The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  Moscow trusts the petty clerk more than Monsieur Voltaire and me; and the taste of inhabitants of Moscow is rather like that of the petty clerk!78

  Absorbed in its narrow ways and self-contained suburbs, closer both historically and geographically to the heart of Russia, and forever suspicious of new ideas, Moscow was the natural center for opposition to the ideals of the European Enlightenment. The features of Catherine's court which most deeply infected Moscow were the venal and self-indulgent ones. Moscow, not St. Petersburg society was to be the butt of Griboedov's celebrated satirical comedy Woe from Wit, in which the hero, Chatsky, is at war with Moscow society and all its vulgarity and monotony. This world, in which forty to fifty aristocratic dances were held each night of the winter season,70 was held up to iambic scorn by Chatsky:

  What novelty can Moscow show to me? Today a ball, tomorrow two or three.80

  The venality and ennui of Moscow society added an element of vindictiveness to attacks on the Voltairianism and cosmopolitanism of St. Petersburg.

  The struggle between Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment went on within both cities-and in others as well. However, St. Petersburg remained the symbol and center of the former, and Moscow of the latter, trend.

  To understand the roots of the anti-Enlightenment tradition among the Russian aristocracy one must look at the activities of Novikov's Moscow period. To understand these activities, one must appreciate not only the special atmosphere of Moscow, but also the history of Russian Freemasonry: the first ideological class movement of the Russian aristocracy and the one through which Novikov channeled almost all his varied activities. The split in Novikov's career and in Russian Masonry between a St. Petersburg and a Moscow phase illustrates the deep division in Russian aristocratic thought between rationalism and mysticism-which was later to reappear in the famous controversy between Westernizers and Slavophiles.

  Freemasonry was the fraternal order of the eighteenth-century European aristocracy.81 Within its lodges, the landholding officer class of Europe acquired a sense of belonging; and new arrivals gained access to aristocratic society more easily than through the more rigid social system prevailing outside. But Masonry was also a kind of supra-confessional deist church. It provided its members with a sense of higher calling and sacramental mystery which they no longer found in traditional churches. It gave new symbolic elaboration to the basic eighteenth-century idea that there was a natural, moral order to the universe; it offered secret rites of initiation and confession to those who recognized this central truth; and it prescribed philanthropic and educational activities which reassured them of their belief in human perfectibility.

  The oft-alleged medieval origins of Freemasonry belong to the category of legend,82 although there does appear to have been some connection with the stone mason guilds, particularly in the period of the rebuilding of London after the fire of 1666. Masonic lodges of the modern type made their first appearance in England in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century. Members were led through three stages or initiation similar to those of medieval trade guilds: apprentice, journeyman, and master. English tradesmen set up the first lodges in Russia no later than the 1730's, and thereafter, Russian Masonry, like the Russian aristocratic culture which it helped form, was deeply influenced by foreigners.

  All of the flamboyant qualities of a medieval knight in search of a

  cause are personified in James Keith, the man who brought Masonry from England to Russia. Descended from a Scottish noble family, Keith had been banished from England for his support of the rebellion on behalf of the Stuart Pretender in 1715 and had served in the Spanish army before setting off to Russia in 1728. There he became a leading general, a military governor of the Ukraine, and-in the early 1740's-Provincial Grand Master of Russian Masonry.

  Keith was a beloved and cultivated figure, "an image of the dawn," who attracted Russians to the new aristocratic fraternity. As a Masonic song of the time put it:

  After him [Peter the Great], Keith, full of light, came to the Russians; and, exalted by zeal, lit up the sacred fire. He erected the temple of wisdom, corrected our thoughts and hearts, and confirmed us in brotherhood.83

  Keith left Russia to enter the service of Frederick the Great in 1747; but Masonry continued to grow in Russia. By the late 1750's lodges had appeared in almost every country of Europe, in North America, in some sections of the Middle East, and-on a large scale-in Russia. In 1756 a lodge including many men of letters was formally established in St. Petersburg under the Anglophile Count Vorontsov; and the first official police investigation of "the Masonic sect" was conducted in response to hostile rumors about its foreign and seditious plans. Masonry was exonerated, however; and during his brief reign, Peter III appears to have joined the movement, founding lodges near his residences in both St. Petersburg and Oranienbaum.

  The existence of an organized command structure within the Masonic lodges dates from the installation of a wealthy courtier, Ivan Elagin, as Provincial Grand Master in the Russian Empire. Elagin was a figure of extraordinary influence in the early years of Catherine's reign. She sometimes jocularly signed letters to him "Mr. Elagin's chancellor,"84 and he stands as the organizer and apologist for the first phase of Russian Masonry; the practical-oriented, St. Petersburg-based English form of Masonry which Catherine found relatively acceptable.

  English Masonry partook, indeed, of the dilettantish atmosphere of Catherine's court. Elagin admitted that he turned to the movement originally out of boredom; and his main addition to the standard practices of English Masonry lay in the addition of exotic initiation rituals, which he justified on practical grounds as needed substitutes for the rites of the Church. His definition of a Mason differed little from the description of any enlightened member of Catherine's entourage: "a free man able to master

  his inclinations … to subordinate his will to the laws of reason."85 Elagin's lodges had a base membership in 1774 of some two hundred Russian and foreign aristocrats, almost all occupying leading positions in the civil or military service.86

  Novikov first joined the Masonic order in 1775 through Elagin's lodge in St. Petersburg. But he refused to submit to the usual initiation rituals and was dissatisfied with the way they "played 'mason' like a child's game."87 Within a year he had broken away to form a new lodge and to send Russian Masonry into a second, more intense phase, which was mystical-Germanic rather than English in origin, and had Moscow rather than St. Petersburg as its spiritual center. Novikov took the lead in turning Russian Masonry from the casual fraternal activities of Elagin to the inner groups and esoteric higher orders which were characteristic of this second, Moscow phase of Russian Masonic history and were to have such an important impact on the subsequent development of Russian culture.

  This new trend in Russian Masonry was part of a general European movement away from English toward "Scottish" Masonry, which taught that there were higher levels of membership beyond the original three: anywhere from one to ninety-nine additional stages. This "higher order" Masonry88 introduced closer bonds of secrecy and mutual obUgation, special catechisms and vows, and new quasi-Oriental costumes and rituals. Their lodges claimed origins in the sacred past through the Knights Templars or Knights of Jerusalem back to the Gnostics and the Essenes. In Russian these higher orders were generally known as the "Orders of Andrew," the apostle who allegedly brought Christianity to Russia even before Peter took it to Rome.

  The turn to "true Masonry" had rather the effect of religious conversion for many members of the aristocracy. Chudi, the "literary chameleon" who had been a leading symbol of frivolity and sensuality, became a passionate apologist for the movement as the only bulwark against the moral disintegration of Europe. From writing pornographic literature, Chudi turned to the writing of Masonic sermons and catechisms, and the founding of his own system of higher lodges of "The Flaming Star."89

  The Russian aristocracy was a fertile field for such conversions in the 1770's and 1780's. Increasing numbers
were anxious to dissociate themselves from the immorality, agnosticism, and superficiality of court life, and the higher aristocracy was bound together by a new sense of insecurity in the wake of the Pugachev uprising. They felt cut off from the religion of the people they were now empowered to rule, yet not content with the Voltairianism of Catherine's court. "Finding myself at the crossroads between Voltairianism and religion," Novikov writes of his own conversion,

  "I had no basis on which to work, no cornerstone on which to build spiritual tranquility, and therefore I unexpectedly fell into the society."60 His philosophic journal of the late seventies, Morning Light, was explicitly designed to "struggle with that sect which prides itself on the title 'philosophical' "91 by publishing the great classical and medieval philosophers. The turn to occult, "higher order" Masonry in Eastern Europe was part of the general reaction against French rationalism and secularism that was gathering momentum in the fifteen years prior to the French Revolution. The model was the so-called Swedish system, which had nine grades and a tenth secret group of nine members known as the "Commanders of the Red Cross," who met Fridays at midnight and conducted special prayers, fasts, and other forms of self-discipline. This idea of a new mystical-military order attracted wide attention in Germany, where the Swedish system became known as the "strict observance." Members of these new brotherhoods generally adopted new names as a sign of their inner regeneration and participated in communal efforts to discover through reading and meditation the inner truth and lost unity of the early Christian Church. The theosophic treatises of Jacob Boehme were supplemented in these circles by the works of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who from 1747 to his death in 1772 had written a long series of occult works, such as Secrets of the Universe and The Apocalypse Revealed. By 1770 there were at least twelve major lodges in eastern Germany and the Baltic region; and the next decade was to see a wild proliferation of these higher orders within the two great powers of the region: Prussia and Russia.92 Higher order Masonry appealed to the princes and aristocrats of Eastern Europe as a vehicle for fortifying their realms against the reformist ideas of the French Enlightenment. Two such princes, King Gustav III of Sweden and Crown Prince Frederick William of Prussia, played a major role in bringing the movement into Russia. Gustav gave Swedish Masonry a special stamp of respectability when he flaunted his Masonic ties during his visit to St. Petersburg in 1776 and won over Crown Prince Paul to friendly association if not full membership.93 He entered into negotiations for a royal marriage and sought to link Russian and Swedish Masonry in one system of lodges under the direction of his brother.

  Even more important was the influx from Germany, where the idea of higher orders on the Swedish model was enjoying great vogue. In 1776 Prince Gagarin, a close friend of Paul and leader of the main Swedish type of lodge in St. Petersburg, journeyed to Germany to accept the authority of the Berlin lodge Minerva ("of the strict observance") and to bring back with him both an aristocratic German leader for the Russian "province" and a dynamic young teacher of occult lore, Johann Georg Schwarz.

  A twenty-five-year-old, German-educated Transylvanian, Schwarz was given a position at Moscow University and rapidly threw himself into the business of transforming Russian Masonry in collaboration with the two key Russian admirers: Kheraskov and Novikov. Schwarz's lectures at Moscow University on philology, mystical philosophy, and the philosophy of history attracted the attention of a host of admirers, including two prominent visitors of 1780: Joseph II of Austria and Prince Frederick William of Prussia.

  In 1781 Schwarz, Novikov, Kheraskov, and others combined to organize "the gathering of University foster children," the first secret student society in Russian history. The following year Schwarz was made inspector of a new "pedagogical seminary" to train teachers for the expected expansion of Russia's educational system and to reorganize the preparatory curriculum for the university. From this position, Schwarz tried in effect to integrate Russian higher education with higher Masonry. With Novikov organizing a supporting program of publication, Schwarz gradually gained the interest of a number of wealthy patrons who joined the two of them in the new "secret scientific [sientificheskaia] lodge, Harmony," of 1780.94

  Like the tenth order in Swedish Masonry, this secret lodge had nine members and was dedicated to "returning the society to Christianity." The pursuit and dissemination of knowledge was to be intensified but placed under Christian auspices, for "science without Christianity becomes evil and deadly poison."95 In 1782 the Moscow group formed a "fraternal learned society" with an affiliated "translator's seminary" for publishing foreign books and an "all-supreme philosophic seminary" of thirty-five learned figures, twenty-one of whom had been chosen from the seminaries.

  The final form of "higher order" which the leading Moscow Masons adopted was Prussian Rosicrucianism, into which Schwarz was initiated on a.trip abroad in 1781-2. He had set out as the Russian delegate to the Wilhelmsbad Convention of 1781-2, which had been summoned to try to bring order out of chaos in the higher Masonic orders. Disillusioned with die charlatanism of so much of higher order Masonry, Schwarz fell under the sway of the Prussian Rosicrucian leader, Johann Christoph Wollner, who had also converted Crown Prince Frederick William and was shortly to preside over a purge of rationalistic teachings in the Prussian schools.96 Schwarz was initiated into the Rosicrucian order and empowered to set up his own independent province in Russia, which he called the society of the "Golden-rosed Cross." The central conviction of the "Harmony" group was that science and religion were but two aspects of one truth. As Novikov put it in 1781 in the first issue of his new series of publications for flie university press:

  Between faith and reason . . . philosophy and theology there should be no conflict . . . faith does not go against reason . . . does not take from us the savor of life, it demands only the denial of superfluousness.97

  For Schwarz's Rosicrucians the world itself was the "supreme temple" of Masonry and their brotherhood the final "theoretical level" for which all other grades of Masonry were mere preliminaries. The attainment of this level involved a flight from the rationalism of the Russian Enlightenment as Novikov clearly indicated in the opening number of his new journal, Twilight Glow, in 1782:

  comparing our present position with that of our forefather before the fall who glistened in the noon-day light of wisdom, the light of our reason can hardly be compared even to the twilight glow. . . ,98

  The "light of Adam" is, nonetheless, "still within us, only hidden."99 The task is to find it through inner purification, and a dedicated study of the "hieroglyphics" of nature-and of the most ancient history, which still contained some reflections of this lost light. In a series of lectures given in both the university and the lodges, Schwarz sought to provide a guide. Reason, he explained, was only the first and weakest path to the light; feeling (the aesthetic sense of the rose) the second; and revelation (the mystery of the cross) the third. Each led man to the progressively higher stage of knowledge : the curious, the pleasant, and the useful. Following Boehme, Schwarz contended that all of the cosmos was moving in triads toward perfection. Both the triune God (for whom the world was "created out of his own inner essence," as an "endless wish of his unfathomable will") and God's image, man (who also contained a "trinity" of body, mind, and spirit), were moving toward reunion in the ultimate trinity: "the good, the true, and the beautiful."100 In order to help bring "unripe minds" back from Voltairianism, Schwarz and Novikov published a series of mystical tracts in large editions in the early eighties, ranging from Boehme's Path to Christ and Arndt's On True Christianity to such anonymous compilations as The Errors of Reason and The Secrets of the Cross.

  The death of Schwarz early in 1784 was caused largely by an excess of ascetic self-discipline in his quest for inner perfection and knowledge. A large crowd of mourners gathered at his funeral even though it was held in a remote village; and a memorial service was also spontaneously organized by his students in Moscow. He played an important innovating role
in the development of Russian thought even though he spent less than five of his thirty-three years in Russia and never formally enjoyed noble status. He was in many ways the father of Russian romanticism, with

  his deprecation of natural reason, his belief that art was closer to the inner harmony of nature, and his love of twilight, mystery, and chivalric ideals. At the same time he was the first of a long line of German idealistic philosophers to impart to Russia a thirst for philosophic absolutes, insisting that perfection could be realized through the special knowledge and dedication of a select brotherhood. The Moscow Rosicrucians of the eighties began the tradition of semi-secret philosophic circles which became so important in the intellectual life of Russia. They introduced practices which were to become characteristic in varying forms of such circles: assumed names, bonds of friendship and mutual aid, secret discussion and mutual criticism, and an obligatory system of quarterly confession to the grand master of

  the order.

  The casual moralism and philanthropy that had dominated early Masonry was, under Schwarz, transformed into a seductive belief in the realizability of heaven on earth through the concentrated effort of consecrated thinkers. It seems fitting that Schwarz was apparently the first to use the term intelligentsiia. Though using it in the sense of the Latin term intelligentia ("intelligence"), Schwarz gave the term its distinctive Russian spelling, intelligentsiia, and the sense of special power which would eventually come to be applied to the class of people who went by its name. "Chto takoe intelligentsiia?" "What is intelligence?" asks Schwarz in a phrase that was to be much repeated in subsequent Russian history. It is, he says,