The Icon and the Axe

The Slavophile view of history was tinged with the dualism of German romanticism. All of history was a contest between spiritual and carnal forces. The poet Tiutchev saw it as a struggle between cosmos, the organic unity of all nature, and chaos, the basic principle of the material world. Russia was, of course, on the side of cosmos; and in his famous verse he warned that

With the mind alone Russia cannot be understood,

No ordinary yardstick spans her greatness: She stands alone, unique-

In Russia one can only believe.47

Tiutchev's fellow poet and Schellingian, Alexis Khomiakov, set forth an even more ingenious dualism in his ambitious but never-finished Sketches of Universal History.4S The opposing forces throughout all history became for Khomiakov the spirit of Kush and of Iran. The former comes from the oppressive Ethiopians in the Old Testament who believed in material force and worshipped either stone (physical construction) or the serpent (sensual desire). The Iranian spirit was one of belief in God, inner freedom, and love of music and speech. The victory of the Roman legions over Greek philosophy had been a triumph of Kush, as was the more recent imposition of Byzantine formalism on happy Slavic spontaneity. The Jews had been the original bearers of the Iranian spirit, which had now passed on to the unspoiled Slavs. The spirit of Iran had penetrated particularly deeply into the life and art of the Russian people, whose strong family sense, communal institutions, and oral folklore had kept alive the principle of harmony and unity. Khomiakov assumes that the Iranian spirit will triumph, thus assuring a glorious future to Russia once it throws off the Kushite shackles of Byzantine formalism and Prussian militarism.

Khomiakov is best understood as a perpetuator of the pietistic ideal of a universal, inner church. He was widely traveled in the West and viewed his Lutheran, Anglican, and Bavarian Catholic friends as allies in the

"Iranian" camp. His two contending principles are reminiscent of Schlegel's "spirit of Seth" and "spirit of Cain."49 But Khomiakov is less romantic in his attitude toward the East than Schlegel and many other Western romantics. He decisively rejects the glorification of Asian ways which Magnitsky had made fashionable. The major Kushite worshippers of "the stone" were those who built pyramids in Egypt and temples in Asia; the worst followers of "the serpent" are the Indian disciples of Shiva.

Khomiakov illustrates his theory in two plays of the 1830's, Dmitry the Self-Proclaimed and Ermak. The first play pictures the False Dmitry being first welcomed by the Russian people, then rejected when he is converted to the Latin ideal of earthly power. The later work shows the Cossack conqueror of Siberia struggling with the power-worshiping philosophies of his pagan domain. Ermak refuses to accept the Kushite beliefs of the Siberians and, indeed, renounces power altogether to seek forgiveness for earlier misdeeds from his father and his original home community.50

Quite different from the Slavophile view, with its pietistic glorification of inner regeneration, family harmony, and a new universal church, was the view of the radical Westernizers. They looked to French more than German thought, Catholic more than Protestant sources for ideas.

De Maistre was generally the starting point for Russians who took a more jaded view of the Russian past and Russian institutions. But he was soon supplanted by Lamennais, the real point of transition in French thought between Catholicism and socialism. Beginning as a standard counter-revolutionary Catholic with his famous call for a revival of faith in his Essay on Indifference in 1817, Lamennais had dreamt of a new "congregation of St. Peter" to replace the Jesuit Order and lead Europe into a glorious new era. Shortly after founding a journal, The Future, in 1830, Lamennais despaired of the Catholic Church and turned to Christian socialism and a passionate belief in the spirituality of the downtrodden masses. His writings, like those of De Maistre, were permeated with a kind of prophetic pessimism. As he wrote to the Savoyard:

. . . Everything in the world is being readied for the great and final catastrophe … all now is extreme, there is no longer any middle position.51

Russian converts to Catholicism during the Nicholaevan era were generally converted a la Lamennais, to a life of mendicant communion with the suffering masses. Pecherin, who served as Catholic chaplain in a Dublin hospital, saw in Lamennais "the new faith" for our times and felt convinced that the oppressed outer regions of Europe were the only hope for the decaying center. "Russia together with the United States is beginning a new cycle