The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  that higher state of man, as a mental essence, free from all base, earthly perishable matter; eternally and imperceptibly capable of influencing and acting on all things.101

  Intelligentsia was the magical force for which Catherine had prayed at the beginning of her Nakaz: "Domine Deus … da mihi intelligentiam . . ," But it was given a different, mystical meaning by Schwarz. The first comprehensive history of Russian Masonry claimed with some justice that Russian Masonry first gave the aristocracy "a sense of mission as an intellectual class" {??? intelligentnoe soslovie).102

  After Schwarz's death, a new grand master arrived from Germany convinced that "true Rosicrucians are the true restorers of order in Europe," and that a leading role in this restoration would be played by Russia ("a camel that does not realize it is laden with precious goods").103 Numerous young Russians flocked to Berlin for fuller study of the order, some hoping to unravel there the secret of eternal life. The movement received new encouragement in 1786 when a practicing Rosicrucian, Prince Frederick William, became king of Prussia. A bewildering profusion of occult fraternities flooded into Russia in the late eighties: the "New Israelites," or

  "people of God," who called themselves true Masons but seemed more like religious sectarians; the "children of the New Jerusalem" who were followers of Swedenborg; and an aristocratic group formed in Avignon by Admiral Pleshcheev and Prince N. Repnin, which was transferred to St. Petersburg under the ideological guidance of Dom Pernety, a former Benedictine and librarian of Frederick the Great, who had taken up occult studies.104

  Novikov became uneasy about the new occult turn that Masonry had taken, and proposed forming a more purely Christian and philanthropic order in the late eighties. His harsh criticism of the Jesuits in 1784 as being a political order and thus a betrayal of the monastic ideal had brought a sharp rebuke from their benefactress, Catherine. Increasingly she stepped up her harassment of all Masons, wrote three satirical anti-Masonic plays, closed down Masonic printing presses, and finally arrested Novikov in his village home in 1792.

  Catherine's persecution of Novikov is usually bracketed with her treatment of Radishchev as illustrating her general disillusionment with the Enlightenment in France in the wake of the French Revolution. Actually, her opposition to Masonry was of many years standing and appeared in her writings even before her accession to the throne. It was based not on a sudden disillusionment with a former ideological infatuation, but on a deep antagonism to all forms of obscurity and secretiveness. Catherine was suspicious of anything mystical which "inclines the mind away from participation in the affairs of this world,"105 and was also politically apprehensive of Swedish and Prussian influence over these higher orders.

  There may, moreover, have been real acuteness in her premonitions of special danger lurking within this movement. She knew that the occult orders had influence over her son Paul and sensed that they might establish broader links with other disaffected elements of the population. Having defeated religion in the countryside, Catherine was now seeing it stage a comeback in the drawing rooms. The literature of urban nostalgia was beginning. Chulkov, Shcherbatov, Novikov, and others were leading men's gaze back to the idealized rural and religious culture of Muscovy. Novikov's increasing interest in the religious traditions of Old Russia was giving his publications a new kind of quasi-religious appeal. Novikov adopted the Old Believer habit of counting dates from creation rather than the birth of Christ and published a number of Old Believer documents. Indeed, his publication of an apologia for the rebellious monks of Solovetsk was the immediate cause of his arrest and deportation.

  In the late years of Catherine's reign there was a general turn toward desperation within the religious community. Monks fled from monasteries to the ascetic "desert" settlements (pustyni) during this period. Within the

  schismatic community arose the prophetic "wanderers" led by a man who deserted first from the army and then from the sedentary Old Believer settlement itself. He refused even to touch coins or anything else that bore the imperial "seal of Antichrist." The entire government apparatus was the work of the Antichrist, whose sign was "the division of men into different ranks and the measurement of the forests, seas, and land."106 Among the sectarians a new leader of the Dukhobors gave a flagellant cast to his sect that they have retained ever since by proclaiming himself Christ and setting out as an itinerant preacher with twelve apostles.

  But the most extreme and ghoulish new form of religious protest to Catherine's rule appeared within the flagellant movement: the sect of skoptsy, or self-castrators. As with the "runner" movement among the schismatics, the self-castrators among the sectarians were founded by a deserter from the army. Driven apparently at one of the ecstatic flagellant "rejoicings" to the point of self-castration, he began persuading others to follow his example in the course of the 1770's. For more than a half century he continued to preach the need for this form of purification to interested listeners, which included many of his civil and monastic jailors, General Suvorov, and even Alexander I.

  As with the self-burners of the late seventeenth century, the self-castrated of the late eighteenth should not be looked at solely as a masochistic curiosity. Both groups viewed their act as a "new baptism" into the elect of the world to come and as a kind of sacrificial atonement for the redemption of a fallen society. The self-burners appeared at the time of maximum violence and cruelty among the ruling class; the self-castrators, at the time of greatest profligacy. The sacrifice that they each chose to make was thus, in some degree, determined by the character of the society they were protesting against.

  The self-castrators, however, had curious political pretensions which provide the first hint of the revolutionary social doctrines that were later to come from the sectarian tradition. They worshipped before icons of Peter III; many believed God had created him impotent in order to lead them.107 The attempt of their leader Selivanov to characterize himself as a castrated Peter III was based on the old myth of the "true tsar." What was new was the contention that the skoptsy as a whole were a kind of "true aristocracy" destined to replace the false, promiscuous aristocracy of Catherine's court. Selivanov's expressed purpose was to set up a world-wide rule of the castrated. The first stage of admission to this elite (castration) was referred to as "the small seal"; and the second stage (total removal of the sexual organs), "the imperial seal" (Tsarskaia pechat'). Selivanov had remarkable success in gaining converts-particularly in Moscow among wealthy

  merchants and military leaders who had been denied access to the inner circles of Catherine's court. One of his converts was the former chamberlain to the king of Poland, who came to Moscow after the final partition of Poland and spoke of the skoptsy leadership as a "divine chancery."108 Like the other sectarians the skoptsy considered themselves the true "spiritual" Christians, referring to one another as "doves."

  Among the schismatics, the wanderers devised a loose chain of communication and command centered on a village near Yaroslavl, and the new and more radical Dukhobors in the sectarian community came to view Tambov as the region in which God was coming to gather his true servants for the millennial reign of saints. Thus, all of the new forms of religious dissent under Catherine contained an element of radical if essentially passive protest. They were all determined-as the leader of the wanderers put it in his prophetic book The Garden (Tsvetnik)-not to go on "with one eye on earth and one eye in heaven."109 Both eyes were to be lifted above; and the true capital of Russia for these dissonant elements was not St. Petersburg or any of the cities built or rebuilt by Catherine, but the villages or mountains where the leader of the new spiritual army lived-be it the pustyn' of St. Seraphim, the wanderer center near Yaroslavl, or the perennial sectarian center of Tambov.

  Catherine viewed all of this with a mixture of disgust and patronizing sympathy. Her attitude toward religion was the typically modern one of toleration-through-indifference. She had been born a Lutheran, educated by Calvinists and Catholics, and welcomed into the Orthodo
x fold. She was deeply suspicious of Jews and sectarian extremists; but was otherwise ruled by considerations of raison d'etat in matters of religion. She welcomed Jesuits for their intellectual and pedagogic abilities, encouraged the immigration of agriculturally skilled German pietists, and started the "one faith" (edinoverie) movement whereby Old Believers were permitted to rejoin the official Church, preserving most of their old rites so long as they recognized the authority of the established hierarchy.

  But she correctly sensed that popular religious sentiment was deeply offended by her rule; and she may have felt that the secret groups meeting under Novikov in Moscow were, or would become, a focal point of opposition. Beginning with her edict of 1785, ordering supervision of the Masonic presses and interrogation of Novikov, she repeatedly expressed the fear that "Martinists" were fostering some concealed schism (raskol) in Russian society. In January, 1786, she referred to the Masons as "that crowd of the notorious new schism" and in a special note to the Metropolitan of Moscow, she suggested that there lay "hidden in their reasonings incompatibilities with the simple and pure rules of faith of our Orthodox

  and civil duty."110 Although briefly reassured by the Metropolitan's vote of confidence in Novikov, she must have been disturbed by his statement that he could not pass judgment on Novikov's occult books, because he could not understand them. Her steady war on Masonry continued through both satiric writings and increased administrative pressure, particularly after the appointment of a new chief commandant for Moscow in February, 1790. A measure of her special concern about Novikov is the fact that his arrest in April, 1792, was carefully staged at a time when he was outside of Moscow, and carried out by an entire squadron of hussars. "A poor old man plagued with piles," said Count Razumovsky of Novikov, "was besieged as if he were a city!"111 He was sent under guard to Yaroslavl; and then, apparently realizing that this metropolis on the Volga was a center both of Masonic activity and of sectarian agitation, transferred to a more distant and secluded place of confinement.

  The term "Martinist," which Catherine repeatedly used for Novikov's circles, was well chosen, for it highlights the central importance within higher order Masonry of the mystical teachings of Henri de Saint-Martin, the last of the long line of French thinkers to establish an overpowering influence on Russian thought in the eighteenth century. Saint-Martin was the anti-Voltaire of French thought, and his first and greatest work, On Errors and Truth, was a kind of Bible for the mystical counterattack against the French Enlightenment. Published in 1775, it became known almost immediately in Russia and was translated, copied, and widely extracted within higher Masonic circles.

  Saint-Martin was in many ways a caricature of the alienated intellectual: a small, sickly bachelor with an oversized head, no real occupation, and few friends. As a wealthy aristocrat he had ample time to read and travel; but he appears to have found a sense of purpose and identity only when he met Martinez de Pasqually, said to be a Portuguese Jew, who introduced him to spiritualism through his own secret order of "elected Cohens (priests)." It was under the spell of this order that he wrote his On Errors, signing it mysteriously "the unknown philosopher."112

  The meaning of the book is deliberately obscure, heavily draped with portentous talk of spiritual forces and sweeping attacks on the alleged sensualism and materialism of the age. "I was less the friend of God than the enemy of his enemies, and it was this indignation that impelled me to write my first book."113 The opposite of the animal man is the man of intelligence, whom he later also calls the "man of desire," the "man of spirit." Thus Saint-Martin gives to the term "intelligence" an even broader meaning than Schwarz. Intelligence can alone save the world, for it is impelled by desire and spirit and its object is a return to God. Following the Neo-Platonists,

  Saint-Martin insists that all beings are emanations from God. The original perfection of man has been lost only because his spiritual nature has been diluted with matter; but "the reintegration of beings in their primal wholeness"114 is now possible through the use of "intelligence" within the new spiritualist fraternities.

  Saint-Martin attracted many Russian followers through his promise to lead men to this reintegrating principal, or-as he also called it-"the thing" (la chose). Nobody knew exactly what "the thing" was; but the place to look for it was in occult writings and the higher Masonic lodges. More than any other single man, Saint-Martin established the idea among Russian thinkers that the real world was the world of spirit, and that the key to truth lay in establishing some kind of contact with, or understanding of, that world. This introduction of spiritualism within the intellectual community gave it a potential community of interest with sectarian "spiritual Christianity." Catherine seems to have sensed instinctively that some such unified opposition to her might develop on a religious basis under the "Martinists," and that firm action was necessary to defend the strength of the state.

  Whatever her reasoning, Catherine's arrest of Novikov and dispersal of the Moscow Martinists also brought an end to her program of enlightenment. For Novikov had combined within himself both aspects of the Russian Enlightenment: the St. Petersburg and Moscow, practical philanthropy and theoretical mysticism. His early career shows the predominance of satire, moralism, and Anglo-French influences. All of this was typical of the early, casual forms of English Masonry and of the cosmopolitan and activistic capital.

  With his move to Moscow, he became preoccupied with religious themes. From the world of Addison and Steele, he moved to that of Bunyan and Milton. Novikov encouraged the translation of Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress, and began his own Selected Library of Christian Readings in 1784 with the first Russian translation of a Kempis' Imitation of Christ. He involved himself less in practical activities than in the search for a new esoteric religion through studying the theosophy of Boehme and the older religious traditions of the Russian people.

  The later struggle between "Westernizers" and "Slavophiles" is anticipated in the difference of perspective between lower and higher order Masonry. In both cases the Westernized activism of St. Petersburg contrasts with the more contemplative Eastern preoccupations of Moscow. But in both cases, there was a close bond between the parties. Herzen said of the Westernizers' relationship with the Slavophiles: "Like Janus or like a two-headed eagle we looked in different directions while the same heart throbbed

  within us."115 In like manner the rationalist Radishchev dedicated his Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow to the mystic Kutuzov a half century earlier: "My opinion differs from thine … but thy heart beats as one with mine."116

  Thus, the real sense of solidarity among the alienated, aristocratic intellectuals lay not so much in the mind as in the "heart": in their common sense of caring. The word "intelligence" included "desire" and "spirit" for Saint-Martin, and these qualities were important to men whose heirs were to call themselves collectively the intelligentsiia. It was Catherine's lack of concern, rather than her lack of intelligence, that alienated the intellectuals.

  The quality most highly valued by these dedicated aristocratic circles in the late years of Catherine's reign was "love of truth" (pravda-liubov'). This was the pen name of Novikov and a favorite inscription on gravestones. The aristocratic intellectuals believed that there was such a thing as Truth; in search of it they joined higher Masonic orders, set off on travels, and read new books from the West with special intensity. Following Boehme and Saint-Martin, they attributed their failure to read the "hieroglyphics" of truth to their own fallen sinfulness. Reading came to be regarded not as a casual form of leisure activity but as part of an over-all program of spiritual and moral regeneration. Foreign books became sacred objects that were thought to possess redeeming powers; key sections were often read in an intoned, semi-liturgical manner. Yet behind all these mystical activities of the "circle" stood the supreme Enlightenment belief in an "inner reason," an "ultimate harmony" behind all the seeming incongruity and misfortune in the world. Thus there was a logical connection between the "rational" and t
he "mystical" side of the Enlightenment, as well as a psychological connection through the personality of Novikov.

  Of course, the flight into occult methods of exegesis was partly the • result of virginal enthusiasm. Holy chants of the Church were replaced by new declaratory hymns consecrated to abstract virtues and mythological deities. Icons were replaced by statues-above all busts of great philosophers. The pseudo-science of physiognomy was flourishing in Russia thanks to the extraordinary influence of the Swiss mystic Johann Caspar Lavater; and the belief was widespread that one could divine the inner characteristics of a man (and by extension the essence of his ideas) from a careful study of his facial contour and features. Gardens and rooms full of realistic busts or portraits were increasingly common; and Catherine's famous smashing of her bust of Voltaire as a result of the French Revolution was almost a totemistic act.

  But what did the "lovers of truth" expect to find inside their circles and behind the sculptured masks of philosophers? The answer may be