The Icon and the Axe

The lovers of wisdom circle appears in many ways as a continuation of the last great system of higher order Masonry, that of the lodge Astrea, which defined truth as "that original cause which gives movement to the whole of the universe." Those seeking admission to the lodge were forced to wait in a dark room in the presence of a Bible and a skull, which bore the ominous inscription memento mori: Remember Death.16 The lovers of wisdom also met in secret, with an inscribed skull greeting them at the door. The language was still Latin, but the message was different: "Dare to Know" (Sapere Abide),11 and the book on the table was not the Bible but Schelling's Naturphilosophie. As one of the members explained: "Christian doctrine seemed to us to be good only for the popular masses, but unacceptable for us, lovers of wisdom."18

Schelling's pantheistic teachings about the organic unity of all nature

and the presence therein of a dynamic "world soul" commended itself to the Russian imagination. Characteristically ignoring the complexities of Schelling's later writings and relying partly on vulgarized digests of his ideas,19 Russians were thrilled by the appearance of a doctrine that purported to account for phenomena which they felt had been artificially excluded from the mechanistic world view of the eighteenth century: the beauty and variety of the organic world, telepathy and mesmerism. They also derived some satisfaction from the doubts of scientists themselves in the early nineteenth century that magnetism and electricity had been adequately accounted for by Newtonian mechanics. The long residence in St. Petersburg from 1757 to 1798 of the German authority on magnetism and electricity, Franz Aepinus, stimulated a dilettantish interest in these phenomena (particularly after he rather than D'Alembert became tutor to the future tsar, Paul) without bringing real understanding (outside of the Academy where he worked and Tartu where he retired and died in 1802) of scientific problems and method.

Schelling appears as a kind of absentee grand master of a new higher order. The most popular university lecturer of the period, Professor Pavlov, was master of initiations, greeting students at the door of his lecture hall with his famous question: "You want to know about nature, but what is nature and what is knowledge?"20 The leading speculative philosopher of the age, Ivan Kireevsky, was iconographer and master of ceremonies, bringing back a bust of Schelling to Russia, after hearing him lecture, presiding over discussions of his philosophy, and insisting that the very word "philosophy" has "something magical about it."21 A philosophic popularizer of the time independently described the creation of a Russian philosophy as "the problem of our time," professing to find three ascending levels of meaning within the maxim "Know thyself." The first, or "Delphic," was knowledge of oneself as an individual person; the second, or "Solonic" level was knowledge of self as a "social-national" being; the third and highest-the Socratic level-was knowledge of oneself as a form of divinity.22 Nadezhdin, the Schellingian professor of art and archeology at Moscow during the 1830's, captivated his students by treating artifacts of past civilizations as occult symbols, finding "the secret of the ages in an elegant piece of archeology."23 He was the first Russian to use the term "nihilist"-in describing the materialism which was the opposite of his own idealism.24 Perhaps he acutely sensed that a world view which finds ideal purposes everywhere in general might end up finding them nowhere in particular. Odoevsky attempted to draw up a "Russian system of theosophic physics" designed to study "the inner substance of physical objects as the basis for studying their

external forms."25 Schelling's phflosophy inspired this and other fanciful ideas. As Odoevsky wrote:

You cannot imagine what an impact it produced in its time, what a jolt it gave to people slumbering before the monotonous humming of Locke's rhapsody. … He opened to man an unknown part of the world, about which there had previously existed only legendary tales: his soul. Like Christopher Columbus, he did not find what he sought and raised unfulfilled hopes, but he gave new direction to the activity of man. All threw themselves into this miraculous, luxuriant land.26

In this "miraculous land" ideal ends rather than material causes determined life and history. The universe was a work of art, and man, its supreme creation, was uniquely capable of understanding its hidden harmony and advancing its higher purposes.