through Latvia and Esthonia, partly through Poland and Hungary, they took advantage of Catherine's toleration decrees of 1762 and 1763 to enter Russia in large numbers.
The Moravian Brethren soon became the dominant force within a steadily expanding community of non- conformist German Protestants (Mennonites, Hutterites, and so on) in the rapidly opening regions of the Russian south and east.32 Seeking at first the remnants of the original Moravian Church which they believed had settled in the Caucasus, they soon settled down in the desolate region of Sarepta, on the lower Volga, rapidly transforming it into a model agricultural community.
By the 1790's German Pietists were immensely popular with the Russian aristocracy. The Free Economic Society studied their efficient agricultural methods with interest; aristocrats flocked to Sarepta to patronize its fashionable mineral baths;33 and after the beginning of the French Revolution, Russians began to see in these pious and industrious people a kind of antidote to the abstract rationalism of the French Enlightenment. Zhukov-sky, who turned Russian poetry from classical to romantic patterns, was (like the great German romantic poet Novalis) largely educated by German Pietists. Tikhon Zadonsky, who founded his own 'true Christian' community along the Don, emphasized the Pietistic idea that God's truth was to be found in reading the Bible and in acts of devotion and charity.34
The tolerance, industry, and devotional intensity of the Herrnhut communities made a profound impact on the budding romantic imagination of Europe. Novalis' education with the brethren probably influenced his only superficially Catholic vision of a reunited Christendom in Europe or Christianity. Mme de Stael devoted the fourth part of her On Germany to praise of the Moravian Brethren; and the Slavophile Kireevsky later called the movement the true germ of Christian unity.35
Pietism encouraged education and had been seen as an ally of enlightenment in Eastern Europe; but after the French Revolution it became increasingly mystical and traditionalist. Pietists found themselves increasingly close in spirit to the mystics within the higher Masonic orders, who had long spoken of a Europe-wide conservative alliance of 'true Christians.'
Both groups tended to speak of the Revolution in apocalyptical terms, blaming it on the rationalism of the Enlightenment. There was a tendency in Central and Eastern Europe to blame everything on 'the plot against altars and thrones' of a small group of rationalistic Masons: the 'ffluminists of Bavaria.'36 Lavater, who was equally influential in Masonic and Pietist circles, felt that the only answer to universal revolution was a universal, inner church teaching 'universal speech, universal monarchy, universal religion, universal medicine.'37 Lavater almost certainly had a decisive influence on the turn to conservatism of Karamzin, who called him a 'true Christ' and visited him in Zurich in 1789.38 Lavater and Saint-Martin both implored their followers beyond the Rhine to produce a new Christianity that would vanquish the apocalyptical beast of the Revolution. The response was extraordinary: the German 'society of Christ' called for a universal biblical Christianity free of dogma; others advocated a link between higher Masonry and all Christian confessions; an influential Rosicrucian introduced a program of attending Catholic mass in the morning, Lutheran services in the afternoon, and 'visiting in the evening either the community of the Moravian Brethren, the lodge, or the synagogue.'39
The most widely read prophets of a mystical, counter-revolutionary union were Jung-Stilling and Karl Eckartshausen. In his widely read Victorious History of the Christian Religion of 1799, Jung said that humanity must either continue in endless revolution or subordinate itself to a higher form of Christianity. Jung's work helped influence De Maistre's concept of counter-revolutionary Catholicism;40 but Jung wrote that the new church would come from the East. The Moravian Brethren, among whom Jung had lived for many years, are to be its nucleus, and it will have new quasi-Oriental initiation rites in the manner of a Masonic temple. Jung took a new name in the manner of the higher orders, choosing one to dramatize his belief in the Pietist ideal of inner peace (StiUe).
The prolific Eckartshausen was even more influential in propagating the idea of a new mystical church in his writings of the eighties and nineties: A History of Knighthood, God Is True Love, Religious Writings on Light and Darkness, and The Key to Occult Science and the Mystical Night. In his last and most influential book, The Cloud over the Sanctuary of 1802, he took pains to point out that the new church would be above all presently existing ones. It was to be the primal religion (Urreligion) that lay behind all other religions: a 'new world' known 'to the hidden saints of all religions' in which 'Christian, Jew, and barbarian go hand in hand.'41
Eckartshausen's writings were probably the most important single vehicle for popularizing the idea of a new counter-revolutionary Christian alliance inside Russia. As a former leader of the government commission
which investigated and uprooted the rationalistic 'Illuminists' of Bavaria even before the French Revolution, he was looked to as an experienced and erudite veteran of the counter-revolutionary camp. During the reign of Alexander I almost all of his works were published inside Russia-most of them in several different editions.42 Alexander was reading his Cloud over the Sanctuary while drawing up his draft of the Holy Alliance; and Eckartshausen's fame encouraged Russian authorities to seek out other ecumenically oriented Bavarian mystics during the latter part of Alexander's reign.
The man responsible for popularizing this undistinguished (and elsewhere almost totally unknown) German was the second key figure in the Russian anti-Enlightenment: Ivan Lopukhin. In Lopukhin's career, sectarian Pietism and higher order Masonry were fused and given a clear counterrevolutionary bias.
Lopukhin had been, like De Maistre, an active Mason who slowly turned first against revolution and then against rationalism altogether. The first crisis in his life came in the early eighties when he was asked to translate Holbach's Code of Nature as part of his Masonic duties. When he realized that its materialistic philosophy was alien to Christian teaching, he burned his translation and immersed himself in the occult pursuits of the Rosicrucians. In 1789 he experienced a second crisis. Having just recovered miraculously from a life-long illness and shortly after hearing of the outbreak of revolution in France, he experienced a kind of mystic conversion while walking in the garden of Count Razumovsky. Henceforth he was to be -to cite the title of a tract he wrote in 1791-'A Spiritual Knight, or Searcher for True Wisdom.' He resolved to write a great new treatise for the times, which he published after nearly a decade of labor in 1798: Several Characteristics of the Inner Church, or the One Path to Truth and the Different Paths to Error and Damnation.^ The work created an instant sensation in higher Masonic circles-and throughout Europe. In 1799 a French edition was published in Russia; in 1801 there was published another French edition in Paris and a second Russian edition; and, shortly thereafter, two German editions and several other Russian editions. The aged Eckartshausen particularly admired the work, established close relations with Lopukhin, and arranged for the translation into Russian of his own writings and those of other German members of the 'inner church.'
Meanwhile Lopukhin was sent by the new Tsar Alexander to southern Russia to investigate the growth of sectarian religion in the region. He discovered and lived among the spirit wrestlers, whom he proclaimed to be hidden saints of his new church in his essay 'Voice of Sincerity.' The foes of his mystical church were the secular learning and self-indulgence which
kept man from following Christ and gaining 'true wisdom.' In an essay of 1794, 'The Baneful Fruits of Idle Dreams, of Equality, and of Tumultuous Freedom,' he had seen the acquisitive instincts of the French revolutionaries as the cause of all Europe's ills; and in his church he expressed his ire at the equally materialistic response of the churches. He proposed that the inner church excommunicate beUevers in 'the kingdom of property [tsarstvo jobstvennosti], who bear on them the image of Antichrists.'44 In 1809 he became the guiding spirit behind the journal Friend of Youth, publishing such anti-rationalistic tracts as 'Fruits of the Heart in Love with Truth' and 'Paths of the Praying Heart.' He was joined by another protege of Schwarz, Labzin, whose mystical journal Herald of
