The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  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 emigre 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 emigres, 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),'' 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 Mnousal 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 (lie early Christian Church.9

  Essential to De Maistre's war on the Enlightenment was his convic-lion that man was incurably and irrevocably corrupt. He is harshly critical of

  Ihe 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

  "Wc 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, us 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 ligcrs 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 lor forced abortion but not for God.1(i 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 rev
olution, 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,"10 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,2* 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 emigres as governors of exposed western provinces, Paulucci in Riga and Richelieu in Odessa, was also a boon to Catholic activity.

  However, the levee-en-masse against Napoleon in 1812 raised passions lhat 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 (he 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 toler-

  ance 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?* 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 exclusive-ness 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