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 I730'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. Zhukov-sky, 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 Stael 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 "ffluminists 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 (StiUe).
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.^ 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 beUevers in "the kingdom of property [tsarstvo jobstvennosti], 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 protege 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 Grabi-anka'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 Stael 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.63
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 1817.64 During the same period the Baroness Kriidener, 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 Kriidener, 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."37
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."68
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