The Icon and the Axe

Thus, from the beginning of the Enlightenment, philosophy held for the Russian mind some of the exotic fascination of soaring comets and distant lands. Almost from the first introduction of philosophy into the curriculum of Moscow University, it acquired the subversive reputation of being a rival and potential substitute for revealed religion. Even during the early years of Catherine's reign, a follower of Hume was forced to resign from the university and a dissertation on natural religion publicly burned. With the founding of new universities early in Alexander's reign and the influx of German-trained professors, German philosophic idealism gained such a foothold that Magnitsky could with some justice speak of "substituting Kant for John the Baptist and Schelling for Christ." So heavily censored were lectures on philosophy by the end of Alexander's reign that the most serious discussion of broad philosophic issues often took place in faculties like medicine and jurisprudence. In the wake of the revolution of 1848, Nicholas I abolished philosophy altogether as a legitimate subject of study. This extraordinary ban was lifted in 1863, but other crippling restrictions on academic philosophy remained in effect until 1889.10

The effect of such harassment was not to prevent the study of philosophy but rather to force it out of the classroom into the secret society: away from an atmosphere of critical discipline into one of uncritical enthusiasm. The philosophy that was popularized by Schwarz was similar to that with which the ancient Gnostics had opposed the worldliness of late Hellenistic culture. Schwarz believed in a supra-rational knowledge (gnosis or mudrost', premudrost') which could harmonize reason with revelation. To the clinical study of the natural world, they opposed the mystical "light of Adam," which man could recapture only through inner purification and illumination. The most important single influence on the formation of a Russian philosophical tradition was Jacob Boehme, of whom Schwarz, Saint-Martin, and the other heroes of higher order masonry were little more than popularizes. In Boehme's richly metaphorical writings, all of the universe-even evil-became expressions of the wisdom of God. It was this "wisdom of God" (theosophy) rather than any "love of wisdom" (philosophy) that Boehme held out to his followers as an attainable ideal. Boehme's God was not the finite clockmaker and repairman of the deists, but an infinitely transcendent and, at the same time, omnipresent force. God created the world not out of nothing but out of his own essence. All of man's intellectual pursuits, sexual longings, and social impulses were expressions of what Jung-Stilling called "homesickness" (Heimweh) for the lost unity between

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.