Zion made its first appearance on January 1, 1806. Labzin had been 'converted' to the new mystical Christianity after an initial infatuation with the Encyclopedists, whom he then denounced in a poem, 'The French Shop.'
The Pietistic reactionaries fell briefly out of favor in the years immediately after the alliance with Napoleon in 1807. Labzin's journal was shut; Lopukhin was forced to leave Moscow for his country estate; and Grabi-anka's 'New Jerusalem' sect, which had taken to ecstatic prophecy in the manner of the flagellants, was shut down. But at the same time, the proponents of a counter-revolutionary 'inner church' gained a key disciple within the Tsar's immediate entourage. Prince Alexander Golitsyn, a former lover of the Encyclopedists and a descendant of one of the most learned and Francophile of Russian noble families, also underwent a kind of conversion. As Alexander's civilian procurator of the Holy Synod, Golitsyn decided to read (for the first time in his life) the New Testament. He found in Christ's life and teaching a wealth of inspiration that he had never found in Orthodoxy. As he looked about his empire, he began to feel that the Christian sectarians-particularly the Protestant Pietists-were better practitioners of New Testament Christianity than the Orthodox. He had ' particular regard for the Moravian Brethren's community at Sarepta, which he had often visited for mineral baths.45 Accordingly, in 1810, he resigned as procurator of the Synod to become supervisor of foreign confessions in Russia. What was ostensibly a demotion was to this new believer in inter-confessional Christianity a fresh opportunity.
Golitsyn brought Ignatius Fesler, a defrocked Trappist monk who had become an historian of German Masonry and leader of the Berlin 'Society of the Friends of Humanity,' to St. Petersburg in 1810 to teach philosophy at the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary.46 Nominally a Protestant, this Silesian pamphleteer was mainly interested in promoting a new inter-confessional 'Society of Brotherly Love' (Philadelphia). Bitterly attacked by De Maistre, Fesler received full support from Golitsyn, who encouraged
him to pay a long visit to Sarepta and eventually made him superintendent of the special consistory created for the seventy-three evangelical colonies of South Russia.
Most important of all, Golitsyn persuaded the Tsar himself to read the Bible (also for the first time) and make it a kind of manual for the 'spiritual mobilization' of Russia to combat Napoleon. Golitsyn lent his own Bible to Alexander, who read it on a voyage through newly conquered Finland in the summer of 1812. Especially moved by the prophetic books of the Old Testament and the Apocalypse in the New, Alexander attended Protestant churches in Finland and confessed that 'a new world is opening up before me.'47 The impressionable Tsar began to interpret contemporary events in Biblical terms, to attend prayer meetings and Bible readings in Golitsyn's inter-confessional chapel. He adopted as his own the idea of a new inner Christianity, an inter-confessional brotherhood of 'Biblical' Christians who would heal the wounds of Christian division and revolutionary strife.
The key organization in this 'spiritual mobilization' was the Bible Society, an organization which came to Russia through Protestant Finland from Pietism and its English version, the Methodist Church. It is interesting that this church, which played such an important role in steering English popular enthusiasm away from revolutionary paths,48 should play a similar role in Russia. Alexander delayed his departure from St. Petersburg to Moscow to pursue the retreating Napoleon late in 1812 in order to meet with the English leader of the society, who had just arrived by way of Turku in Finland to help set up a Russian chapter. The Tsar and his two brothers became patrons of the society, and Golitsyn its president.
At the founding meeting of the society in January, 1813, there were representatives of a variety of domestic and foreign Protestant churches, with the Moravians playing the key role. Under Golitsyn's leadership the original plan to print Bibles only in foreign languages was expanded during the next two years to include Russian-language New Testaments and Bibles; its primarily Protestant clerical leadership was expanded to include Orthodox and even Catholic clergy; and chapters spread out all over Russia for dissemination and discussion of Holy Scripture.49
As Alexander moved slowly into Europe behind the advancing Russian army, his movements at times resembled more an inter-confessional religious pilgrimage than a military campaign. He read the Bible daily, interpreting events about him in Biblical terms. As he explained to a Lutheran bishop from Prussia:
The burning of Moscow brought light to my soul, and the judgment of God on the icy fields filled my heart with the warmth of faith which I had not felt till then. I then recognized God as He was described in holy
scripture. I owe my own redemption to [God's] redemption of Europe from destruction.50
En route to the final showdown with Napoleon he stopped off to see the flourishing communities of Moravian Brethren in Livonia and the pilot community of Herrnhut in Saxony, attended Quaker meetings at London, and celebrated an outdoor Easter liturgy with his entire officer corps at the very spot in the Place de la Concorde in Paris where the Catholic King Louis XVI had been beheaded.51
One witness to this scene wrote ecstatically that 'the smoke of incense mounts to the sky in order to reconcile heaven and earth. Religion and liberty have triumphed.'52 Russian officers were encouraged to fraternize with French Masons; European romantics from the libertarian Mme de Stael to the restorationist Chateaubriand hailed the redeeming piety of the Russian monarch; while Lopukhin on his Baltic estate staged a symbolic burial of Napoleon at midnight by the light of five hundred burning crosses.63
Between Alexander's first entrance into Paris in 1814 and the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo the following year, there was a veritable chorus of voices prophesying a great destiny for Alexander. The aged Jung- Stilling professed occult knowledge that the end of the world would occur in 1819 or 1836; the millennium would begin in the East, with Alexander as the elected instrument of God. Alexander visited him and heard him preach in 1814, sent special grants to him thereafter, and remained in close touch until his death in 1817.64 During the same period the Baroness Kriidener, who had close links with Herrnhut and Jung-Stilling, conducted Pietistic devotion services with the Tsar and impressed him with his sense of mission to save Christendom.55 Other important associates of the period were the French mesmerist Nicholas Bergasse and the Bavarian mystic Franz von Baader, who early in 1814 had sent a memorandum to the rulers of Russia, Austria, and Prussia: On the Need Created by the French Revolution for a New and Closer Union of Religion with Politics.56 The following summer he resubmitted it to the Tsar alone, dedicating the memorandum to Golitsyn. All education and political rule must, in Baader's view, be suffused with Christian teachings; and Christianity itself must assimilate vital elements from other religions and mythologies.
Whether Mme Kriidener, Baader, or Alexander was its principal author, the Holy Alliance that was promulgated in September, 1815, and presented to the Russian people on Christmas day was the culmination of the effort to find a 'Christian answer to the French Revolution.' A Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox monarch publicly pledged themselves to base their entire rule 'upon the sublime truths which the holy religion of
our savior teaches.' The name of the alliance was taken from a prophetic passage in the Book of Daniel; the dedication is to 'the Most Holy and Indivisible Trinity'; and the monarchs pledge aid to one another rather in the manner of a higher Masonic order. They speak of themselves as 'three branches of the one family' pledged to aid one another in unfolding 'the treasures of love, science, and infinite wisdom.'37
It was, of course, mainly in Russia that the religious nature of the Alliance was taken seriously. In the first two years of its existence an extraordinary effort was made to transform Russian society in accordance with the spirit of the Alliance. Golitsyn was given a new portfolio without parallel in nineteenth-century Europe: as 'minister of education and spiritual affairs.' He maintained contact with Baader, who recruited for him a number of anti- scholastic and anti-papal Catholic mystics from Bavaria in order 'to provide good priests for all the cults.' Alexander commissioned Baader to write a manual of instruction for the Russian clergy, and Golitsyn enlisted him as his
