The Icon and the Axe

in history."62 Chaadaev was also influenced by Lamennais; and he generally served Russians as a guide in moving from an early infatuation with Catholicism to a later interest in socialism. From a Russian point of view, Catholicism and socialism did not seem as incompatible as they did in the West. Both forces seemed to offer the possibility of introducing social discipline and sense of purpose into a passive and unorganized Russia.

Saint-Simon, whose theory of history eventually became the credo of the young Westernizers, had himself been influenced by De Maistre's deep fear of anarchy and revolution and admired the ordering function which the Catholic Church had fulfilled in medieval society. In his call for a "new Christianity" that was to be purely ethical and a new hierarchy that was to be purely managerial, Saint-Simon and his disciple Auguste Comte were proponents of what has been called "Catholicism without Christianity." Whereas Saint-Simon's theories of industrial organization and class tensions interested his Western followers, it was "the breadth and grandioseness of his historical-philosophical views" which excited the Russians.53

Saint-Simon's first Russian disciple was the Decembrist Lunin, who actively propagated Saint-Simon's ideas from exile after 1825 and was silenced only by imprisonment in 1841. Paralleling his career as a prophet of socialism was a religious life that brought him eventually into the Roman Catholic fold. A romantic student-soldier during the Napoleonic wars, Lunin felt alienated from his native land after becoming acquainted with Paris and Saint-Simon in 1814-16. Like Saint-Simon, Lunin was neither an advocate of revolution nor an admirer of the West as it actually was. "In your superficiality," he told a French friend, "you need only the light and playful. But we, inhabitants of the north, love all that which moves the soul and forces us to plunge into thought."54

Saint-Simon made one of his infrequent visits to a fashionable Parisian soiree expressly for the purpose of bidding Lunin farewell in 1816.

Through you, I would like to establish links with a young people not yet withered up with scepticism. The soil is fertile there for the reception of the new teaching. . . .

Superstition considers that the golden age was some time in the distant past, whereas it is still to come. Then again giants will be born; but they will be great not in body but in spirit. Machines will work then in place of people . . . another Napoleon will stand at the head of an army of workers. . . .

If you forget me, do not at least forget the proverb: "by running for two hares, one catches neither." From the time of Peter the Great you have been ever widening your borders; do not become lost in endless space. Rome was destroyed by its victories; the teaching of Christ entered

into a soil fertilized with blood. War supports slavery; peaceful work prepares the basis for freedom which is the inalienable right of each.55

Saint-Simon did not see his ideas take hold during his lifetime. His pleas to Alexander I for the adoption of his new Christianity by the Holy Alliance were no more heeded than his disciple Comte's later appeal to Nicholas I to adopt his new "system of positive politics."56 But these theologians of progress were perceptive in addressing their grandiose theories to a nation "not yet withered up with scepticism" or (in Comte's words) "retrograde empiricism." Neglected by the tsars, their new theories of history were taken up by the Westernizing aristocracy. "Spiritually we lived in France," explained one of the Westernizers of Nicholas' reign. "We in studying turned to France. Not, of course, to the France of Louis Philippe and Guizot, but to the France of Saint-Simon, Cabet, Fourier, Louis Blanc, and particularly George Sand. From there, came to us a belief in humanity; from there, certainty burst upon us that 'the golden age' lay not behind, but before us."57 Pecherin heard in Saint-Simon "the giant steps of the approaching future."58 Most important of all, the young figure of Alexander Herzen, who had sworn to avenge the Decembrists and continue their Westernizing traditions, carried around Saint-Simon's works "like the Koran." His Moscow circle of the 1830's began to lead the opposition to Schellingian philosophy and the turn to social problems which became characteristic of the new radical Westernizers.