The Icon and the Axe

For better or worse the unorthodox religious ideas of the Alexandrian era were to have far greater impact on subsequent Russian history than the reformatorial political ideas of the age. Speculative religious thinkers of the late nineteenth century tended to pick up where men of Alexander's time left off. Faithful to the main line of Alexandrian spirituality, they tended to oppose both revolution and rationalism. They also tended to vacillate between De Maistre's idea of a disciplined inquisitorial church and Lopukhin's idea of a spiritual "inner" church.

The two ideals confront one another in Dostoevsky's "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor." The returning Christ figure is Lopukhin's ideal spiritual knight who opposes the dedicated and articulate Inquisitor with the spiritual weapons of silent suffering and freely given love. The two ideals are also present in Vladimir Solov'ev, whose personal rapprochement with Roman Catholicism and with De Maistre's views on war conflicted with his vision of churches reunited in a "free theocracy."113 Even Constantine Pobedon-ostsev, the semi-Inquisitorial procurator of the Synod, felt the contrary appeal of the "inner church," and translated Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ.

It seems appropriate that the most famous convert to the ideal of a new inner church in nineteenth-century Russia, Leo Tolstoy, spent several key years of his life studying the history of the Alexandrian era. The fruit of his study was, of course, Russia's greatest historical novel, War and Peace, which began as a study of the Decembrists and ended as a panoramic epic of the war with Napoleon and of the spiritual strivings which accompanied it.

Tolstoy subsequently became an archetype of Lopukhin's "spiritual knight" with his "conversion" to a new non-doctrinal Christianity that abjured violence and taught that "the kingdom of God is within you." Tolstoy's idea that man could rid the world of evil by reading the secret message on a little green stick represents a perhaps unconscious borrowing from higher order Masonry for which a green stick was the symbol of eternal life. Even his celebrated parody of the externals of Masonic rituals in War and Peace reflects the contempt for mere ritual which was central to Novikov's and Lopukhin's ideal of higher spiritual orders. Tolstoy's first youthful vision of a new fraternity "of all the people of the world under the wide dome of heaven" went by the name of "Ant Brotherhood" {muraveinoe bratstvo), which was apparently a mutation of the idealized Moravian Brotherhood (Moravskoe Bratstvo).114 Tolstoy's tendency to

keep himself surrounded with Bibles or Gospels in all languages116 and his general sympathy for pietistic Protestant teachings was reminiscent of the Bible Society. In his old age he devoted great energy to aiding the original persecuted sect of "spiritual Christians," the Dukhobors.116 Tolstoy opposed De Maistre's ideal of an inquisitorial Church, though Solov'ev implied that he secretly wished to set up one of his own.117 De Maistre's historical scepticism and pessimism also profoundly influenced War and Peace.118

However rich in speculative ideas, the Alexandrian age tended to discredit religion in the eyes of many thinking people. Alexander's personal vacillation encouraged a jockeying for imperial favor among the various religious confessions, which soon degenerated into inter-confessional polemic and intrigue. Terms like "Jesuit" and "Methodist" were used as epithets almost as often as "Jacobin" and "illuminist." Thus, ironically, Alexander's efforts to encourage tolerance only intensified sectarian bitterness.

To compound the irony, Alexander's manifest failure to provide leadership strengthened rather than weakened the adulation that he personally received. All the partisans of reform idealized the tolerant Alexander and cherished the thought that the benign and enigmatic emperor really subscribed to their particular views. Alexander was indeed until his death the one concrete focal point for all the vague hopes of the age. He remained Alexander the Great to a host of would-be Aristotles throughout Europe and a near god to the peasantry, who launched no great insurrection against him. Catholics cherished the thought that Alexander had contemplated conversion at the time of his death; and the popular religious imagination clung to the idea that Alexander was not dead at all but lived on as the wandering holy man, Fedor Kuzmich.119