The Icon and the Axe

Herzen, who launched the secular revolutionary tradition in an effort to avenge the fallen Decembrists, was also influenced by the culture of higher order Masonry: in his youthful oath-taking, his early talk of palingenesis ("rebirth");127 in the title of his first journal, Polar Star (which was taken from a Decembrist paper named after a key Masonic lodge and symbol); and in his decision to edit, even amidst the exciting early years of Alexander IPs reign, the works of the original "spiritual knight," Lopukhin. Many symbols of higher order Masonry seem, indeed, strangely applicable to the Russian revolutionary tradition: the basic slogan "Victory or Death"; the supreme symbol of the sword (representing the need to fight for an idea); the lower symbol of the knife (representing the need to punish traitors); the idea of inscribing messages on a cross; and the candles within the temple symbolizing the light of Adam within man and the perfection of the starry firmament which they would soon bring down to earth. In extinguishing these candles, the Romanovs did not succeed in snuffing out the spark that had lit them; and the journal in which Lenin first developed his revolutionary ideas was to bear the name of this key Masonic symbol, The Spark-again through the intermediacy of Decembrist usage.

The Masonic culture of the Alexandrian age was, of course, a far different thing from the revolutionary movements that were to make use of its symbols and techniques. All Masons were pledged to belief in God, but he had many names and faces. One could find him equally well in the world (macrocosm), in oneself (microcosm), or in books of revelation (mesocosm). God's very name had symbolic and allegorical meaning for the Russian occultists. The letters BOG stood for blago ("good"), otets ("father"), and glagol' ("the word"), which were the three essential characteristics of the "God above God" of Russian mysticism. The letter "O" stood in the middle -a self-contained circle of perfection signifying that there was neither beginning nor end to God's fatherhood.128 The birth of Christ was said to have occurred in all three forms: as the moral incarnation of the good and the scientific incarnation of the true word. Thus the "imitation of Christ" meant in higher order Masonry the attainment by man of the "two-sided truth" of knowledge and justice.

But how did such a God relate to Russia? Beneath the anguish and frustrations of the Alexandrian age lies the pathos of intoxicated mystics

trying to apply their insights to the real world, and the deeper drama of an awakening nation in search of a national creed. De Maistre offered Russia the Catechism of the Council of Trent. Pietistic sectarians looked to Lopuk-hin's Moral Catechism of the True Free Mason to lead them away from "dreams born of smoke from the dull light of false wisdom."129 Conservative military leaders looked admiringly to the pietistic and patriotic Short Catechism for German Soldiers written in 1812 by Ernst Arndt for German soldiers fighting Napoleon in Russia.130 Rationalistic sceptics turned to Voltaire's Catechism of an Honest Man.131 Patriotic reformers admired the Russian translation of a Spanish Citizen's Catechism drawn up during the Peninsular War, and tended toward the view set forth in the Catechism of the Decembrist Murav'ev-Apostol that Russians should "rise up all together against tyranny and establish faith and freedom in Russia. Whoever rejects this path will, like the traitor, Judas, be cursed with anathema. Amen."182

The creed which Russia adopted under Nicholas I was far closer to that described by Catherine's courtier, the conservative historian M. Shcher-batov, in his "Utopian" novel of 1783-4, A Voyage to the Land of Ofir, than to anything outlined in Alexander's time. Shcherbatov, for all his erudition and his unexcelled fifteen-thousand-volume library, was deeply suspicious of undisciplined intellectual activity. He proposed an absolute monarchy with a rigid class structure and an educational system that would be totally oriented toward practical problems. Religion was to be completely rational and authoritarian. In place of all other reading matter (even the Bible), the ordinary citizen was-to be given two new catechisms: a moral and legal catechism. Both the priests who taught the former and the police who taught the latter should have as their object the maintenance of order and the inculcation of respect for morality and law.133