higher fraternities dedicated to combating scepticism and license, but had not provided any clear idea of where new belief and authority were to be found. They had left Russians with only a vague belief in spiritual rather than material forces, in esoteric symbols rather than rational propositions. These occult, quasi-religious circles led the aristocratic retreat from the rationalism of the Enlightenment. The retreat was not to be sudden and precipitous, as Paul had hoped, into a kind of garrison state ruled by a knightly order of mystical obscurantists. It was, rather, a gradual progression under Alexander I from the high noon of the Enlightenment into the gathering dusk of morbid romanticism.

Three figures can be said to have led this retreat: Joseph De Maistre, Ivan Lopukhin, and Michael Magnitsky. Each had roots in higher order Masonry. Each illustrates the basically rootless nature of reactionary political thought and the desperate quality of the search for some new principle of authority. De Maistre looked to Catholicism, Lopukhin to Protestant pietism, Magnitsky to Orthodoxy. Yet the churches to which they looked were not the historical churches of their respective communions but rather the private creations of their own disturbed minds. All three thinkers were haunted by memories of the French Revolution and fear that revolution was the inevitable by-product of secular enlightenment. Against the real and imagined dangers of Jacobins, “illuminists,” and revolutionaries, this reactionary trio created some of the first ideological blueprints in modern Europe for what may be fairly called “the radical right.”

De Maistre and Lopukhin, who were essentially transmitters of Western counter-revolutionary ideas onto Russian soil, are key figures in the ideological ferment of the early years of Alexander I’s reign. Magnitsky, who was more extreme than either of them, was almost unknown during their period of influence. His sudden rise to prominence in the second half of Alexander’s reign was a dramatic indication of the extent to which the anti-Enlightenment had struck roots in Russian soil. Through Magnitsky, Russia produced an original “Orthodox” species of counter-revolutionary theory, which was then refined and codified by Count Uvarov as the official ideology of the Russian Empire.

Catholics

OF ALL the counter-revolutionaries, De Maistre was the most philosophically profound in his denial of the possibility of human enlightenment. He rejected not just the light of reason but also Rousseau’s “inner light” and Pascal’s “reasons of the heart.” There are, he warns, “shadows within the heart”¹—and even darker shadows lengthening across the path of history. His famous philosophical dialogue Evenings of St. Petersburg is suffused with the metaphor of gathering darkness; and his elliptical imagery and polemic intensity represents a further setting of the sun of enlightened discourse. This process had begun in Russia with Novikov’s Twilight Glow and would culminate in another lengthy and obscure philosophic dialogue of the 1840’s: Prince Odoevsky’s Russian Nights. As the work of a Western émigré in Russia, de Maistre’s Evenings also stands as a kind of eastward extension of the romantic revolt against optimistic rationalism which had begun with Young’s Night Thoughts and culminated in Novalis’ Hymns to the Night.

De Maistre’s first contact with Russia came in 1797. As the dispossessed son of the former president of the senate of Savoy, he was fleeing the advancing legions of the French Revolution when he accidentally met and was taken aboard a boat on the Po River by the Russian ambassador.² After many subsequent wanderings, De Maistre joined his brother Xavier and many other Savoyards and Piedmontese who had already taken refuge in St. Petersburg. He brought with him a passionate opposition to the French Revolution and the entire philosophy of the Enlightenment: “the destructive fanaticism of the eighteenth century.”³ Unlike most other émigrés, he did not formally enter the Russian service but came rather in the capacity of ambassador of Sardinia. As such he moved into a position of independent authority and began fifteen years of influential activity in and around the imperial court. De Maistre arrived during a high period of Catholic favor in Russia. Paul had obtained from Pius VII permission to restore the disbanded Society of Jesus in Russia. The Jesuits’ educational zeal endeared them to Alexander as it had earlier to Catherine. The head of the Society lived in Russia, and it continued to flourish throughout the early years of Alexander’s reign independently of the Catholic hierarchy.⁴

De Maistre argued that the Revolution of 1789 and the Terror of 1793 followed inevitably from the real revolution that had taken place in the European mind some years before, “the insurrection against God.”⁵ In his denunciation of “theophobia”⁶ and contemporary nihilism (rienisme),⁷ he became a favorite figure in the drawing rooms of St. Petersburg and by 1805 was already a confidant of the young emperor, advocating Roman Catholicism as the only antidote to revolution.

Yet De Maistre was no ordinary Catholic. His ideological background lay not in Thomist philosophy and Roman Catholic academies but in occult mysticism and secret societies. In the seventies and eighties he had been a leading theorist and organizer of higher order Masonry—a background which prepared him well for the disturbed atmosphere of aristocratic Russia. Like the Russian intellectuals, De Maistre had a kind of unstable ideological convertibility. “I owe to the Jesuits,” he wrote, “not having become an orator of the constituent assembly.”⁸ He often seems more fascinated than outraged by the mystical and destructive side of the Revolution. Morbid themes weave in and out of his provocative writings, creating an impression that terrifying forces are loose in the world and that only total surrender to the Roman priesthood can stave off disaster. He picks up essentially where Schwarz and Novikov had left off in their attacks on “the pale light of reason.” While still a Mason he had written an ambitious project for the congress of higher orders at Wilhelmsbad in 1782. His espousal of the Roman priesthood came not on rational or traditional grounds but as an answer to the need which he felt for a new society dedicated to combating scepticism and recapturing the “true divine magic” of the early Christian Church.⁹

Essential to De Maistre’s war on the Enlightenment was his conviction that man was incurably and irrevocably corrupt. He is harshly critical of

the banal hypothesis that man has lifted himself gradually from barbarism to science and civilization. It is the favorite dream, the mother-error … of our century.¹⁰

“We must not let ourselves be seduced by what we perceive of order in the universe,”¹¹ he warns in an italicized passage. The ecclesiastical optimism of Bishop Berkeley is no less wrong than the scientific optimism of Bacon. Man has triumphed in the natural world not because he is more reasonable, as the eighteenth century contended, but because he is more barbaric. Man is a “terrible and superb king,” the supreme killer who takes perfume “from the heads of sharks and whales,” tramples triumphantly on the skins of tigers and bears, “kills for the sake of killing.”

Man demands everything at once: the entrails of the lamb to play on his harp, the bones of the whale to stiffen the virgin’s corset, the most murderous tooth of the wolf to polish light works of art, the defences of the elephant to fashion a child’s toy: his tables are covered with corpses.¹²

Man will finish by destroying himself in accordance with an “occult and terrible law” which permeates nature. It was far harder for Peter the Great to abolish beards than to get his people to go to war—even when they were losing. There is an irresistible fascination with bloody violence, which is attested to even in man’s highest religions. Lofty prophetic monotheisms, such as Islam and Judaism, require bloodletting in circumcision, and the loftiest of all, Christianity, required crucifixion. Salvation is a mysterious gift gained only through bloody sacrifice and requiring a special priestly caste to keep the secrets and disperse authority.¹³ Political authority likewise is based on fear of the hangman and requires the right of summary execution by the sovereign to be effective.¹⁴ He hails the Jesuits as “the Janissaries of St. Peter,” who “alone could have prevented the Revolution.”¹⁵ But he feels that Europe is disintegrating and will give way to some savage tribe, such as the natives of New Holland, who have a word for forced abortion but not for God.¹⁶ His last words were: “the earth is trembling, yet you want to build.”¹⁷

A hint of premonition is introduced at the beginning of his most famous work dealing with Russia. The setting for the Evenings is the “fleeting twilight” of the northern summer, where the sun “rolls like a flaming chariot over the somber forests which crown the horizon, and its rays reflected by the windows of the palaces give the spectator the impression of an immense conflagration.”¹⁸ De Maistre believed that the flames were already reaching St. Petersburg; but, like the Old Believers, he considered fire a purifying rather than a destructive force. He saw the flame of poetry mixed in with the flame of revolution, and he betrays the same mixture of horror and fascination with which many Russian intellectuals were to look on their country. De Maistre was appalled in 1799 at the arrival in Italy of Suvorov’s army, “Scyths and Tatars from the north pole coming to slit the throats of the French,”¹⁹ yet he soon became convinced that Russia was an instrument chosen by Providence for the salvation of Europe. He spoke contemptuously about Russia’s tendency toward violence and assassination, yet was fascinated with the potentialities for sudden political and ideological change with which this “Asiatic remedy” provided Russia.²⁰ He loved to visit the supposedly haunted regions of Gatchina and the room in the Mikhailovsky Palace in which Paul was killed.

Almost immediately upon arrival he wrote of the danger to Russia of “minds fashioned by La Harpe”²¹ in the Tsar’s entourage and soon gathered about himself a constellation of older noblemen who also had reason to be apprehensive of the Tsar’s new advisers and liberal inclinations: the Stroganovs, Tolstoys, Kochubeis, and the Viazemskies. The leader of the latter family, Catherine’s former procurator general, provided the salons which, along with the new Jesuit headquarters in St. Petersburg, became the centers for De Maistre’s activities.

Like Possevino in the sixteenth century and Krizhanich in the seventeenth, De Maistre became fascinated by the possibility of converting this vast land to Catholicism. He launched a program for the conversion of “one dozen women of quality” and helped gain for the Jesuits increasing authority within the empire.²² As the euphoria of the summit meeting of 1807 between Napoleon and Alexander receded and the possibility of war with France grew, De Maistre’s influence increased proportionately. He became a leader in the ideological mobilization of the Russian aristocracy, portraying their struggle as that of Christian civilization against the new Caesar.

He began his public attack on the liberalism of Alexander’s earlier years in 1810 with Five Letters on Public Education in Russia, an indictment of Speransky’s proposed educational reforms.²³ The following year he began his correspondence with Count Uvarov, the future minister of education and theoretician of reaction. He also delivered a long memorandum to Alexander Golitsyn, later printed as Four Chapters on Russia,²⁴ and participated with Admiral Shishkov and other reactionary leaders in the newly formed patriotic society Lovers of Russian Speech. At the time of Speransky’s dismissal in the spring of 1812, De Maistre reached the height of his influence. He held a number of long private conversations with the Tsar and was offered the position of official editor of documents published in the Tsar’s name.

Catholicism generally was at a high point of favor. The Jesuit order, which had been permitted to extend its activities to Siberia in 1809 and the Crimea in 1811, changed its collegium at Polotsk into a seminary in 1812 with university status and wide supervisory rights over secondary education in White Russia. In 1813 Alexander even expressed sympathy for the Roman Catholic position on the classical ecclesiastical controversy over the origin of the Holy Spirit. The appointment of Catholic émigrés as governors of exposed western provinces, Paulucci in Riga and Richelieu in Odessa, was also a boon to Catholic activity.

However, the levée-en-masse against Napoleon in 1812 raised passions that were to sweep both De Maistre and the Jesuits out of Russia within a few years. Increased national pride and anti-foreign feeling made Roman Catholicism a particularly suspect faith; but Russia was in any case suddenly captured by a new religious infatuation that was anathema to De Maistre and Catholicism: ecumenical pietism. This syncretic and emotional offshoot of Protestantism was even more hostile to the secular rationalism of the Enlightenment than the ultramontanism of De Maistre. It was to be far more important in consolidating the anti-Enlightenment in Russia.

De Maistre had seen the new movement coming; and in his critique of the Pietist-influenced course of study for the new St. Petersburg Theological Academy in 1810, he had tried to counter what he called the “German sickness” of vagueness with “the Parisian mercury otherwise known as ridicule.”²⁵ He remained in Russia long enough to voice his objections to the two main by-products of the new pietism: the Russian Bible Society and the Holy Alliance. He objected to the idea of distributing Bibles to the people without any guide for reading and interpretation, and to the subordination of religious activities to a state official. General discussions of scripture and intra-confessional prayer meetings merely “accommodate human pride by freeing it from all authority.” Like the Bible Society, the Holy Alliance reduced Catholicism to the status of a subordinate cult, represented only by the Catholic Austrian Emperor who was one of its three signers. The Pope refused to sign or approve the text of the Alliance, and De Maistre denounced it as a “Socinian plot” and “mask for revolution.”²⁶

Nonetheless, De Maistre felt that the idea of inter-confessional tolerance would eventually benefit Catholicism, as the only participant certain to remain intolerant and proselytizing. The vague movements sponsored by Alexander were “a blind instrument of providence” preparing the world for “I don’t know what kind of great unity” which will “drive out all doubt from the city of God.”²⁷ Thus, even after Alexander had turned to pietism and expelled the Jesuits from Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1815, De Maistre lingered on in hopes of playing some role in the mysterious march of providence. He wrote a valedictory appeal for tightened censorship and discipline, Five Letters to a Russian Gentleman on the Spanish Inquisition.²⁸ He may have been encouraged by a long interview with the Tsar in February, 1816, when Alexander assured him that the Society and the Alliance were but the first stages in the establishment of a universal church. Later in the year Alexander succeeded in enlisting the ranking Catholic prelate in the empire as a member of the Society and the following year sent a Catholic deputy to Rome to discuss a peace of the churches to accompany the peace of the nations. In moments of crisis, even after the departure of De Maistre in May, 1817, and the banishment of the Jesuits from Russia in 1820, Alexander turned periodically to Rome, coordinating his ban on secret societies in Poland in September, 1821, with the concurrent Papal bull, Ecclesia Iesu Christo. In 1825, the last year of his life, Alexander sent an old friend of De Maistre and fellow Catholic from Savoy on a secret mission to Rome apparently to procure a high Church official for instruction in the Catholic faith. Thus he may have been contemplating conversion on the eve of his death.²⁹

Pietists

FAR MORE IMPORTANT than the Catholic reactionaries in the mobilization of Russia against revolutionary and Enlightenment thought were the religious thinkers that held sway over Alexander in the fateful second half of his reign: the Pietistic prophets of a universal, “inner” church. More amorphous than the Catholic party, the ecumenical party drew its strength from both higher order Masonry and mystical Protestantism. Indeed, this party represents the final forging of an alliance between aristocratic mysticism and popular sectarianism that Catherine had feared. This party left a complicated legacy; its truest spiritual heirs were anti-authoritarian moralists like Leo Tolstoy; but its immediate legacy to Russia lay, ironically, in the intensification and deepening of counter-revolutionary thought in Russia. Vaguely seeking a universal church, the proponents of a new church helped lay the groundwork for the new restrictiveness and exclusiveness of Russia under Nicholas I.

The new ingredient in this movement was Protestant Pietism, an ideological force that had been filtering into Russia ever since it began to dominate ecclesiastical life in Germany in the early eighteenth century. Pietism was the main rival to secular rationalism in the Age of the Enlightenment and the spiritual forebear of the romantic counterattack of the early nineteenth century. Like Methodism, its most familiar offshoot, Pietism first received its name as an epithet and was for a time little more than an impulse toward a more emotional, personal religious commitment within the established Church. Pietists generally sought to do away with dogma in favor of what they called “true Christianity,” a phrase from the title of a book written at the beginning of the seventeenth century by Johann Arndt. Pietism first acquired identity through the movement to create a new inter-confessional and international brotherhood of Christians largely in response to two writings of the late seventeenth century: Philipp Spener’s On True Evangelical Churches and Gottfried Arnold’s Non-Party History of Church and Heresy. The Pietists’ main base of operations became Halle University, where they set up a special program of devotional instruction and an institute for the study and evangelization of Eastern peoples. They paid special attention to Russia and exerted an ever-increasing influence within Russian theological academies of the early eighteenth century, still the major educational institutions of the time. Particularly in White and Little Russia, where there had been much crossing of confessional lines, Pietism seemed to offer a new approach free of traditional doctrinal bitterness. The most learned Russian Orthodox theologian of the early eighteenth century, Simeon Todorsky, was the Ukrainian son of a converted Jew who was educated by Jesuits but found his spiritual calling among the Pietists, translating Arndt into Russian along with the most complete version of the Bible yet to appear in Russia: the so-called Elizabeth Bible of 1751.³⁰

Pietism was the first international missionary movement of Protestantism to accept the obligation of evangelizing the heathen as a primary duty of the church independent of state support. Even under Peter the Great, the Pietists had found Russia a fruitful field for evangelization. They set up small and short-lived schools in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Narva, Astrakhan, and Tobol’sk—all of them teaching at least one Oriental language for purposes of future evangelization.³¹

Of more lasting importance for Russia was the colonization that began soon after the founding of a central base for Pietism on the estate of Count Zinzendorf in Saxony in the 1720’s. Known as Herrnhut (“Watch of the Lord”), this community attracted survivors of the old Czech Protestant movement from Moravia, along with Lutherans, Calvinists, and even some Catholics. Zinzendorf’s community became the germ of the religious fraternity known as the Moravian Brethren, or more properly, the United Brethren. Almost from the beginning, the Brethren were anxious to transplant to foreign soils not just Pietist ideas but the entire experience of the Herrnhut community. Settling everywhere from colonial Georgia to Greenland and India, they began in the 1730’s their most natural and extensive colonizing movement: into Eastern Europe. Moving partly through Latvia and Esthonia, partly through Poland and Hungary, they took advantage of Catherine’s toleration decrees of 1762 and 1763 to enter Russia in large numbers.

The Moravian Brethren soon became the dominant force within a steadily expanding community of non-conformist German Protestants (Mennonites, Hutterites, and so on) in the rapidly opening regions of the Russian south and east.³² Seeking at first the remnants of the original Moravian Church which they believed had settled in the Caucasus, they soon settled down in the desolate region of Sarepta, on the lower Volga, rapidly transforming it into a model agricultural community.

By the 1790’s German Pietists were immensely popular with the Russian aristocracy. The Free Economic Society studied their efficient agricultural methods with interest; aristocrats flocked to Sarepta to patronize its fashionable mineral baths;³³ and after the beginning of the French Revolution, Russians began to see in these pious and industrious people a kind of antidote to the abstract rationalism of the French Enlightenment. Zhukovsky, who turned Russian poetry from classical to romantic patterns, was (like the great German romantic poet Novalis) largely educated by German Pietists. Tikhon Zadonsky, who founded his own “true Christian” community along the Don, emphasized the Pietistic idea that God’s truth was to be found in reading the Bible and in acts of devotion and charity.³⁴

The tolerance, industry, and devotional intensity of the Herrnhut communities made a profound impact on the budding romantic imagination of Europe. Novalis’ education with the brethren probably influenced his only superficially Catholic vision of a reunited Christendom in Europe or Christianity. Mme de Staël devoted the fourth part of her On Germany to praise of the Moravian Brethren; and the Slavophile Kireevsky later called the movement the true germ of Christian unity.³⁵

Pietism encouraged education and had been seen as an ally of enlightenment in Eastern Europe; but after the French Revolution it became increasingly mystical and traditionalist. Pietists found themselves increasingly close in spirit to the mystics within the higher Masonic orders, who had long spoken of a Europe-wide conservative alliance of “true Christians.” Both groups tended to speak of the Revolution in apocalyptical terms, blaming it on the rationalism of the Enlightenment. There was a tendency in Central and Eastern Europe to blame everything on “the plot against altars and thrones” of a small group of rationalistic Masons: the “illuminists of Bavaria.”³⁶ Lavater, who was equally influential in Masonic and Pietist circles, felt that the only answer to universal revolution was a universal, inner church teaching “universal speech, universal monarchy, universal religion, universal medicine.”³⁷ Lavater almost certainly had a decisive influence on the turn to conservatism of Karamzin, who called him a “true Christ” and visited him in Zurich in 1789.³⁸ Lavater and Saint-Martin both implored their followers beyond the Rhine to produce a new Christianity that would vanquish the apocalyptical beast of the Revolution. The response was extraordinary: the German “society of Christ” called for a universal biblical Christianity free of dogma; others advocated a link between higher Masonry and all Christian confessions; an influential Rosicrucian introduced a program of attending Catholic mass in the morning, Lutheran services in the afternoon, and “visiting in the evening either the community of the Moravian Brethren, the lodge, or the synagogue.”³⁹

The most widely read prophets of a mystical, counter-revolutionary union were Jung-Stilling and Karl Eckartshausen. In his widely read Victorious History of the Christian Religion of 1799, Jung said that humanity must either continue in endless revolution or subordinate itself to a higher form of Christianity. Jung’s work helped influence De Maistre’s concept of counter-revolutionary Catholicism;⁴⁰ but Jung wrote that the new church would come from the East. The Moravian Brethren, among whom Jung had lived for many years, are to be its nucleus, and it will have new quasi-Oriental initiation rites in the manner of a Masonic temple. Jung took a new name in the manner of the higher orders, choosing one to dramatize his belief in the Pietist ideal of inner peace (Stille).

The prolific Eckartshausen was even more influential in propagating the idea of a new mystical church in his writings of the eighties and nineties: A History of Knighthood, God Is True Love, Religious Writings on Light and Darkness, and The Key to Occult Science and the Mystical Night. In his last and most influential book, The Cloud over the Sanctuary of 1802, he took pains to point out that the new church would be above all presently existing ones. It was to be the primal religion (Urreligion) that lay behind all other religions: a “new world” known “to the hidden saints of all religions” in which “Christian, Jew, and barbarian go hand in hand.”⁴¹

Eckartshausen’s writings were probably the most important single vehicle for popularizing the idea of a new counter-revolutionary Christian alliance inside Russia. As a former leader of the government commission which investigated and uprooted the rationalistic “Illuminists” of Bavaria even before the French Revolution, he was looked to as an experienced and erudite veteran of the counter-revolutionary camp. During the reign of Alexander I almost all of his works were published inside Russia—most of them in several different editions.⁴² Alexander was reading his Cloud over the Sanctuary while drawing up his draft of the Holy Alliance; and Eckartshausen’s fame encouraged Russian authorities to seek out other ecumenically oriented Bavarian mystics during the latter part of Alexander’s reign.

The man responsible for popularizing this undistinguished (and elsewhere almost totally unknown) German was the second key figure in the Russian anti-Enlightenment: Ivan Lopukhin. In Lopukhin’s career, sectarian Pietism and higher order Masonry were fused and given a clear counterrevolutionary bias.

Lopukhin had been, like De Maistre, an active Mason who slowly turned first against revolution and then against rationalism altogether. The first crisis in his life came in the early eighties when he was asked to translate Holbach’s Code of Nature as part of his Masonic duties. When he realized that its materialistic philosophy was alien to Christian teaching, he burned his translation and immersed himself in the occult pursuits of the Rosicrucians. In 1789 he experienced a second crisis. Having just recovered miraculously from a life-long illness and shortly after hearing of the outbreak of revolution in France, he experienced a kind of mystic conversion while walking in the garden of Count Razumovsky. Henceforth he was to be —to cite the title of a tract he wrote in 1791—“A Spiritual Knight, or Searcher for True Wisdom.” He resolved to write a great new treatise for the times, which he published after nearly a decade of labor in 1798: Several Characteristics of the Inner Church, or the One Path to Truth and the Different Paths to Error and Damnation.⁴³ The work created an instant sensation in higher Masonic circles—and throughout Europe. In 1799 a French edition was published in Russia; in 1801 there was published another French edition in Paris and a second Russian edition; and, shortly thereafter, two German editions and several other Russian editions. The aged Eckartshausen particularly admired the work, established close relations with Lopukhin, and arranged for the translation into Russian of his own writings and those of other German members of the “inner church.”

Meanwhile Lopukhin was sent by the new Tsar Alexander to southern Russia to investigate the growth of sectarian religion in the region. He discovered and lived among the spirit wrestlers, whom he proclaimed to be hidden saints of his new church in his essay “Voice of Sincerity.” The foes of his mystical church were the secular learning and self-indulgence which kept man from following Christ and gaining “true wisdom.” In an essay of 1794, “The Baneful Fruits of Idle Dreams, of Equality, and of Tumultuous Freedom,” he had seen the acquisitive instincts of the French revolutionaries as the cause of all Europe’s ills; and in his church he expressed his ire at the equally materialistic response of the churches. He proposed that the inner church excommunicate believers in “the kingdom of property [tsarstvo sobstvennosti], who bear on them the image of Antichrists.”⁴⁴ In 1809 he became the guiding spirit behind the journal Friend of Youth, publishing such anti-rationalistic tracts as “Fruits of the Heart in Love with Truth” and “Paths of the Praying Heart.” He was joined by another protégé of Schwarz, Labzin, whose mystical journal Herald of Zion made its first appearance on January 1, 1806. Labzin had been “converted” to the new mystical Christianity after an initial infatuation with the Encyclopedists, whom he then denounced in a poem, “The French Shop.”

The Pietistic reactionaries fell briefly out of favor in the years immediately after the alliance with Napoleon in 1807. Labzin’s journal was shut; Lopukhin was forced to leave Moscow for his country estate; and Grabianka’s “New Jerusalem” sect, which had taken to ecstatic prophecy in the manner of the flagellants, was shut down. But at the same time, the proponents of a counter-revolutionary “inner church” gained a key disciple within the Tsar’s immediate entourage. Prince Alexander Golitsyn, a former lover of the Encyclopedists and a descendant of one of the most learned and Francophile of Russian noble families, also underwent a kind of conversion. As Alexander’s civilian procurator of the Holy Synod, Golitsyn decided to read (for the first time in his life) the New Testament. He found in Christ’s life and teaching a wealth of inspiration that he had never found in Orthodoxy. As he looked about his empire, he began to feel that the Christian sectarians—particularly the Protestant Pietists—were better practitioners of New Testament Christianity than the Orthodox. He had particular regard for the Moravian Brethren’s community at Sarepta, which he had often visited for mineral baths.⁴⁵ Accordingly, in 1810, he resigned as procurator of the Synod to become supervisor of foreign confessions in Russia. What was ostensibly a demotion was to this new believer in inter-confessional Christianity a fresh opportunity.

Golitsyn brought Ignatius Fesler, a defrocked Trappist monk who had become an historian of German Masonry and leader of the Berlin “Society of the Friends of Humanity,” to St. Petersburg in 1810 to teach philosophy at the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary.⁴⁶ Nominally a Protestant, this Silesian pamphleteer was mainly interested in promoting a new inter-confessional “Society of Brotherly Love” (Philadelphia). Bitterly attacked by De Maistre, Fesler received full support from Golitsyn, who encouraged him to pay a long visit to Sarepta and eventually made him superintendent of the special consistory created for the seventy-three evangelical colonies of South Russia.

Most important of all, Golitsyn persuaded the Tsar himself to read the Bible (also for the first time) and make it a kind of manual for the “spiritual mobilization” of Russia to combat Napoleon. Golitsyn lent his own Bible to Alexander, who read it on a voyage through newly conquered Finland in the summer of 1812. Especially moved by the prophetic books of the Old Testament and the Apocalypse in the New, Alexander attended Protestant churches in Finland and confessed that “a new world is opening up before me.”⁴⁷ The impressionable Tsar began to interpret contemporary events in Biblical terms, to attend prayer meetings and Bible readings in Golitsyn’s inter-confessional chapel. He adopted as his own the idea of a new inner Christianity, an inter-confessional brotherhood of “Biblical” Christians who would heal the wounds of Christian division and revolutionary strife.

The key organization in this “spiritual mobilization” was the Bible Society, an organization which came to Russia through Protestant Finland from Pietism and its English version, the Methodist Church. It is interesting that this church, which played such an important role in steering English popular enthusiasm away from revolutionary paths,⁴⁸ should play a similar role in Russia. Alexander delayed his departure from St. Petersburg to Moscow to pursue the retreating Napoleon late in 1812 in order to meet with the English leader of the society, who had just arrived by way of Turku in Finland to help set up a Russian chapter. The Tsar and his two brothers became patrons of the society, and Golitsyn its president.

At the founding meeting of the society in January, 1813, there were representatives of a variety of domestic and foreign Protestant churches, with the Moravians playing the key role. Under Golitsyn’s leadership the original plan to print Bibles only in foreign languages was expanded during the next two years to include Russian-language New Testaments and Bibles; its primarily Protestant clerical leadership was expanded to include Orthodox and even Catholic clergy; and chapters spread out all over Russia for dissemination and discussion of Holy Scripture.⁴⁹

As Alexander moved slowly into Europe behind the advancing Russian army, his movements at times resembled more an inter-confessional religious pilgrimage than a military campaign. He read the Bible daily, interpreting events about him in Biblical terms. As he explained to a Lutheran bishop from Prussia:

The burning of Moscow brought light to my soul, and the judgment of God on the icy fields filled my heart with the warmth of faith which I had not felt till then. I then recognized God as He was described in holy scripture. I owe my own redemption to [God’s] redemption of Europe from destruction.⁵⁰

En route to the final showdown with Napoleon he stopped off to see the flourishing communities of Moravian Brethren in Livonia and the pilot community of Herrnhut in Saxony, attended Quaker meetings at London, and celebrated an outdoor Easter liturgy with his entire officer corps at the very spot in the Place de la Concorde in Paris where the Catholic King Louis XVI had been beheaded.⁵¹

One witness to this scene wrote ecstatically that “the smoke of incense mounts to the sky in order to reconcile heaven and earth. Religion and liberty have triumphed.”⁵² Russian officers were encouraged to fraternize with French Masons; European romantics from the libertarian Mme de Staël to the restorationist Chateaubriand hailed the redeeming piety of the Russian monarch; while Lopukhin on his Baltic estate staged a symbolic burial of Napoleon at midnight by the light of five hundred burning crosses.⁵³

Between Alexander’s first entrance into Paris in 1814 and the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo the following year, there was a veritable chorus of voices prophesying a great destiny for Alexander. The aged Jung-Stilling professed occult knowledge that the end of the world would occur in 1819 or 1836; the millennium would begin in the East, with Alexander as the elected instrument of God. Alexander visited him and heard him preach in 1814, sent special grants to him thereafter, and remained in close touch until his death in 1817.⁵⁴ During the same period the Baroness Krüdener, who had close links with Herrnhut and Jung-Stilling, conducted Pietistic devotion services with the Tsar and impressed him with his sense of mission to save Christendom.⁵⁵ Other important associates of the period were the French mesmerist Nicholas Bergasse and the Bavarian mystic Franz von Baader, who early in 1814 had sent a memorandum to the rulers of Russia, Austria, and Prussia: On the Need Created by the French Revolution for a New and Closer Union of Religion with Politics.⁵⁶ The following summer he resubmitted it to the Tsar alone, dedicating the memorandum to Golitsyn. All education and political rule must, in Baader’s view, be suffused with Christian teachings; and Christianity itself must assimilate vital elements from other religions and mythologies.

Whether Mme Krüdener, Baader, or Alexander was its principal author, the Holy Alliance that was promulgated in September, 1815, and presented to the Russian people on Christmas day was the culmination of the effort to find a “Christian answer to the French Revolution.” A Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox monarch publicly pledged themselves to base their entire rule “upon the sublime truths which the holy religion of our savior teaches.” The name of the alliance was taken from a prophetic passage in the Book of Daniel; the dedication is to “the Most Holy and Indivisible Trinity”; and the monarchs pledge aid to one another rather in the manner of a higher Masonic order. They speak of themselves as “three branches of the one family” pledged to aid one another in unfolding “the treasures of love, science, and infinite wisdom.”⁵⁷

It was, of course, mainly in Russia that the religious nature of the Alliance was taken seriously. In the first two years of its existence an extraordinary effort was made to transform Russian society in accordance with the spirit of the Alliance. Golitsyn was given a new portfolio without parallel in nineteenth-century Europe: as “minister of education and spiritual affairs.” He maintained contact with Baader, who recruited for him a number of anti-scholastic and anti-papal Catholic mystics from Bavaria in order “to provide good priests for all the cults.” Alexander commissioned Baader to write a manual of instruction for the Russian clergy, and Golitsyn enlisted him as his “literary correspondent” late in 1817. Baader and the other Bavarian mystics hoped to reunite Christendom with an esoteric neo-Platonic theology that would bypass both “Protestant rationalism” and “Roman dictatorship.” Ignatius Lindl, a great preacher and leader of the Bavarian Bible Society, came to Russia in 1819; Johann Gosner came from Bavaria by way of Switzerland and Silesia the following year. They all played a leading role in the effort under Golitsyn to devise a system of instruction in which “simple unlearned people” could be “tutored by the Holy Ghost.”⁵⁸

Spiritual regeneration was to be accomplished not only through the Bible Society and a new system of spiritual instruction but also through such philanthropic societies as the nationwide “Lovers of Humanity,” which was founded by Alexander for “the fulfillment of the divine commandments that the Bible Society teaches us.”⁵⁹ Most important of all was the florid expansion of higher order Masonry, which Alexander encouraged by visiting lodges both in Prussia and in Russia. His birthday became one of the two special holidays of Russian Masonry, and regional lodges began to spring up in the provinces as a counterpart to the regional chapters of the Bible Society and the “Lovers of Humanity.” In 1815 higher Masonry was subordinated to the Grand Lodge Astrea, named for the Goddess of Justice, who had been the last to leave the earth at the end of the Golden Age. New Masonic hymns, inspired by the Holy Alliance, spoke of restoring the golden age “when love illuminated all with its beauty and men lived in brotherhood.” Lutheran and Catholic priests joined, and prayers of invocation were addressed to “God, Odin, Zeus, Jehovah, Thor, and the White God.”⁶⁰ Pietists were particularly active in the rapidly expanding chain of provincial lodges, and German became the main language within the lodges.⁶¹

Quirinus Kuhlmann was venerated as a prophet of the new religion. Lopukhin included a statue of Kuhlmann in his garden of heroes, a kind of outdoor pantheon of the inner church. Labzin, in his introduction to an edition of The Path to Christ in 1815 by “our father among the saints, Jacob Boehme,” suggested that Kuhlmann’s teachings had been well received by “some of the boyars closest to the Tsar.”⁶² Certainly, Labzin’s mystical writings gained such favor. He published nine books on Boehme, and in 1816 was decorated by the Tsar and asked to revive his Herald of Zion. He became a kind of coordinator-in-chief for publications of the new supra-confessional church. In addition to the Herald, twenty-four books of a new devotional manual entitled “The Spiritual Year in the Life of a Christian” appeared in 1816. Other “spiritual journals,” like Christian Reading and Friend of Youth (to which had been added and of All Ages), flourished as part of a general program to “bring thinking people back to faith.”⁶³ Previously proscribed prophetic works by Jung-Stilling were published. His famous Homesickness, which was serialized by the Moscow University Press throughout 1817-18, included among its subscribers twenty-four from Irkutsk alone.⁶⁴ The Herald of Zion had among its sponsoring subscribers the Tsar, the Grand Duke Constantine, and all the theological academies of the empire.

In 1817 the Herald added a special section, The Rainbow, purporting to reveal new symbols and prophecies pertaining to the unification of the churches and of all humanity. Rainbows were a key symbol for higher order Masonry, because they combined sunlight (the light of the past) with rain (the sins of the present) to give men a hint of the future transformation of the world.⁶⁵ The spectrum of colors in the rainbow was likened to the various churches and nationalities that were all formed from the One True Light.

For the optimistic, romantic imagination,

The One remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;

Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity.⁶⁶

As supervisor of heraldic symbols, Golitsyn sought to invest the official iconography of the state with the portentous symbols of occult Masonry. Classical mythology and esoteric, pseudo-Oriental motifs were incorporated into the coinage, architecture, and embellishments of the period.

The principal coin struck to commemorate the victory over Napoleon bore the legend “Not ours, not ours, but thine be the praise, oh Lord.”⁶⁷ Alexander participated in prayer meetings with Quakers and Methodists; and the Moravians were gaining followers among the Kalmyks to the east and the Latvians to the west. The curator of the university at Tartu was converted, and the Moravians grew from about three thousand to forty thousand in the Baltic provinces under Alexander.⁶⁸

By the late years of Alexander’s reign, the pietistic idea of a universal church and an inner spiritual regeneration seemed to be endangering the stability of the established order. The hierarchy complained that Labzin’s Herald of Zion had supplanted the patristic writers in the seminaries, and sectarian preachers the Orthodox clergy. Selivanov, the prophet of the self-castrated sects, was given opulent quarters in St. Petersburg by Golitsyn and continued to proselytize freely until 1820. In that year the ubiquitous Fesler returned from the Protestant consistories that he was supervising in southern Russia to deliver prophetic sermons in St. Michael’s Church in Moscow, while Gosner arrived from Bavaria to begin his preaching career in St. Petersburg. Mme Krüdener came to St. Petersburg in 1821; but by then, another German noblewoman had eclipsed “the lady of the Holy Alliance” with an even more exotic form of supra-confessional revivalism. Mme Tatarinova, the German widow of a Russian colonel, was sponsoring devotional meetings which were climaxed by her own inspired prophecies, recited in a semi-trance in the manner of the flagellants. She held frequent meetings with the Tsar and, like the native Russian sectarians, claimed mysterious links with extinguished branches of the royal family.

This wave of emotional Pietism receded in the mid-twenties with the same sudden finality that the Catholic wave had ebbed a decade before. The fall from grace of Golitsyn and the dissipation of the Pietistic euphoria in 1824 followed the realization by the Orthodox clergy that a new syncretic church was in effect becoming the established church of the empire. Baader had spoken in his dispatches to Golitsyn about the “invisible church” coming into being on Russian soil and was formulating the idea of establishing a new type of Christian academy in St. Petersburg.⁶⁹ Gosner had lived at Sarepta and published a manual for the new faith in St. Petersburg, The Spirit of the Life and Teaching of Christ. Fesler had published a new liturgy in St. Petersburg, supplementing it with his Christian Sermons of 1822 and his Liturgical Handbook of 1823.⁷⁰

The campaign to oust the German mystics was fought largely over two other texts that they introduced in the early twenties. One was a government-sponsored translation of Mme Guyon’s earlier quietistic tract Call to People on the Following of the Inner Path to Christ, which was denounced for rendering the Orthodox Church completely irrelevant. Even stronger was the opposition that developed to Gosner’s essay on the gospel of St. Matthew. By juxtaposing the spiritual kingdom of Christ with the material kingdom of Herod, Gosner was thought to be attacking tsardom. His talk of a church without a hierarchy was disturbing to fellow Catholic as well as Orthodox priests. His books were confiscated and burned along with Mme Guyon’s work. The witch hunt for subversive preachers was under way, and both Golitsyn and the Bible Society were bound to suffer. Fesler became a “well-known Jesuit-Jacobin,”⁷¹ “worse than Pugachev,”⁷² and all Methodists (the leaders of the Bible Society) “deceptive intriguers.”⁷³

When Golitsyn tried to bring Franz Baader himself to St. Petersburg, Baader never got beyond Riga and was forced to return to Bavaria late in 1823. He was a victim both of the general campaign against foreign influences and of the fear in official circles that a new religion was coming into being on Russian soil. Baader vainly pleaded directly to the Tsar in December, 1822, protesting that he was not in touch with “a certain Pietist sect in Russia” and had “no links of principle with Pietism in general, separatism or raskolnikism.”⁷⁴ The charge was being made with increasing frequency against Golitsyn and his associates. The military governor of Riga was faced with a particularly acute increase in the strength of the Moravian Brethren within his province. As an émigré friend of De Maistre, he must have been glad to block Baader’s efforts to proceed beyond Latvia. De Maistre was, in effect, wreaking a kind of belated revenge on the Pietists who had supplanted him at the Imperial Court. The Russian court seemed to be accepting at last his judgment that

in truth Martinism and Pietism penetrate one another such that it would be very difficult to find a sectarian of one of these systems who did not adhere to the other.⁷⁵

The mystical teachings of higher order Masonry were indeed spilling out into mass sectarian religious movements. The most dramatic illustration was that of the new sect of “spirit bearers” (dukhonostsy) that suddenly sprang up among the traditionally rebellious Cossacks of the Don. The Cossack leader Evlampy Kotel’nikov had been profoundly influenced by Lopukhin’s idea of a new “inner church” of “spiritual knights.”⁷⁶ Kotel’nikov recognized Lopukhin’s Characteristics of the Inner Church as the inspired word of God; and his followers considered it to be co-equal in authority with the Bible itself. Following Lopukhin’s teachings, the spirit bearers claimed to be the true spiritual church of Jung-Stilling’s prophecies. They insisted that the reign of the Antichrist had already begun through the official Church hierarchy, but that Alexander I was a reincarnation of Christ, who would destroy this many-headed serpent and establish spiritual rule on Russian soil.

The spirit bearers caused apprehension not only by their doctrine but even more because of the support felt for them in court circles. Their prophetic teachings bore many points of resemblance with occult Masonry and Mme Tatarinova’s circle. A long series of interrogations of Kotel’nikov throughout 1823-4 revealed considerable indecision about how to deal with such a figure.

A second illustration of links between the mystical aristocracy and the sectarian masses may be found in the remarkable preacher Theodosius Levitsky, who arrived in St. Petersburg in 1823, and began prophesying the imminent end of the world.⁷⁷ He had been an active evangelist among Old Believers in White Russia and had found Jung-Stilling’s prophetic writings an invaluable asset. His works had made an impression on Golitsyn, for he proposed to bring the Jews into the new inner church. Levitsky had preached among Jews in White Russia and sought to remind Christians that the Jews were to re-enter the Church just prior to the millennium. Baader had attached importance to the fact that Martinez de Pasqually, the founder of higher order Masonry, claimed to be “at the same time a Jew and a Christian” and had revived for humanity “the ancient alliance not only in its forms, but in its magical powers.”⁷⁸ Martinez’s “elected Cohens” and other higher orders of Masonry frequently invoked Jewish words and symbols and sometimes even the Jewish Kabbala as aids for their spiritual quest—particularly in White Russia, where there was a large Jewish population and some Jewish participation in Masonic activities.⁷⁹

The idea of a new church unifying Christians and Jews was gaining grass roots support in the Orel-Voronezh region with the sudden appearance of the sabbatarian (subbotniki) sect. They added to the usual rejection of Orthodox forms of worship opposition to the doctrine of the trinity, celebration of Saturday as the sabbath, and the rite of circumcision. The sect made its first appearance in the second half of Alexander’s reign. Though the added increase in strength from the Synod’s estimate of fifteen hundred in 1819 to the Council of Ministers’ estimate of twenty thousand the following year probably reflects less an increase in real strength than a desire of the latter body to undercut Golitsyn, the sect was gaining strength. A new secret census confirmed the importance of the sect, which apparently included Karaite as well as Talmudic Jews. It taught that all men could be rabbis and that the coming Messiah would be an occult philosopher who would unlock the secrets of the universe.⁸⁰

As it became evident in the last years of Alexander’s life that there would be no universal church on Russian soil, those who continued to believe in it became darkly apocalyptical. In St. Petersburg Levitsky preached the need for repentance in a famous sermon, “The Catastrophic Flood”; Kotel’nikov began to practice daily communion with his followers in imitation of the early apostles and in expectation of the coming end of the world. He addressed two meditations on the apocalypse, The Cruel Sickle, to the Tsar and his wife, likening St. Petersburg to Sodom and beseeching him to join the fellowship of the spirit bearers who alone would be spared in the coming judgment.

By 1824 many of the Tsar’s key advisers had concluded that a subversive plot against the established order lay behind all this ferment; and that Jung-Stilling’s prophetic writings contained the “hidden plan of revolution.”⁸¹ Beginning in 1824 Levitsky was incarcerated in a monastery on Lake Ladoga; Kotel’nikov sent first to Schlüsselburg prison, then to distant Solovetsk; Gosner and Fesler expelled from the country; Golitsyn relieved of all his positions of ecclesiastical authority; and harsh measures enacted to suppress the sabbatarians. The Bible Society was weakened and soon shut altogether “in order not to produce schism in the church.”⁸²

The idea of a “universal church” as a counter to revolution, rationalism, and all forms of external coercion had been dealt a blow from which it could not recover. Its only point of reference had been the “internal life” of each member, and all its hopes had been focused on “the blessed Alexander” whom all of the “spiritual knights” felt to be their patron if not their messiah.

The main unifying concept among all the heretical prophets of a new universal church was the idea that occult spiritual forces ruled the world. Saint-Martin had led the intellectuals into spiritualism with his last two major works: On the Spirit of Things and The Ministry of the Man-Spirit, the titles of which dramatized his opposition to two works of the Enlightenment: Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws and La Mettrie’s The Man-Machine. Following him, Lopukhin had written his books on “spiritual knighthood” and “the inner church of the spirit.” These in turn had forged a link with the Russian sectarian and the German pietist traditions, both of which had tended to view the world of spirit as the supreme reality. The spirit bearers, who recognized Lopukhin’s works as holy scripture, were the heirs of a sectarian tradition that included spirit wrestlers and “spiritual Christians.”

The last years of Alexander’s reign saw the degeneracy of this fashionable belief in disembodied spirits. Tatarinova’s circle became a center for séances; Labzin’s presses turned out vulgarized pocket guides for the understanding of the spirit world. Levitsky began referring to all his activities as “spiritual deeds”; and great attention was devoted to Jung-Stilling’s treatise on the functioning of the spirit world: The Science of Spirits. Matter was seen as an imperfect form of reality in which Christ had only seemed to exist. Christ himself became a disembodied spirit, “the representation of the wisdom of a thinking God.”⁸³

If all of this was shocking to rationalistic minds of the Enlightenment, it was equally abhorrent to the Orthodox Church, which saw in all of this romantic occultism the reappearance of the dualistic heresies that had periodically plagued Eastern Christendom. Well might the clergy complain that Golitsyn had substituted belief in spirit (dukh) for belief in the soul (dusha), and that Fesler was in effect “a new Manichean.”⁸⁴ They looked almost imploringly to the government to re-establish Orthodox Christianity in their land. Thus the Orthodox clergy played the last and most decisive role in the “reactionary uprising” against the Enlightenment. Orthodoxy supplanted Pietism; but the flight from rationalism continued just as it had when Pietism supplanted Catholicism at court a decade earlier.

Orthodox

IN TERMS of sheer size and growth, the expansion of the educational system of the Orthodox Church ranks among the most remarkable accomplishments of the late eighteenth century. Whereas there had been but twenty-six “spiritual schools” in 1764, there were 150 by 1808.⁸⁵ Administered by the state-controlled Synod, these schools imparted the rudiments of a pious and patriotic education to the majority of those civil servants and professional people who made the empire run. Teachers and alumni provided the grass roots support for the reactionary counterattack against the secularism and rationalism of the more cosmopolitan universities and lyceums, and of the more urbane teachers in the Church, such as Platon Levshin, who markedly improved the quality of the teaching in Church schools during his long tenure as Metropolitan of Moscow from 1775 to 1812, and fought to retain Latin rather than Russian as the basic language of instruction.

The generation of Orthodox leaders that rose to power after Platon’s death resented the prominence of foreigners in the church school system, and shared the nationalistic enthusiasm that swept through Russia during the resistance to Napoleon. They were stung by the searching critique of De Maistre, who characterized the Orthodox Church as “an object of pity” incapable of understanding, let alone defending Christianity.

Take away the Catholicizing and the Protestantizing groups: the illuminists who are the raskolniks of the salons and the raskolniks who are the illuminists of the people, what is there left to it?⁸⁶

There was growing agreement that Orthodox tradition needed more aggressive spokesmen if it was to survive in an age of ideological upheaval and confusion. The first important plan for a distinctively Orthodox battle against impiety, heresy, and revolution was provided by Alexander Sturdza, a gifted Moldavian nobleman who had become fascinated with occult orders when commissioned by the Russian court to write a history of Russian relations with the Maltese order. His Considerations on the Doctrine and Spirit of the Orthodox Church, written in 1816 for the benefit of the Lovers of Humanity Society, proposed in effect that the Orthodox Church be transformed into a kind of spiritual overseer for the Holy Alliance. Two years later, he wrote his widely discussed Memoir on the Present State of Germany, which dealt mainly with the problem of education.⁸⁷

In Sturdza’s view, Germany’s unrest was a direct result of undisciplined student activities. The Western Church had mistakenly granted the universities autonomy from the guiding discipline of the Church. Germany should revoke the medieval liberties of its universities. Orthodox Russia should not permit any such liberties to be granted in its new universities and should limit the numbers and regulate the curriculum of the German professors who were flooding into Russia’s universities and seminaries.

If Sturdza sounded the warning, it was the remarkable figure of Michael Magnitsky who produced the call to battle stations and the detailed blueprints for an Orthodox Christian assault against the armies of godless rationalism. Magnitsky illustrates the new blend of bureaucratic opportunism and philosophical obscurantism that was frequently to reappear in court circles during the remaining century of tsarist rule. In the early years of Alexander’s rule, Magnitsky had done all the proper things for a member of the lesser nobility anxious to get ahead. He had served in the Preobrazhensky Regiment and in Russian embassies in Paris and Vienna. He had composed sentimental verses and participated in masonic and philanthropic societies. Indeed, so liberal had his posture been that he was identified with Speransky’s reformist ideas and forced to share his downfall in 1812.

Exiled to Vologda, Magnitsky’s talents were soon put to use (like those of Speransky) in the provincial civil service. He became vice-governor of Voronezh on the upper Don, then governor of Simbirsk on the Volga. This city had a long record of extremism; it was the former center of peasant rebellion and was to be the birthplace of Lenin. It was in Simbirsk that Magnitsky began in 1818 his extraordinary war on the educational system of the Russian empire. In an anonymous letter to the Simbirsk branch of the Bible Society he urged the establishment of a Russian Inquisition to extirpate heresy from all published works. He then began public attacks on the influential new Masonic lodge, “Key to Virtue,” in Simbirsk, as a center of subversion.⁸⁸ Early in 1819 he was empowered to investigate the University of Kazan, where Lopukhin’s ideas had found particular receptivity;⁸⁹ and in April he became famous overnight with his lurid exposé.

Repin and Russian Realism

PLATES XIII-XIV

Ilya Repin, the most famous and influential of all Russian realist painters, is a rarity among modern Russian artists in that he had a relatively long life (1844–1930) and enjoyed the favor of both official and radical circles. His career began with successful prize paintings in the Imperial Academy of Arts in the 1860’s and imperial commissions in the 1870’s, and he flourished during the brief liberal democratic era, when he painted portraits of leading politicians, and lived on in the U.S.S.R. (although he spent his last years abroad as an émigré), where he was hailed as a founder of the monumentalism and exhortative realism of Soviet art.

Repin capitalized on the peculiar fascination with historical themes that has animated Russian culture since the early illustrated chronicles. His famous representation of Ivan the Terrible with his murdered son (1885; Plate XIII) used the new realistic medium melodramatically to convey the horror and fascination with which Russians had always regarded this decisive act in the severing of the sacred line of succession from Riurik. The real-life model for Repin’s picture of the tsarevich was the prophetic writer Vsevolod Garshin, who died three years later at 33, the same age as Christ, whom friends thought he resembled.

Many of Repin’s portraits (such as his Tolstoy standing barefoot in peasant dress) provided the images by which a famous personality came to be remembered. Particularly revered by fellow Russian artists was Repin’s painting of Musorgsky (Plate XIV), completed during four days of visits to the psychiatric hospital just a few days before the composer died in March 1881. Repin’s rendering of his suffering friend caused many figures of the populist era to contend that Musorgsky had—almost literally—“survived” death through this vindication of Repin’s own search for a natural “people’s” art.

PLATE XIII

PLATE XIV

PLATE XV

Repin and Russian Realism

PLATE XV

Repin also brought to the centuries-old tradition of genre painting a new populist passion for identification with the simple, suffering people. His “Haulers on the Volga” (1870-3; Plate XV) became a monumental icon of populist revolutionaries (even though it had been commissioned by the Grand Duke Vladimir) and vaulta Repin to the symbolic leadership of the new quest for a realistic “art of the people” which the “wanderers” had launched a decade earlier. Partly inspired by the famed song of the Volga boatmen, the painting in turn inspired Musorgsky to seek a new music of redemption from the spontaneous sounds of his native Volga region. Revolutionaries saw a call to defiance and a plea for help in the proud bearing and searching gaze of the unbowed young boy. The ship provided a hint of other, distant lands to the East to which the river led; perhaps even of romantic deliverance by some future Stenka Razin from the toil and bondage of the landlocked empire.

The substantial amount of time that Repin spent planning this composition and traveling about in search of real-life models represented a continuation of the obsessive preoccupation of Russian painters with some single redemptive masterpiece—a tradition that began with Ivanov’s “Appearance of Christ” and which has continued to the present with a painting like “Requiem of Old Russia, the Uspensky Sobor,” which P. D. Korin, a principal designer of the monumental historical frescoes in the Moscow subway, has worked on for more than twenty-five years. Repin’s greatest obsession (from 1878 to 1891) was his “Zaporozhian Cossacks Write a Letter to the Turkish Sultan,” in which a historical theme was successfully blended with the genre style. Revolutionaries took heart at the rustic glorification of Cossack liberties, while conservative Pan-slavs took equal pleasure in the anti-Turkish subject.

Twenty of twenty-five professors are “hopeless,” Magnitsky reported as a result of his inspection tour. Heretical German philosophy has replaced Orthodox theology in the curriculum, but “fortunately the lectures are so badly delivered that no one can understand them.”⁹⁰ Like an outraged taxpayer, Magnitsky rhetorically demands to know why two million rubles have been spent on a den of heresy and subversion in which lectures are mainly given in languages unintelligible to Russians.

His proposed remedy administered a real shock to the vague euphoria of tolerance then prevalent in the empire. He recommended to Golitsyn that the university be not reformed, but closed, formally sentenced like a criminal, and then razed. In its place should be established a controlled gymnasium, a medical institute, and a school for indoctrinating Tatars and teaching the Orthodox about the East.⁹¹ These measures were not adopted, but he was made head of the university in June and proceeded with reforms that were almost as drastic.

The university was henceforth to base its entire curriculum on the Bible and “on piety, in accordance with the decrees of the Holy Alliance.”⁹² Each student was required to own a Bible, and scriptural passages were written all over the walls and corridors often in ornate gold letters. Geology was outlawed as hostile to Biblical teachings, and mathematicians were instructed to point out that the hypotenuse of a right triangle represented the mercy of God descending to man through Christ.⁹³ Books were removed from the library, professors forced to write long spiritual autobiographies, and puritanical discipline and communal scripture readings instituted. Three grades of punishment were instituted for student infractions, the highest involving solitary confinement in a barred room containing only a wooden table and bench, a large crucifix, and a picture of the Last Judgment. Students were ordered to pray for offenders in this category, who were in some cases forcibly transferred to military service.⁹⁴

The supreme danger of modern universities was, in Magnitsky’s view, their teaching of philosophy, which was bound to raise doubts about revealed religion. He found an invaluable ally in Runich, the first curator of the new university in St. Petersburg, who was called “Magnitsky’s echo” and “a corpse stimulated to life by Magnitsky.” A German professor had been dismissed at Kharkov in 1816 for teaching that Napoleon’s crimes lay in overthrowing the natural rights of the people rather than the traditional rights of monarchs. In 1820 Runich and Magnitsky broadened the assault with a combined attack on a professor of the Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo who had just presented a copy of his book, Natural Law, to the Emperor. In the following year they succeeded in obtaining the dismissal of three key professors from St. Petersburg University.

Early in 1823 Magnitsky launched an expanded campaign against the “Hellish Alliance” which he claimed was now at war with the Holy Alliance. He claimed to find the “doctrines of Marat” in one professor’s book and the secret plans of “illuminists” in another. In February he proposed the outlawing of philosophy, warning that “from one line of a professor can come 200,000 bayonets and 1,000 ships of the line.”⁹⁵ In May he denounced the “bloody cap of freedom” which “used to be called only philosophy and literature and is now already called liberalism.”⁹⁶

“Down with altars, down with sovereigns, long live death and hell.” They are already howling forth in several countries in Europe. How can one fail to recognize who is speaking? The Prince of Darkness himself is coming visibly closer to us; the veil covering him is becoming more and more transparent and soon, no doubt, will fall altogether. This assault, the last perhaps that he will lead against us, is the most terrible, for it is spiritual. The word is being spread from one end of the world to the other invisibly and rapidly like an electric shock, and suddenly culminates in a shattering of the earth. The human word, that is what transmits this diabolical force; the printing press is its arm. Godless university professors are distilling the atrocious poison of disbelief and of hate towards legitimate power for our unhappy youth.…⁹⁷

Russia should simply

separate herself from Europe so that not even a rumor about the horrible events taking place there could reach her. The present war of the spirit of evil cannot be arrested by the force of arms, for against a spiritual assault an equally spiritual defense is needed. A clairvoyant censorship united with a system of popular education founded on the unshakable base of faith is the only dike against the flood of disbelief and depravity engulfing Europe.⁹⁸

There was little support within the ministry of education and spiritual affairs for such an extreme position. One member pointed out that countries like Spain and Portugal in which revolutions had occurred were precisely the ones in which enlightenment was least far advanced;⁹⁹ another wrote that a successful state could not function in this manner even “if we could surround our fatherland with a Chinese Wall … transplant to Russian soil the Spanish Inquisition … and blot out everything that has ever been written about philosophy.”¹⁰⁰ But Magnitsky found more powerful allies in Archimandrite Photius, a young ascetic influential with the Tsar who had recently turned from long friendship with Golitsyn to violent denunciation of the Bible Society. “It is the cleverness of Hell itself that the ancient faith is being destroyed by pious foreigners,” echoed an anonymous informant of Admiral Shishkov.¹⁰¹ Runich wrote that it was essential “to pluck even one quill from the dark wing of the foe of Christ.”¹⁰²

Magnitsky followed the new Metropolitan of St. Petersburg, Seraphim, to the Winter Palace in the spring of 1824, when the latter went to request Golitsyn’s dismissal. He waited outside on Admiralty Boulevard in order to tell immediately from the expression on Seraphim’s face whether or not the Tsar had acceded to the request. The news was, of course, good for the Orthodox reactionaries: Golitsyn was dismissed from all posts: replaced as head of the Bible Society by Seraphim, as minister of education by Shishkov. “Foreign cults” were placed in a separate category, subordinate at last to the Orthodox Synod and to the Draconian Arakcheev. Thus, Golitsyn’s unique concentration of spiritual and pedagogical authority was broken up; and the dream of a new universal church destroyed.

The Orthodoxy which Magnitsky opposed to syncretism made use of the same supra-confessional terminology from higher order Masonry that Lopukhin had used before him. He described life as “passing through the Great Temple … in holy darkness” in order to reach “the all-seeing eye of holiness … the Church of the first centuries.”¹⁰³

Like De Maistre, Magnitsky’s main concern was the mobilization of Russia to combat the infection of Russia with the rationalism that had been spawned by the Protestant Reformation in religion and by the French Revolution in politics. But there were critical differences between the absolutist remedies proposed by the two men. Whereas De Maistre had sought the rule of an international church hierarchy subordinate to the pope, Magnitsky looked rather to the Russian tsar as supreme authority and to his civil and ecclesiastical bureaucracy as the “hierarchy.” Whereas De Maistre assumed that the new Christian civilization would be suffused with the classical culture of the Latin world, Magnitsky insisted that Russian civilization must deepen its sense of identification with the East.

Magnitsky’s fascination with the East was in part a reflection of occult Masonry and the related vision of a new church coming from the East. Masonic temples were always built facing the East, and the term “Orient” was used as a synonym for a city in which Masons were active.¹⁰⁴ Pietist missionaries and the vernacular translators of the Russian Bible Society had spoken excitedly of the rich “harvest” they hoped to reap in the Russian East; and Lopukhin had insisted that Russia’s “most sincere collaborators” in combating revolution and secularism were to be found among “Asians [Aziattsy] from Peking to Constantinople.”¹⁰⁵ Magnitsky criticized Karamzin for saying that the Mongol period was one of decline for Russia, since the Tatars saved it from Europe and enabled it to preserve the purity of its Christian faith at a time when all others were falling into heresy. Beginning with his proposal of 1819 for evangelizing the Tatars, Magnitsky displayed a romantic fascination with the idea that the cultivation of Eastern links would help qualify Russia for the role of redeeming the fallen West.

Orientalism received a new boost with the establishment of a chair in Arabic at St. Petersburg in the same year; and in 1822 Magnitsky drew up a plan for an “Institute of the East” to be established in Astrakhan to train future Russian civil servants and place them “in touch with the learned circles of India.” He cherished the belief that an unspoiled apostolic Church still flourished in India and claimed to see Biblical influences in Hindu sacred writings. The wife of Brahma, Sara-Veda, was thought to be Sarah, the wife of Abraham in the Old Testament. He organized the search for lost treasures in the monasteries of Armenia and sought to sponsor cultural safaris to Siberia and Samarkand.¹⁰⁶

The career of Magnitsky illustrates the vulnerability of the Russian body politic to extremist pressures. The very extremity of his denunciations exercised a certain fascination and made some of his victims almost anxious to believe that they were as powerful and purposeful as Magnitsky alleged them to be. In a confused intellectual atmosphere he offered a simple explanation for all difficulties: an enemy to replace Napoleon as a stimulus to national unity. All difficulties came from the “illuminists.” Revolutions in Spain, Naples, and Greece were interrelated parts of their eastward-moving plot. Students in Germany had already been infected; but Orthodox Russia, the anchor of the Holy Alliance, was its principal target. In denouncing a Masonic leader in Simbirsk, Magnitsky added the accusation of secret links with the Carbonari; in denouncing Fesler, he hinted at Jewish and Socinian connections.

In the absence of dispassionate investigation, the confused impression grew that some kind of spiritual invasion was indeed underway. Concealment and suspicion grew apace and helped encourage nervous displays of loyalty to the Tsar. With relentless logic, the denunciations and purges ran their course until Magnitsky himself fell a victim. An accusation that Magnitsky was a secret illuminist was among Alexander’s papers at the time of his death. Shortly thereafter his administration of Kazan University was investigated and his foes treated to the revelation that he had employed a Jew as supervisor of studies, had spent as much in seven years as his predecessor had been accused of spending in twelve, and so on. In vain Magnit-sky argued that the apostles themselves were converted Jews and that his accusers were repeating the arguments of Voltaire. He journeyed to St. Petersburg to plead his case and wrote two eleventh-hour detailed analyses of the “world-wide illuminist plot” for the new Tsar from his exile in Esthonia early in 1831.

The illuminists were attacking at four levels: academic, political, ecclesiastical, and popular. “Levelers,” “millennarians,” “methodists,” and “schismatics” were bracketed together as part of a giant conspiracy to substitute a “Tsar-Comrade” for the “Tsar-Father” of simple Russians. Even conservative Austria was alleged to be sending in agents to subvert Russian institutions.¹⁰⁷

But Magnitsky had made too many enemies, and his main friend, Arakcheev, had fallen from power. Having ridden the wave of obscurantism, he was now swept aside into the stagnant backwaters of the provincial civil service from which he was to witness the success of the policies he advocated without benefiting from them. He wrote briefly for a journal bearing a title from the symbolism of higher Masonic orders: The Rainbow. But his last writings represent only a broken-spirited endorsement of his long-standing anti-rationalism: a treatise on astrology and a series called “simple thinker,” which defended the unquestioning faith of “muzhik Christianity.”¹⁰⁸

The Legacy

UNDER CATHERINE and Alexander, Russia had moved deep into Europe physically and spiritually but had not equipped itself to share in the political and institutional development of the West. Russian cities had been rebuilt on neo-classical models, but Russian thought had remained largely untouched by classical form and discipline. An experiment that had begun with Catherine’s promise to provide the most tolerant and rational rule in Europe had ended with Magnitsky’s intolerance and glorification of the Mongols. Imprecise hopes had given way to equally vague fears without the major problems being defined, let alone solved. The debate was cut off before Russia had achieved either a rationalized political system or a rational theology; and the imperial government committed itself to the difficult reactionary position of simply preventing the questions from being asked.

The religious purge of 1824 ended all broad discussion of belief within the official Church, just as the repression of the Decembrists the following year ended all discussion of basic political questions within the government. But expectations once raised are not easily dispelled. Denied a hearing in official circles, the problems continued to agitate Russia unofficially.

Indeed, the leading agitators of the Alexandrian age acquired in martyrdom an historical significance they had been unable to gain in action. The trial and humiliation of the Decembrists left a keen impact on the newly awakened moral sensibilities of the aristocracy. Having been unable to agree on their own political program, the aristocratic thinkers were united by their opposition to the spectacle of a “generation on trial” and by their revulsion at the execution of the leaders and the sanctioning of odes in praise of those throwing mud at others en route to Siberian exile. The “Hannibalic oath” of Herzen and Ogarev to avenge the fallen Decembrists is the real starting point of Russia’s modern revolutionary tradition.

Equally remarkable was the continued appeal throughout Nicholas’ reign of the new religious answers that had been offered under his predecessor. The Catholic Church attracted many Russian aristocrats—particularly after the official anti-Catholicism that accompanied the crushing of the Polish rebellion. The beautiful Zinaida Volkonsky, a close friend of Alexander I and former maid of honor to the dowager empress, became a leading figure in Catholic charity work in Rome and an apostle of reunification of the churches and conversion of the Jews.¹⁰⁹ Sophia Svechin, the daughter of one of Catherine’s leading advisers, became a leading benefactress of the Jesuit order in Paris. She set up a chapel and Slavic library and helped induce a young diplomat, Ivan Gagarin, to join the order.¹¹⁰ The Decembrist Lunin became a Catholic and the freethinker Pecherin a Redemptorist friar ministering to the poor of Dublin. Most remarkable of all was the conversion of a large part of the Golitsyn family, which had pioneered since the seventeenth century in the secular Westernization of Russia. Dmitry Golitsyn, son of Diderot’s main Russian contact, joined the Church and went to Baltimore, Maryland, where he became the first Catholic priest to receive all his orders in the United States. Ordained in 1795, he led a Sulpician mission to western Pennsylvania, administering a vast area stretching from Harrisburg to Erie, Pennsylvania, from a log church near the present town of Loretto.¹¹¹

Prophetic sectarianism continued also to exercise an appeal. The various “spiritual Christians” in the south continued to flourish: the “milk drinkers” in the Caucasus, whence they were deported in 1823 and began establishing new contacts extending into Persia; the “spirit bearers” in the Cossack center of Novocherkassk, where various followers of Kotel’nikov told of his martyrdom in Solovetsk and predicted the end of the world in 1832, 1843, and 1844.¹¹²

For better or worse the unorthodox religious ideas of the Alexandrian era were to have far greater impact on subsequent Russian history than the reformatorial political ideas of the age. Speculative religious thinkers of the late nineteenth century tended to pick up where men of Alexander’s time left off. Faithful to the main line of Alexandrian spirituality, they tended to oppose both revolution and rationalism. They also tended to vacillate between De Maistre’s idea of a disciplined inquisitorial church and Lopukhin’s idea of a spiritual “inner” church.

The two ideals confront one another in Dostoevsky’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.” The returning Christ figure is Lopukhin’s ideal spiritual knight who opposes the dedicated and articulate Inquisitor with the spiritual weapons of silent suffering and freely given love. The two ideals are also present in Vladimir Solov’ev, whose personal rapprochement with Roman Catholicism and with De Maistre’s views on war conflicted with his vision of churches reunited in a “free theocracy.”¹¹³ Even Constantine Pobedonostsev, the semi-Inquisitorial procurator of the Synod, felt the contrary appeal of the “inner church,” and translated Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ.

It seems appropriate that the most famous convert to the ideal of a new inner church in nineteenth-century Russia, Leo Tolstoy, spent several key years of his life studying the history of the Alexandrian era. The fruit of his study was, of course, Russia’s greatest historical novel, War and Peace, which began as a study of the Decembrists and ended as a panoramic epic of the war with Napoleon and of the spiritual strivings which accompanied it.

Tolstoy subsequently became an archetype of Lopukhin’s “spiritual knight” with his “conversion” to a new non-doctrinal Christianity that abjured violence and taught that “the kingdom of God is within you.” Tolstoy’s idea that man could rid the world of evil by reading the secret message on a little green stick represents a perhaps unconscious borrowing from higher order Masonry for which a green stick was the symbol of eternal life. Even his celebrated parody of the externals of Masonic rituals in War and Peace reflects the contempt for mere ritual which was central to Novikov’s and Lopukhin’s ideal of higher spiritual orders. Tolstoy’s first youthful vision of a new fraternity “of all the people of the world under the wide dome of heaven” went by the name of “Ant Brotherhood” (muraveinoe bratstvo), which was apparently a mutation of the idealized Moravian Brotherhood (Moravskoe Bratstvo).¹¹⁴ Tolstoy’s tendency to keep himself surrounded with Bibles or Gospels in all languages¹¹⁵ and his general sympathy for pietistic Protestant teachings was reminiscent of the Bible Society. In his old age he devoted great energy to aiding the original persecuted sect of “spiritual Christians,” the Dukhobors.¹¹⁶ Tolstoy opposed De Maistre’s ideal of an inquisitorial Church, though Solov’ev implied that he secretly wished to set up one of his own.¹¹⁷ De Maistre’s historical scepticism and pessimism also profoundly influenced War and Peace.¹¹⁸

However rich in speculative ideas, the Alexandrian age tended to discredit religion in the eyes of many thinking people. Alexander’s personal vacillation encouraged a jockeying for imperial favor among the various religious confessions, which soon degenerated into inter-confessional polemic and intrigue. Terms like “Jesuit” and “Methodist” were used as epithets almost as often as “Jacobin” and “illuminist.” Thus, ironically, Alexander’s efforts to encourage tolerance only intensified sectarian bitterness.

To compound the irony, Alexander’s manifest failure to provide leadership strengthened rather than weakened the adulation that he personally received. All the partisans of reform idealized the tolerant Alexander and cherished the thought that the benign and enigmatic emperor really subscribed to their particular views. Alexander was indeed until his death the one concrete focal point for all the vague hopes of the age. He remained Alexander the Great to a host of would-be Aristotles throughout Europe and a near god to the peasantry, who launched no great insurrection against him. Catholics cherished the thought that Alexander had contemplated conversion at the time of his death; and the popular religious imagination clung to the idea that Alexander was not dead at all but lived on as the wandering holy man, Fedor Kuzmich.¹¹⁹

The hopes for a transformation of Russia through Alexander were too vague and romantic, too unchastened by experience in the real world. Yet Alexander—like other well-meaning political leaders who have been looked to as saviors—appears to have become hypnotized by the adulation he received. In his late years he became even more incapable than before of sober statesmanship. “Moving from cult to cult and religion to religion,” complained Metternich, “he has upset everything and built nothing.”¹²⁰ He died in a distant Southern retreat from reality, after visiting various churches, mosques, and a synagogue and rejecting medical treatment.¹²¹ The champion of tolerance had permitted Russia to become the scene of ideological interrogation, anonymous denunciation, and arbitrary exile. The most beloved tsar in modern Russian history had let Russia drift into policies that were in some respects even more reactionary than those of Paul.

Most of the leading theorists of the age—whether Russians like Radishchov, Novikov, Karamzin, Speransky, Pestel, Lopukhin, and Magnit-sky, or foreign teachers like Schwarz, De Maistre, Baader, and Fesler—had been active in the Masonic movement. Though Masonry was formally neither a political nor a religious movement, it had profound influence in both of these areas. Higher order Masonry excited Russians to believe that self-perfection was possible and that the new temple of Solomon to be built by “true Masons” was nothing short of the world itself. But there was no way of knowing exactly how or where this rebuilding was to take place. “One can have knowledge about Masonry,” one leader was fond of saying, “but Masonry itself is a secret.”¹²²

The lodges filled for the culture of aristocratic Russia something of the role that had been played by the monasteries in the culture of Muscovy. They provided islands of spiritual intensity and cultural activity within a still bleak and hostile autocratic environment. Like the monasteries of old, the Masonic lodges represented both a challenge and an opportunity to the ruling authorities. But Catherine and eventually Alexander chose to view Masonry as a challenge, just as Peter had regarded monasticism. If the various protest movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represent a kind of counterattack against the autocratic destruction of the old monastic culture, so the ideological rebellion of the nineteenth-century intellectuals appears in some ways as a form of protest against the autocratic destruction of the new Masonic culture.

The sacred chants of this Masonic culture were the declamatory hymns consecrated to abstract virtues and mythological deities. Initiation into the lodge was a kind of second, adult baptism. Sacred texts were those of Boehme, Saint-Martin, Jung-Stilling, and other mystical thinkers who were regarded as equal to the evangelists and early Church fathers. The Masons, however, sought no salvation in the next world, which was the goal of the monks, but truth in this world: pravda, the “two-sided truth” of wisdom and justice.

The icons of the Masonic culture were statues and busts of great figures of the past. It was only under Catherine that statuary had first assumed importance in Russian art.¹²³ The bronze statue of Peter the Great was her monumental icon to Westernization, her statue of Voltaire her icon for private veneration. Lopukhin had a private garden full of symbolic sculpture and busts of the “spiritual knights” of his “inner church.”¹²⁴ Magnitsky made statuary crucifixes a key part of his decor for the reformed university at Kazan; and Runich kept a private bust of Christ with a crown of thorns.¹²⁵

The extraordinary attention paid to physical characteristics of the face was partly the new enthusiasm of a people just discovering the naturalistic art that had been present in the West for several centuries but partly also a new version of the iconographer’s old belief that a painting was a means of communing with the saints. The private gallery of busts and paintings in the castle that Rastrelli built for the Stroganovs in St. Petersburg became a kind of hall of icons; and the Decembrist Bestuzhev’s painting portraits in exile of all those who had participated in the uprising marked the beginnings of a new martyrological portraiture.¹²⁶

Herzen, who launched the secular revolutionary tradition in an effort to avenge the fallen Decembrists, was also influenced by the culture of higher order Masonry: in his youthful oath-taking, his early talk of palingenesis (“rebirth”);¹²⁷ in the title of his first journal, Polar Star (which was taken from a Decembrist paper named after a key Masonic lodge and symbol); and in his decision to edit, even amidst the exciting early years of Alexander II’s reign, the works of the original “spiritual knight,” Lopukhin. Many symbols of higher order Masonry seem, indeed, strangely applicable to the Russian revolutionary tradition: the basic slogan “Victory or Death”; the supreme symbol of the sword (representing the need to fight for an idea); the lower symbol of the knife (representing the need to punish traitors); the idea of inscribing messages on a cross; and the candles within the temple symbolizing the light of Adam within man and the perfection of the starry firmament which they would soon bring down to earth. In extinguishing these candles, the Romanovs did not succeed in snuffing out the spark that had lit them; and the journal in which Lenin first developed his revolutionary ideas was to bear the name of this key Masonic symbol, The Spark—again through the intermediacy of Decembrist usage.

The Masonic culture of the Alexandrian age was, of course, a far different thing from the revolutionary movements that were to make use of its symbols and techniques. All Masons were pledged to belief in God, but he had many names and faces. One could find him equally well in the world (macrocosm), in oneself (microcosm), or in books of revelation (mesocosm). God’s very name had symbolic and allegorical meaning for the Russian occultists. The letters BOG stood for blago (“good”), otets (“father”), and glagol’ (“the word”), which were the three essential characteristics of the “God above God” of Russian mysticism. The letter “O” stood in the middle—a self-contained circle of perfection signifying that there was neither beginning nor end to God’s fatherhood.¹²⁸ The birth of Christ was said to have occurred in all three forms: as the moral incarnation of the good and the scientific incarnation of the true word. Thus the “imitation of Christ” meant in higher order Masonry the attainment by man of the “two-sided truth” of knowledge and justice.

But how did such a God relate to Russia? Beneath the anguish and frustrations of the Alexandrian age lies the pathos of intoxicated mystics trying to apply their insights to the real world, and the deeper drama of an awakening nation in search of a national creed. De Maistre offered Russia the Catechism of the Council of Trent. Pietistic sectarians looked to Lopukhin’s Moral Catechism of the True Free Mason to lead them away from “dreams born of smoke from the dull light of false wisdom.”¹²⁹ Conservative military leaders looked admiringly to the pietistic and patriotic Short Catechism for German Soldiers written in 1812 by Ernst Arndt for German soldiers fighting Napoleon in Russia.¹³⁰ Rationalistic sceptics turned to Voltaire’s Catechism of an Honest Man.¹³¹ Patriotic reformers admired the Russian translation of a Spanish Citizen’s Catechism drawn up during the Peninsular War, and tended toward the view set forth in the Catechism of the Decembrist Murav’ev-Apostol that Russians should “rise up all together against tyranny and establish faith and freedom in Russia. Whoever rejects this path will, like the traitor, Judas, be cursed with anathema. Amen.”¹³²

The creed which Russia adopted under Nicholas I was far closer to that described by Catherine’s courtier, the conservative historian M. Shcherbatov, in his “utopian” novel of 1783-4, A Voyage to the Land of Ofir, than to anything outlined in Alexander’s time. Shcherbatov, for all his erudition and his unexcelled fifteen-thousand-volume library, was deeply suspicious of undisciplined intellectual activity. He proposed an absolute monarchy with a rigid class structure and an educational system that would be totally oriented toward practical problems. Religion was to be completely rational and authoritarian. In place of all other reading matter (even the Bible), the ordinary citizen was to be given two new catechisms: a moral and legal catechism. Both the priests who taught the former and the police who taught the latter should have as their object the maintenance of order and the inculcation of respect for morality and law.¹³³

Under Nicholas I, Russia acquired both its “moral” and its “legal” catechism: the former in Metropolitan Philaret’s Orthodox Catechism, the latter in Uvarov’s famous circular outlining the doctrine of “official nationality.” At the same time, social and economic policies followed the rigid lines set forth in Shcherbatov’s novel. Class distinctions were strictly maintained; the peasantry remained in bondage; and commerce and industry were kept subordinate to agriculture, which Shcherbatov had considered the source of all wealth.

This represented in some ways a return to order and rationality after the confusions of Alexander’s time. Nicholas discarded the most extreme figures in the “reactionary uprising” of the mid-twenties: Arakcheev for Benckendorff in the army, Magnitsky for Uvarov in education, Photius for Philaret in the Church, the archaic Slavicisms of Shishkov for the Europeanized prose of Karamzin. Yet Nicholas’ policies were more resented because of their finality, their refusal to leave room for further discussion of religion and politics by the aristocracy. His ideal society was the army, in which, “there is order … no impertinent claims to know all the answers … no one commands before he himself has learned to obey.”¹³⁴ God was the supreme commander and Nicholas “a subordinate officer determined to execute his orders well and to occupy an honorable place in the great military review to be held in the next world.”¹³⁵ Never again, except for a few brief years under Alexander II, were the Romanovs to encourage the discussion of political reform. Never again, except in the last decadent days under Rasputin, was the court to encourage the extra-ecclesiastical pursuit of religious truth.

Thus, the suspicions of rational enlightenment engendered during Alexander’s lifetime had a debilitating effect on the subsequent development of Russian culture. It was particularly fateful that the high tide of anti-Enlightenment feeling should occur at the very time when Russia was becoming fully conscious of its national power and identity. Anti-rationalism was given special sanction within Russia because rationalism was identified with revolution, revolution with Napoleon, and Napoleon with the invasion of Russia and burning of Moscow.

The new Moscow that arose on the ruins of the old soon began to eclipse St. Petersburg and to think of itself as distinct from European culture. Following the burning of Moscow, Michael Zagoskin, one of the most widely read writers of the era, began a lifetime of gathering material for sketches on “Moscow and Muscovites,” which enjoyed great popularity when they finally appeared in the 1840’s. As he said in his introduction:

I have studied Moscow too much for thirty years and can say emphatically that it is not a city, not a capital, but an entire world that is profoundly Russian.… Just as thousands of rays of sunshine come to a focus at one point in passing through a magnifying glass, in precisely the same way in Moscow the different characteristics of our Russian popular physiognomy are unified in one national countenance … you will find in Moscow a treasure house of all the elements in the worldly and civil life of Russia, that great colossus for which Petersburg acts as the head, and Moscow the heart.¹³⁶

The “heart” was more important than the “head” for the mystical romantics of the new Muscovite culture. Their attempts to find truths hidden in the physiognomy of a city was an extension of the occult fascination with statuary and phrenology under Alexander. The very uniqueness and asymmetry of Moscow appealed to their imagination. Marvelous meaning was discovered in the strange shapes of the old capital, whereas fear and foreboding were found on the face of the new—in the contemporaneous Physiology of Petersburg and a number of literary works.¹³⁷ This was no longer the Moscow which had appeared on Latin-inscribed medals struck in honor of the founding of Russia’s first university, showing the Kremlin towers illumined by the rising sun,¹³⁸ but a Moscow of mysterious moonlight:

How clear and brilliant is the moon

Contemplating sleeping Moscow.

Can it have ever seen in all its journeys through the vault of heaven

A city so magnificent? Can it have seen a second Kremlin?¹³⁹

The remarkable cultural activity of Moscow under Nicholas I was, however, no mere return to the Muscovy of old. Catherine and Alexander I had wrought an irrevocable change in Russian thought. The aristocracy had undergone a stimulating exposure to the West, and to books that were hitherto inaccessible in the vernacular—from the complete New Testament to Diderot’s Encyclopedia. They had acquired a taste for the fraternal and intellectual activity of small circles. Secular journalism and art, organized education and philanthropy, had all become part of the life of many Russian aristocrats.

The changes that had already taken place in the intellectual atmosphere are illustrated by the figure who finally set down the official state philosophy of Nicholas I, Sergius Uvarov. From the time he first propounded his sacred trilogy of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality” as the newly installed minister of education in 1833 until he died just a few months after Nicholas in 1855, Uvarov was an urbane and effective apologist for the anti-Enlightenment. Just as Speransky’s new law code of 1833 spelled an end to the hopes of the Russian Enlightenment for political-constitutional reform, so Uvarov’s circular of the same year brought to a close hopes for educational reform. But in contrast to the law code, Uvarov’s writings helped open up new avenues for Russian thought by keeping alive some of the ideological passion of the preceding era.

Superficially, Uvarov appears as yet another epigon of occult Masonry—arguing that some supra-rational basis must be found for truth and authority and that one must look to the ancient East for surviving reflections of the “lost light of Adam.” Russia should treasure its links with Asia and conduct extensive “metaphysical archeology” into its Eastern heritage, Uvarov argued, in his blueprint of 1810 for an Asian Academy.¹⁴⁰ Two years later, his Essay on the Eleusinian Mysteries idealized the authority of mystery in a primitive Greek civilization still thought to be linked to its Oriental heritage. The implication was that the democracy and critical philosophy for which Greece had generally been praised in the Age of the Enlightenment were, in fact, corrosive forces that had destroyed the “intellectual solidarity”¹⁴¹ of an earlier, proto-Oriental society.

This early statement of pro-Asian sentiment attracted increased attention as Napoleon’s invasion of Russia fanned anti-European and anti-Enlightenment sentiment. Uvarov’s reiteration of this position in the 1830’s benefited from a second wave of anti-Western feeling that followed the Polish uprising of 1830. Pletnev, Uvarov’s leading lieutenant and popularizer, insisted that Western classicism was incompatible with autocracy; Osip Senkovsky, professor of Oriental languages at St. Petersburg, became a propagandist for Uvarov’s views; and Count Rostopchin, the reactionary pamphleteer who had defended Moscow from Napoleon, was posthumously assigned a genealogy from Genghis Khan.

“We must Easternize ourselves [ovostochit’sia],” proclaimed one leading critic,¹⁴² and, as if in response, Asians suddenly became heroes in a number of new and distinctly second-rate historical plays and novels—such as those of the prolific Raphael Zotov, which ranged from the embellished saga of his Tatar father’s battles against Napoleon, The Last Descendant of Genghis Khan, to the picture of enlightened Chinese struggling with corrupt Western intruders in Tsin-Kin-Tong, or the Three Good Deeds of the Spirit of Darkness. A play of 1823, The Youth of Ivan III, or the Attack of Tamerlane on Russia, even goes so far as to have the Mongol invader tutor the Russian tsar. An almanac of 1828 completed the picture by offering an anthology of Mongolian proverbs to a people always responsive to this type of folk wisdom.¹⁴³

Pan-Asianism did not become part of Uvarov’s doctrine of “official nationality”; but his fascination with the Orient illustrates his own remoteness from any simple doctrine of returning to primitive, purely Russian practices. Instead, he appears as an uncertain seeker for some new form of authoritarianism. He speaks of “complete societies … where the philosophic element triumphs,”¹⁴⁴ and where shallow philosophes are confounded by “complete thought” which integrates intelligence, imagination, and sentiment.¹⁴⁵

Uvarov fully shared the general aristocratic contempt for the commercially oriented West and its periodical press which has “dethroned the word.”¹⁴⁶ But he places on his ideological throne not the Word that was in the beginning but slogans that never were before. Orthodoxy comprised only one third of his formula; and his critical writings reveal a general indifference to Christianity—if not actual atheism.¹⁴⁷ He is the voice not of faith but of inner uncertainty and romantic longing. He seems to be looking not for a philosopher-king or Christian emperor, but for the grand master of some occult order. His image of the “complete society” is not one in which each individual has perfected his rational faculties and remade the social order in accordance with moral law. Rather it is a rigidly hierarchical society ruled by an “intelligence” that is unintelligible to all but the inner initiates.

Uvarov fought Cartesianism and scepticism not with tradition but with a new ideology that often seems to anticipate modern totalitarianism. In the process, however, he helped create other problems. By introducing narodnost’ (“nationality”) as one of the three pillars of official ideology, he gave increased authority to a vague term which radicals later interpreted to mean “spirit of the people.” By founding in 1834 and presenting his views regularly in a monthly “thick journal,” The Journal of the Ministry of Public Education, Uvarov moved the government into the risky terrain of ideological journalism. By idealizing the “effervescence of ideas”¹⁴⁸ in the ancient Orient, he helped encourage the new effervescence of exotic thought that became characteristic of the age of Nicholas. By setting forth an all-encompassing state ideology, Uvarov helped turn Russian thinkers to broad questions of personal and national belief, which increasingly interested Russians as the possibility of political and pedagogic reform faded.

New vistas had been opened to the imagination in the Age of Alexander I. Despite Uvarov’s efforts to hold them in check, the aristocrats were to enjoy a last period of creative exploration under Nicholas before the stage became filled with the new social classes and material concerns of a more open and industrialized society under Alexander II.