Gnostic belief that esoteric inner secrets of the universe could be discovered both within and beyond the traditional source of revelation for older Protestantism: the Holy Bible. Boehme's gnosticism was particularly appealing to those who shared both the religious concerns of the age and the new taste for intellectual speculation freed from traditional authority. There was, after all, no higher goal for the mind to aspire to than 'the wisdom of God'-the literal meaning of the word 'theosophy,' which Boehme used to describe his system of truth.
Boehme's speculations had been used by his followers as the basis for prophetic predictions about the coming of a new order. Just as man was to recapture the lost perfection of Adam before the fall, so was the whole world on the eve of a new millennium, according to many prophetic Protestants in the mid-seventeenth century. Jan Comenius, the brilliant educator and long-suffering leader of Czech Protestantism, had died in Amsterdam in 1671, predicting that the millennium would come in 1672. In his last great work, Lux e Tenebris, Comenius gathered together the writings of a
number of recently martyred East European Protestants and spoke in a Manichean manner of the coming struggle of light and darkness. Kuhlmann was much influenced by this work, which was published and widely discussed in Amsterdam (and perhaps also by Jewish Sabbataianism, which claimed Amsterdam as one of its centers). In his treatise of 1674, Boehme Resurrected, Kuhlmann announces his own expectation that the thousand-year reign of righteousness is about to begin on earth:
Jesus Christ, the King of all Kings and Lord of all Lords is coming with his Lily and Rose to bring back Adam's forgotten life of paradise on Earth.16
Kuhlmann sought to recruit various rulers of Europe as leaders of the righteous remnant, instruments of the New Jerusalem. His preaching took him progressively farther East: to Liibeck and Rostock on the Baltic in the mid- seventies, to Constantinople and the court of the Sultan in the late seventies. By the 1680's he had become a political extremist, urging the rulers of Europe to abdicate from power in preparation for the coming 'Jesuelite' kingdom, implying at times that they should hand over power during the interim to the custody of the inspired prophet himself. Kuhlmann provided his own devotional literature of mystical songs and hymns. In his Kuhlpsalter the word 'triumph' occurs several hundred times. His works circulated together with those of Boehme throughout the Baltic region and became known among German merchants as far afield as Archangel and Moscow. Sympathizers among the foreign colony in Moscow urged Kuhlmann to come to discover for himself the spiritual potential of this new land, and when Kuhlmann arrived in Moscow by way of Riga and Pskov in April, 1689, there was already a nucleus of sympathizers quick to respond to his preachings.
The purpose of Kuhlmann's visit was to prepare Russia for transformation into the apocalyptical fifth monarchy: the place on earth where Christ would come again and launch a thousand-year reign on earth together with his chosen saints. Before leaving England for Moscow, Kuhlmann had set forth such a program in a collection of writings addressed jointly to the young Peter the Great and his ill-fated co-ruler, Ivan V. It was similar to appeals that he had unsuccessfully addressed to the rulers of France, Sweden, and Brandenburg Prussia, and reflected an attempt to carry over to the continent the ideas he had picked up from yet another prophetic group: the rejected 'Fifth Monarchy men' of the English Revolution.
Kuhlmann quickly established a following within the German suburb of Moscow. He appears also to have won supporters at the imperial court and to have written a memorandum for his Russian followers.17 He taught
that the Jesuits had taken over the world and that Lutheranism had betrayed the true Reformation, which was provided by the teaching of Boehme and the witness of the persecuted East European Protestants whom Co- menius had praised. Such views frightened the leading Lutheran pastor of the German community, who pleaded for help from the Tsar in silencing this disruptive prophet. Translators in the Russian foreign office advised that his teachings were, indeed, 'similar to those of the schismatics.'18 Probably fearing that he might gain influence over the impressionable young Tsar Peter, who was an habitue of the German quarter, Sophia designated Kuhlmann and his followers as bearers of 'schism, heresy, and false prophecy.' In October, 1689, just six months after his arrival, Kuhlmann was burned in a specially built thatched hut in Red Square together with his writings and his principal local collaborator. The English mercenary colonel in the Tsar's service, whose family had sponsored Kuhlmann's trip to Moscow, was placed in prison, where he committed suicide. Orders were distributed to provincial voevodas for the suppression of his ideas and destruction of his writings.19
Like the Catholic Krizhanich, this lonely Protestant prophet had little direct impact on the Russian scene. Russia in the late seventeenth century was in the process of rejecting all purely religious answers to its problems.20 The West to which Russia had turned was not moving from one religion to another but from all religions to none at all. This was the time of the 'crisis of the European consciousness,' when faith suddenly became nominal and scepticism fashionable.21 Russia was deeply affected. Grecophiles and Latinizers within the Orthodox Church were rejected as decisively as theocrats and fundamentalists had been earlier; and Russia refused to accept either a purely Catholic or radical Protestant solution to its problems. Thus, from one point of view Krizhanich and Kuhlmann represent two final, foredoomed efforts to provide a religious solution for Russia. From another point of view, however, they represent early examples of an important future phenomenon: the Western prophet who looks to Russia for the realization of ideas not given a proper hearing in the West. Though unre-ceptive to such prophets in the late seventeenth century, the rulers of Russia were to lend increasingly sympathetic ears to prophetic voices from the West: Peter the Great to Leibniz, Catherine the Great to Diderot, Alexander I to De Maistre. But these were a new breed of prophets; and they brought their messages not to the chaotic religiosity of a city on the upper Volga but to the geometric new secular capital on the Baltic. It was not to Moscow but to St. Petersburg that the new Western prophets were to bring their ideas.
The Sectarian Tradition
More than krizhanich-or any other foreign religious voice in seventeenth-century Russia-Kuhlmann was a harbinger of things to come in Russia. For the rejected radical Protestantism of Central Europe was to find roots in eighteenth-century Russia second in importance only to those it found in America.
Kuhlmann was, of course, only one of many prophetic influences that helped launch the vigorous Russian sectarian tradition. There is no firm evidence for the contention that Kuhlmann's teachings provided the original doctrine for either of the two sects that he is sometimes alleged to have founded: the khlysty, or 'flagellants' (the sect that first appeared in the late seventeenth century) or the Dukhobortsy (the 'spirit wrestlers' who date from the eighteenth century). But the teachings of these and other Russian sects bear greater over-all similarities to the teaching of Boehme, Kuhlmann, and other sectarian Protestant extremists than to that of the Russian schismatics with whom they are often loosely identified.22
In practice, of course, sectarians (sektanty) and schismatics {raskoV-niki) were equally persecuted and equally fractious forms of religious dissent. They often merged or interacted with one another (and at times also with Jewish and even Oriental religious traditions). Moreover, Russian sectarians generally shared with schismatics a hatred of bureaucrats and 'Jesuits' as well as a general expectation that providential changes in history were about to take place. Nonetheless, the two traditions are fundamentally different. For the sectarians represent totally new religious confessions rather than attempts to defend an older interpretation of Orthodoxy. This distinction separated the heirs of Kuhlmann from the heirs of Awakum in two important ways. First, the sectarians built their devotional life around an extra-ecclesiastical calisthenic of self-perfection and inner illumination. Russian sectarians disregarded church ritual-old or new-and paid little attention to the celebration of sacraments in any form-or even to the building of churches.
A second difference between schismatics and sectarians lay in the contrasting nature of their historical expectations. Although both traditions were prophetic, the schismatics were basically pessimists, and the
