Alexander Golitsyn, later printed as Four Chapters on Russia,2* and participated with Admiral Shishkov and other reactionary leaders in the newly formed patriotic society Lovers of Russian Speech. At the time of Speransky's dismissal in the spring of 1812, De Maistre reached the height of his influence. He held a number of long private conversations with the Tsar and was offered the position of official editor of documents published in the Tsar's name.
Catholicism generally was at a high point of favor. The Jesuit order, which had been permitted to extend its activities to Siberia in 1809 and the Crimea in 1811, changed its collegium at Polotsk into a seminary in 1812 with university status and wide supervisory rights over secondary education in White Russia. In 1813 Alexander even expressed sympathy for the Roman Catholic position on the classical ecclesiastical controversy over the origin of the Holy Spirit. The appointment of Catholic emigres as governors of exposed western provinces, Paulucci in Riga and Richelieu in Odessa, was also a boon to Catholic activity.
However, the levee-en-masse against Napoleon in 1812 raised passions lhat were to sweep both De Maistre and the Jesuits out of Russia within a few years. Increased national pride and anti-foreign feeling made Roman Catholicism a particularly suspect faith; but Russia was in any case suddenly captured by a new religious infatuation that was anathema to De Maistre and Catholicism: ecumenical pietism. This syncretic and emotional offshoot of Protestantism was even more hostile to the secular rationalism of the Enlightenment than the ultramontanism of De Maistre. It was to be far more important in consolidating the anti-Enlightenment in Russia.
De Maistre had seen the new movement coming; and in his critique of (he Pietist-influenced course of study for the new St. Petersburg Theological Academy in 1810, he had tried to counter what he called the 'German sickness' of vagueness with 'the Parisian mercury otherwise known as ridicule.'25 He remained in Russia long enough to voice his objections to the two main by-products of the new pietism: the Russian Bible Society and the Holy Alliance. He objected to the idea of distributing Bibles to the people without any guide for reading and interpretation, and to the subordination of religious activities to a state official. General discussions of scripture and intra-confessional prayer meetings merely 'accommodate human pride by freeing it from all authority.' Like the Bible Society, the Holy Alliance reduced Catholicism to the status of a subordinate cult, represented only by the Catholic Austrian Emperor who was one of its three signers. The Pope refused to sign or approve the text of the Alliance, and De Maistre denounced it as a 'Socinian plot' and 'mask for revolution.'26
Nonetheless, De Maistre felt that the idea of inter-confessional toler-
ance would eventually benefit Catholicism, as the only participant certain to remain intolerant and proselytizing. The vague movements sponsored by Alexander were 'a blind instrument of providence' preparing the world for 'I don't know what kind of great unity' which will 'drive out all doubt from the city of God.'27 Thus, even after Alexander had turned to pietism and expelled the Jesuits from Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1815, De Maistre lingered on in hopes of playing some role in the mysterious march of providence. He wrote a valedictory appeal for tightened censorship and discipline, Five Letters to a Russian Gentleman on the Spanish Inquisition?* He may have been encouraged by a long interview with the Tsar in February, 1816, when Alexander assured him that the Society and the Alliance were but the first stages in the establishment of a universal church. Later in the year Alexander succeeded in enlisting the ranking Catholic prelate in the empire as a member of the Society and the following year sent a Catholic deputy to Rome to discuss a peace of the churches to accompany the peace of the nations. In moments of crisis, even after the departure of De Maistre in May, 1817, and the banishment of the Jesuits from Russia in 1820, Alexander turned periodically to Rome, coordinating his ban on secret societies in Poland in September, 1821, with the concurrent Papal bull, Ecclesia Iesu Christo. In 1825, the last year of his life, Alexander sent an old friend of De Maistre and fellow Catholic from Savoy on a secret mission to Rome apparently to procure a high Church official for instruction in the Catholic faith. Thus he may have been contemplating conversion on the eve of his death.29
Pietists
Far more important than the Catholic reactionaries in the mobilization of Russia against revolutionary and Enlightenment thought were the religious thinkers that held sway over Alexander in the fateful second half of his reign: the Pietistic prophets of a universal, 'inner' church. More amorphous than the Catholic party, the ecumenical party drew its strength from both higher order Masonry and mystical Protestantism. Indeed, this party represents the final forging of an alliance between aristocratic mysticism and popular sectarianism that Catherine had feared. This party left a complicated legacy; its truest spiritual heirs were anti-authoritarian moralists like Leo Tolstoy; but its immediate legacy to Russia lay, ironically, in the intensification and deepening of counter-revolutionary thought in Russia. Vaguely seeking a universal church, the proponents of a new
church helped lay the groundwork for the new restrictiveness and exclusive-ness of Russia under Nicholas I.
The new ingredient in this movement was Protestant Pietism, an ideological force that had been filtering into Russia ever since it began to dominate ecclesiastical life in Germany in the early eighteenth century. Pietism was the main rival to secular rationalism in the Age of the Enlightenment and the spiritual forebear of the romantic counterattack of the early nineteenth century. Like Methodism, its most familiar offshoot, Pietism first received its name as an epithet and was for a time little more than an impulse toward a more emotional, personal religious commitment within the established Church. Pietists generally sought to do away with dogma in favor of what they called 'true Christianity,' a phrase from the title of a book written at the beginning of the seventeenth century by Johann Arndt. Pietism first acquired identity through the movement to create a new inter-confessional and international brotherhood of Christians largely in response to two writings of the late seventeenth century: Philipp Spener's On True Evangelical Churches and Gottfried Arnold's Non-Party History of Church and Heresy. The Pietists' main base of operations became Halle University, where they set up a special program of devotional instruction and an institute for the study and evangelization of Eastern peoples. They paid special attention to Russia and exerted an ever-increasing influence within Russian theological academies of the early eighteenth century, still the major educational institutions of the time. Particularly in White and Little Russia, where there had been much crossing of confessional lines, Pietism seemed to offer a new approach free of traditional doctrinal bitterness. The most learned Russian Orthodox theologian of the early eighteenth century, Simeon Todorsky, was the Ukrainian son of a converted Jew who was educated by Jesuits but found his spiritual calling among the Pietists, translating Arndt into Russian along with the most complete version of the Bible yet to appear in Russia: the so-called Elizabeth Bible of 1751.30
Pietism was the first international missionary movement of Protestantism to accept the obligation of evangelizing the heathen as a primary duty of the church independent of state support. Even under Peter the Great, the Pietists had found Russia a fruitful field for evangelization. They set up small and short-lived schools in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Narva, Astrakhan, and Tobol'sk-all of them teaching at least one Oriental language for purposes of future evangelization.31
Of more lasting importance for Russia was the colonization that began soon after the founding of a central base for Pietism on the estate of Count Zinzendorf in Saxony in the 1720's. Known as Herrnhut ('Watch of the Lord'), this community attracted survivors of the old Czech Protestant
movement from Moravia, along with Lutherans, Calvinists, and even some Catholics. Zinzendorf s community became the germ of the religious fraternity known as the Moravian Brethren, or more properly, the United Brethren. Almost from the beginning, the Brethren were anxious to transplant to foreign soils not just Pietist ideas but the entire experience of the Herrnhut community. Settling everywhere from colonial Georgia to Greenland and India, they began in the I730's their most natural and extensive colonizing movement: into Eastern Europe. Moving partly
