group of nine members known as the 'Commanders of the Red Cross,' who met Fridays at midnight and conducted special prayers, fasts, and other forms of self-discipline. This idea of a new mystical-military order attracted wide attention in Germany, where the Swedish system became known as the 'strict observance.' Members of these new brotherhoods generally adopted new names as a sign of their inner regeneration and participated in communal efforts to discover through reading and meditation the inner truth and lost unity of the early Christian Church. The theosophic treatises of Jacob Boehme were supplemented in these circles by the works of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who from 1747 to his death in 1772 had written a long series of occult works, such as Secrets of the Universe and The Apocalypse Revealed. By 1770 there were at least twelve major lodges in eastern Germany and the Baltic region; and the next decade was to see a wild proliferation of these higher orders within the two great powers of the region: Prussia and Russia.92 Higher order Masonry appealed to the princes and aristocrats of Eastern Europe as a vehicle for fortifying their realms against the reformist ideas of the French Enlightenment. Two such princes, King Gustav III of Sweden and Crown Prince Frederick William of Prussia, played a major role in bringing the movement into Russia. Gustav gave Swedish Masonry a special stamp of respectability when he flaunted his Masonic ties during his visit to St. Petersburg in 1776 and won over Crown Prince Paul to friendly association if not full membership.93 He entered into negotiations for a royal marriage and sought to link Russian and Swedish Masonry in one system of lodges under the direction of his brother.
Even more important was the influx from Germany, where the idea of higher orders on the Swedish model was enjoying great vogue. In 1776 Prince Gagarin, a close friend of Paul and leader of the main Swedish type of lodge in St. Petersburg, journeyed to Germany to accept the authority of the Berlin lodge Minerva ('of the strict observance') and to bring back with him both an aristocratic German leader for the Russian 'province' and a dynamic young teacher of occult lore, Johann Georg Schwarz.
A twenty-five-year-old, German-educated Transylvanian, Schwarz was given a position at Moscow University and rapidly threw himself into the business of transforming Russian Masonry in collaboration with the two key Russian admirers: Kheraskov and Novikov. Schwarz's lectures at Moscow University on philology, mystical philosophy, and the philosophy of history attracted the attention of a host of admirers, including two prominent visitors of 1780: Joseph II of Austria and Prince Frederick William of Prussia.
In 1781 Schwarz, Novikov, Kheraskov, and others combined to organize 'the gathering of University foster children,' the first secret student society in Russian history. The following year Schwarz was made inspector of a new 'pedagogical seminary' to train teachers for the expected expansion of Russia's educational system and to reorganize the preparatory curriculum for the university. From this position, Schwarz tried in effect to integrate Russian higher education with higher Masonry. With Novikov organizing a supporting program of publication, Schwarz gradually gained the interest of a number of wealthy patrons who joined the two of them in the new 'secret scientific [sientificheskaia] lodge, Harmony,' of 1780.94
Like the tenth order in Swedish Masonry, this secret lodge had nine members and was dedicated to 'returning the society to Christianity.' The pursuit and dissemination of knowledge was to be intensified but placed under Christian auspices, for 'science without Christianity becomes evil and deadly poison.'95 In 1782 the Moscow group formed a 'fraternal learned society' with an affiliated 'translator's seminary' for publishing foreign books and an 'all- supreme philosophic seminary' of thirty-five learned figures, twenty-one of whom had been chosen from the seminaries.
The final form of 'higher order' which the leading Moscow Masons adopted was Prussian Rosicrucianism, into which Schwarz was initiated on a.trip abroad in 1781-2. He had set out as the Russian delegate to the Wilhelmsbad Convention of 1781-2, which had been summoned to try to bring order out of chaos in the higher Masonic orders. Disillusioned with die charlatanism of so much of higher order Masonry, Schwarz fell under the sway of the Prussian Rosicrucian leader, Johann Christoph Wollner, who had also converted Crown Prince Frederick William and was shortly to preside over a purge of rationalistic teachings in the Prussian schools.96 Schwarz was initiated into the Rosicrucian order and empowered to set up his own independent province in Russia, which he called the society of the 'Golden-rosed Cross.' The central conviction of the 'Harmony' group was that science and religion were but two aspects of one truth. As Novikov put it in 1781 in the first issue of his new series of publications for flie university press:
Between faith and reason . . . philosophy and theology there should be no conflict . . . faith does not go against reason . . . does not take from us the savor of life, it demands only the denial of superfluousness.97
For Schwarz's Rosicrucians the world itself was the 'supreme temple' of Masonry and their brotherhood the final 'theoretical level' for which all other grades of Masonry were mere preliminaries. The attainment of this level involved a flight from the rationalism of the Russian Enlightenment as Novikov clearly indicated in the opening number of his new journal, Twilight Glow, in 1782:
comparing our present position with that of our forefather before the fall who glistened in the noon-day light of wisdom, the light of our reason can hardly be compared even to the twilight glow. . . ,98
The 'light of Adam' is, nonetheless, 'still within us, only hidden.'99 The task is to find it through inner purification, and a dedicated study of the 'hieroglyphics' of nature-and of the most ancient history, which still contained some reflections of this lost light. In a series of lectures given in both the university and the lodges, Schwarz sought to provide a guide. Reason, he explained, was only the first and weakest path to the light; feeling (the aesthetic sense of the rose) the second; and revelation (the mystery of the cross) the third. Each led man to the progressively higher stage of knowledge : the curious, the pleasant, and the useful. Following Boehme, Schwarz contended that all of the cosmos was moving in triads toward perfection. Both the triune God (for whom the world was 'created out of his own inner essence,' as an 'endless wish of his unfathomable will') and God's image, man (who also contained a 'trinity' of body, mind, and spirit), were moving toward reunion in the ultimate trinity: 'the good, the true, and the beautiful.'100 In order to help bring 'unripe minds' back from Voltairianism, Schwarz and Novikov published a series of mystical tracts in large editions in the early eighties, ranging from Boehme's Path to Christ and Arndt's On True Christianity to such anonymous compilations as The Errors of Reason and The Secrets of the Cross.
The death of Schwarz early in 1784 was caused largely by an excess of ascetic self-discipline in his quest for inner perfection and knowledge. A large crowd of mourners gathered at his funeral even though it was held in a remote village; and a memorial service was also spontaneously organized by his students in Moscow. He played an important innovating role in the development of Russian thought even though he spent less than five of his thirty- three years in Russia and never formally enjoyed noble status. He was in many ways the father of Russian romanticism, with
his deprecation of natural reason, his belief that art was closer to the inner harmony of nature, and his love of twilight, mystery, and chivalric ideals. At the same time he was the first of a long line of German idealistic philosophers to impart to Russia a thirst for philosophic absolutes, insisting that perfection could be realized through the special knowledge and dedication of a select brotherhood. The Moscow Rosicrucians of the eighties began the tradition of semi-secret philosophic circles which became so important in the intellectual life of Russia. They introduced practices which were to become characteristic in varying forms of such circles: assumed names, bonds of friendship and mutual aid, secret discussion and mutual criticism, and an obligatory system of quarterly confession to the grand master of
the order.
The casual moralism and philanthropy that had dominated early Masonry was, under Schwarz, transformed
