The Icon and the Axe

and "a corpse stimulated to life by Magnitsky." A German professor had been dismissed at Kharkov in 1816 for teaching that Napoleon's crimes lay in overthrowing the natural rights of the people rather than the traditional rights of monarchs. In 1820 Runich and Magnitsky broadened the assault with a combined attack on a professor of the Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo who had just presented a copy of his book, Natural Law, to the Emperor. In the following year they succeeded in obtaining the dismissal of three key professors from St. Petersburg University.

Early in 1823 Magnitsky launched an expanded campaign against the "Hellish Alliance" which he claimed was now at war with the Holy Alliance. He claimed to find the "doctrines of Marat" in one professor's book and the secret plans of "illuminists" in another. In February he proposed the outlawing of philosophy, warning that "from one line of a professor can come 200,000 bayonets and 1,000 ships of the line."95 In May he denounced the "bloody cap of freedom" which "used to be called only philosophy and literature and is now already called liberalism."™

"Down with altars, down with sovereigns, long live death and hell." They are already howling forth in several countries in Europe. How can one fail to recognize who is speaking? The Prince of Darkness himself is coming visibly closer to us; the veil covering him is becoming more and more transparent and soon, no doubt, will fall altogether. This assault, the last perhaps that he will lead against us, is the most terrible, for it is spiritual. The word is being spread from one end of the world to the other invisibly and rapidly like an electric shock, and suddenly culminates in a shattering of the earth. The human word, that is what transmits this diabolical force; the printing press is its arm. Godless university professors are distilling the atrocious poison of disbelief and of hate towards legiti mate power for our unhappy youth. . . .97

Russia should simply

separate herself from Europe so that not even a rumor about the horrible events taking place there could reach her. The present war of the spirit of evil cannot be arrested by the force of arms, for against a spiritual assault an equally spiritual defense is needed. A clairvoyant censorship united with a system of popular education founded on the unshakable base of faith is the only dike against the flood of disbelief and depravity engulfing Europe.98

There was little support within the ministry of education and spiritual affairs for such an extreme position. One member pointed out that countries like Spain and Portugal in which revolutions had occurred were precisely the ones in which enlightenment was least far advanced;89 another wrote

that a successful state could not function in this manner even "if we could surround our fatherland with a Chinese Wall. . . transplant to Russian soil the Spanish Inquisition . . . and blot out everything that has ever been written about philosophy."100 But Magnitsky found more powerful allies in Archimandrite Photius, a young ascetic influential with the Tsar who had recently turned from long friendship with Golitsyn to violent denunciation of the Bible Society. "It is the cleverness of Hell itself that the ancient faith is being destroyed by pious foreigners," echoed an anonymous informant of Admiral Shishkov.101 Runich wrote that it was essential "to pluck even one quill from the dark wing of the foe of Christ."102

Magnitsky followed the new Metropolitan of St. Petersburg, Seraphim, to the Winter Palace in the spring of 1824, when the latter went to request Golitsyn's dismissal. He waited outside on Admiralty Boulevard in order to tell immediately from the expression on Seraphim's face whether or not the Tsar had acceded to the request. The news was, of course, good for the Orthodox reactionaries: Golitsyn was dismissed from all posts: replaced as head of the Bible Society by Seraphim, as minister of education by Shishkov. "Foreign cults" were placed in a separate category, subordinate at last to the Orthodox Synod and to the Draconian Arakcheev. Thus, Golitsyn's unique concentration of spiritual and pedagogical authority was broken up; and the dream of a new universal church destroyed.

The Orthodoxy which Magnitsky opposed to syncretism made use of the same supra-confessional terminology from higher order Masonry that Lopukhin had used before him. He described life as "passing through the Great Temple … in holy darkness" in order to reach "the all-seeing eye of holiness … the Church of the first centuries."103