The Icon and the Axe

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 during 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