God and man. This thirst for reunion is present in God's own longing for Sophia, which meant for Boehme and Saint-Martin not merely the Holy Wisdom of the ancient East but also the principle of "eternal femininity." In his original state of perfect union with God, Adam had been spiritually perfect without sex; and part of man's return to God would be the attainment of perfect androgyny: union of male and female characteristics.
Sophia, the mystical principle of true wisdom and lost femininity, was the common object of the strivings of both God and man.11 Saint-Martin and Baader followed Boehme in making Sophia a fourth person within the Trinity; and Baader related this concept to the old Pythagorean idea of the world being composed of four parts. He saw "in the number 4 the symbol of creation and the formula which provides the key to the mysteries of nature";12 the cross itself was a hidden symbol of the figure four.
Sophia was, to cite the title of one occult manuscript of the Alexandrian period, "the auspicious eternal virgin of Divine Wisdom."18 Labzin, Boehme's principal translator and popularizer, gave himself the pen name Student of Wisdom (Uchenik Mudrosti), which he often abbreviated as UM, or "mind."14 It is not too much to say that Russian thinkers turned to German idealistic philosophy, not for keys to a better critical understanding of the natural world, but rather-to cite the title of a typical occult handbook of the age-for "the key to understanding the divine secrets." The key appeared as the second volume of "selected readings for lovers of true philosophy,"15 and the most influential philosophic circle to develop late in the reign of Alexander called itself Lovers of Wisdom (liubomudrye). Thus, philosophy, as the term came to be understood in the Nicholaevan era, was closer to the occult idea of "divine wisdom" than to the understanding of philosophy as rational and analytical investigation in the manner of Descartes, Hume, or Kant.
The lovers of wisdom circle appears in many ways as a continuation of the last great system of higher order Masonry, that of the lodge Astrea, which defined truth as "that original cause which gives movement to the whole of the universe." Those seeking admission to the lodge were forced to wait in a dark room in the presence of a Bible and a skull, which bore the ominous inscription memento mori: Remember Death.16 The lovers of wisdom also met in secret, with an inscribed skull greeting them at the door. The language was still Latin, but the message was different: "Dare to Know" (Sapere Abide),11 and the book on the table was not the Bible but Schelling's Naturphilosophie. As one of the members explained: "Christian doctrine seemed to us to be good only for the popular masses, but unacceptable for us, lovers of wisdom."18
Schelling's pantheistic teachings about the organic unity of all nature
and the presence therein of a dynamic "world soul" commended itself to the Russian imagination. Characteristically ignoring the complexities of Schelling's later writings and relying partly on vulgarized digests of his ideas,19 Russians were thrilled by the appearance of a doctrine that purported to account for phenomena which they felt had been artificially excluded from the mechanistic world view of the eighteenth century: the beauty and variety of the organic world, telepathy and mesmerism. They also derived some satisfaction from the doubts of scientists themselves in the early nineteenth century that magnetism and electricity had been adequately accounted for by Newtonian mechanics. The long residence in St. Petersburg from 1757 to 1798 of the German authority on magnetism and electricity, Franz Aepinus, stimulated a dilettantish interest in these phenomena (particularly after he rather than D'Alembert became tutor to the future tsar, Paul) without bringing real understanding (outside of the Academy where he worked and Tartu where he retired and died in 1802) of scientific problems and method.
Schelling appears as a kind of absentee grand master of a new higher order. The most popular university lecturer of the period, Professor Pavlov, was master of initiations, greeting students at the door of his lecture hall with his famous question: "You want to know about nature, but what is nature and what is knowledge?"20 The leading speculative philosopher of the age, Ivan Kireevsky, was iconographer and master of ceremonies, bringing back a bust of Schelling to Russia, after hearing him lecture, presiding over discussions of his philosophy, and insisting that the very word "philosophy" has "something magical about it."21 A philosophic popularizer of the time independently described the creation of a Russian philosophy as "the problem of our time," professing to find three ascending levels of meaning within the maxim "Know thyself." The first, or "Delphic," was knowledge of oneself as an individual person; the second, or "Solonic" level was knowledge of self as a "social-national" being; the third and highest-the Socratic level-was knowledge of oneself as a form of divinity.22 Nadezhdin, the Schellingian professor of art and archeology at Moscow during the 1830's, captivated his students by treating artifacts of past civilizations as occult symbols, finding "the secret of the ages in an elegant piece of archeology."23 He was the first Russian to use the term "nihilist"-in describing the materialism which was the opposite of his own idealism.24 Perhaps he acutely sensed that a world view which finds ideal purposes everywhere in general might end up finding them nowhere in particular. Odoevsky attempted to draw up a "Russian system of theosophic physics" designed to study "the inner substance of physical objects as the basis for studying their
external forms."25 Schelling's phflosophy inspired this and other fanciful ideas. As Odoevsky wrote:
You cannot imagine what an impact it produced in its time, what a jolt it gave to people slumbering before the monotonous humming of Locke's rhapsody. … He opened to man an unknown part of the world, about which there had previously existed only legendary tales: his soul. Like Christopher Columbus, he did not find what he sought and raised unfulfilled hopes, but he gave new direction to the activity of man. All threw themselves into this miraculous, luxuriant land.26
In this "miraculous land" ideal ends rather than material causes determined life and history. The universe was a work of art, and man, its supreme creation, was uniquely capable of understanding its hidden harmony and advancing its higher purposes.
Practically speaking, the philosophy of Schelling had a double effect in Russia. On the one hand many aristocrats rediscovered through philosophy something they had ceased to find in religion: assurance that there was an ideal, unifying purpose to life and history. In that sense Schelling's philosophy was one of reassurance and consolation, tending to encourage social and political conservatism. Thus, it is not surprising that a reactionary writer like Pogodin should try to enlist Schelling's aid in formulating the ideology of "official nationalism"; or that a future radical like Belinsky should find himself reconciled to reality and writing odes to tsardom under the impact of Schelling (and later, of Hegel) in the 1830's.
At the same time, Schelling's philosophy was the starting point for revolutionary thought in Russia. Under Schelling's influence the greatest biologist of Nicholaevan Russia, Karl von Baer, developed an idealistic theory of purposeful evolution which was to influence subsequent radical thinkers like Kropotkin and Mikhailovsky. More important, however, was the intoxicating effect Schelling's ideas produced on large numbers of thinkers who never acquired more than a confused third-hand knowledge of them. Frustration was drowned in philosophy as men saw themselves promised cosmic redemption, without being tied down to any predetermined scheme of how it would take place. Schelling encouraged men to think that profound changes might be forthcoming from the process of becoming, which was the essence of life itself. The belief grew that the previous generation's search for hidden keys to the universe, far from being chimerical, was merely immature and unrefined. The search for all-encompassing answers continued; and Schelling stands as a transitional figure from the crude occultism of Boehme and Eckartshausen to the ideological systems of Hegel, Saint-Simon, and Marx.
The Meaning of History
The most widely debated of all the "cursed questions" during Nicholas' reign was the meaning of history. In the wake of the Napoleonic war, Russians were more than ever anxious to know their p
lace in history. The anti-Enlightenment had insisted that irregular, traditional patterns in history had meanings of their own; and Russians were not less determined to find out what these patterns were than romantic thinkers elsewhere. Their theology had been historically oriented, and their flight to philosophy led them naturally on to the philosophy of history.
The development in the romantic age of a broad, philosophical interest in history was to some extent the work of Baltic Germans who had been stimulated by contact with the Slavic world. Herder's broodings in Riga helped crystallize his idea that truth lay within history rather than beyond it; and that each culture was destined to grow and flower in its own way in the garden of humanity. Schlozer's long years of teaching and study in Uppsala and St. Petersburg helped him formulate his original plan for a "universal history." He pioneered in the use of Old Russian manuscripts for historical purposes, challenging the "Norman school" of Russian history and exciting his many Russian students at Gottingen with the idea that Russia had a unique role to play in the next stage of history. Throughout the Germanophile reign of Nicholas I, Baltic German writers continued to play a leading role in investing the distinctive popular institutions of Russia with a romantic aura of "higher truth": Haxthausen in his writings about the peasant commune (obshchina) and Hilferding in his "discovery" of the oral epics (byliny) of the Russian north.27
Meanwhile, the Russian interest in history grew rapidly. In 1804, the Society of History and Russian Antiquities was founded under the president of Moscow University. The defeat of Napoleon and the reconstruction of Moscow created a broad, popular interest in history, and Nicholas I contributed to it by encouraging the activities of a large number of patriotic lecturers and historians: Ustrialov, Pogodin, and others.28 Between Pushkin's Boris Godunov (1825) and Glinka's Life for the Tsar (1836), historical plays and operas dominated the Russian stage. Even in the underdeveloped cultural area of painting there was an abortive tendency toward monumental, patriotic canvases: climaxing in Briullov's "Fall of Pskov" and in his unfulfilled commission of the late thirties to provide Russian historical frescoes for the Winter Palace.20 Historical novels dominated the literary scene, as vulgar imitators of Walter Scott appeared even in the provinces.
M. Zagoskin started the long line of chauvinistic "Russians-and-Poles" novels with his Yury Miloslavsky of 1829, and his subsequent patriotic novels and plays enjoyed a spectacular vogue during the thirties. One scholar has counted 150 long poems on historical themes in the style of Byron and Pushkin written in Russia between 1834 and i848.so
Schelling's philosophy lent special intensity to the interest in history, with its insistence that the world was in a perpetual state of "becoming" and that peculiar national patterns were part of its ever-unfolding divine plan. As one "lover of wisdom" put it, Schelling provided "consolation" and kept him from being "stupefied by the atmosphere around me" by "summoning up to me my sacred fatherland."31 Schelling was sought out personally by many Russians, and he assured them that "Russia is fated to have a great destiny; never, until now, has it realized the fullness of its strength."32
The man who focused all of this interest of history on the problem of Russia's destiny was Peter Chaadaev. Chaadaev had gone off to fight Napoleon at the impressionable age of eighteen and had subsequently been subjected to most of the disquieting intellectual influences of the second half of Alexander's reign. He had known De Maistre, participated in higher order Masonry, and was a leading intellectual light in the restive Semenovsky regiment. As a specially favored adjutant, he carried news of that regiment's rebellion in 1820 to the Tsar, who was then meeting with the other leaders of the Holy Alliance at Laibach. Shortly thereafter, he resigned his commission and set off for Switzerland to begin a long period of romantic wandering and philosophic introspection, which kept him abroad until after the Decembrist uprising and brought him into contact with Schelling.
Returning for the coronation of Nicholas I in 1826, he began writing eight "philosophical letters" about Russia's historical development, which were largely completed by 1831. Though widely discussed in the early thirties, the first letter was not published until 1836. It echoed "like a pistol shot in the night,"53 bringing the wrath of official Russia on him and his editor, Nadezhdin, but serving to open up the unofficial debate over Russia's destiny that has come to be known as the Slavophile-Westernizer controversy.
Chaadaev's letter stands as a kind of signpost, pointing toward the radical, Westernizing path that was soon to be advocated for Russia. Written in polemic French and calling Moscow "Necropolis" (the city of the dead), Chaadaev insisted that Russia had so far been a part of geography rather than history, totally dependent on ideas and institutions imposed from without.
Chaadaev's extreme rejection of the Russian heritage is partly the result of De Maistre's influence-evident both in his tendency toward bold
statement and in his sympathy for Roman Catholicism. More profoundly, however, Chaadaev's dark portrayal of Russia's past and present serves to dramatize the brightness of the future. He emphasizes that Russia's absence from the stage of history may actually be an advantage for its future development. Chaadaev was, in effect, restating in philosophical terms what had been said by Leibniz to Peter the Great, the Encyclopedists to Catherine the Great, and the Pietists to Alexander the Blessed: that Russia was fortunate in being uncommitted to the follies of Europe and was still capable of serving as the savior of European civilization. Unlike all these predecessors, however, Chaadaev was a Russian speaking to Russians inside Russia. Moreover, at a time when tsarist pretensions were at their highest, he was not addressing himself primarily to the Tsar. To the guardians of "official nationality" there was a faintly subversive quality to his contempt for the cultural barrenness and excessive humility of Orthodoxy and to his blunt assertion that "political Christianity . . . has no more sense in our times," and must "give way to a purely spiritual Christianity [which will] illuminate the world."34
Chaadaev's suggestion that Russia overleap the materialistic West in the interest of all Christian civilization was typical of the Russian Schell-ingians. Odoevsky had written that there would have to be "a Russian conquest of Europe, but a spiritual conquest, because only Russian thought can unify the chaos of European science. . . ,"35 Thus, belief in a special destiny for Russia did not, to the Russian idealists, imply a lack of interest in Western Europe. Just as the autocratic Karamzin had entitled his journal the Herald of Europe, so did the leaders of early Slavophilism, the Kireevsky brothers, entitle their new journal of 1832 The European. Yet interest in the West did not imply sympathy with secularism or rationalism. Chaadaev, for all his sympathy with Catholicism, was hostile to scholastic philosophy and felt that Russian thought had been corrupted with the intrusion of "the categories of Aristotle." His editor, Nadezhdin, entertained the idea throughout the thirties of visiting all of the shrines of the Orthodox East in order to write a great history of the Eastern Church.
The idealists of early Nicholaevan Russia agreed that their land must play a significant role in the solution of the common problems of Christian civilization. But what are the real problems? they began to ask. What is the nature of Russia vis-a-vis the West? and what should its role in history be? In response to such questions Russian thinkers produced a remarkable rash of analyses and prophecies in the twenties and thirties.
There was general agreement that the absence of a classical heritage was responsible for much of the difference between Russia and the West. The extravagant praise of Pushkin's poetry and Glinka's music was partly
produced by the desire to overcome this deficiency. There was deep resentment of Nicholas' policy of downgrading the classical emphases that Alexander had introduced into Russian education. Chaadaev's editor, Nadezhdin, was expelled from theological seminary in 1826 for his interests in classical writers, and his widely hailed Latin thesis of 1830, De Poesi Romantica, argued that Russia should fuse classicism and romanticism in order to play a role in "the great dra
ma of the fate of man."36
Nadezhdin's conception of the classical age was itself romantic. Schelling was the new Plotinus, Napoleon the new Caesar, Schiller the new Virgil; and the implication was clear that the Russians were the new Christians. Nadezhdin had read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and, in his lectures at Moscow University in the early thirties, he likened Russia to a new band of barbaric hordes swarming over the collapsing West. Gogol wrote a historical essay on the barbarian conquest of Rome and lectured on the fall of Rome during his brief period as history lecturer at St. Petersburg University. Briullov's "The Last Days of Pompeii" was thought to be fraught with contemporary meaning by Russian critics after its first showing in 1836.
The young idealists also agreed that the woes of contemporary Europe followed from the materialism and scepticism of the eighteenth century which led to the French Revolution. Though influenced by De Maistre, Saint-Martin, and the entire anti-Enlightenment tradition, they were particularly indebted to German romantic thought for their conception of the deeper, historical causes of Western decline. Kireevsky argued that the defeat of Pascal and Fenelon by the Jesuits was a critical turning point in the loss of Western spirituality; Khomiakov blamed it on the annexation of the Western church by lawyers and logicians in the twelfth century; Odoevsky on Richelieu's philosophy of raison d'etat, which made war between nations inevitable by "taking away the thin lining of paper which had kept the porcelain vases apart."37
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