The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  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."07 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 Krudener 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.™

  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 emigre 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.76

  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 Schliisselburg 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 seances; 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 ran. 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 fo 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 du
ring 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 illumin-ists who are the raskolniks of the salons and the raskolniks who are the il-Iuminists 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