'literary correspondent' late in 1817. Baader and the other Bavarian mystics hoped to reunite Christendom with an esoteric neo-Platonic theology that would bypass both 'Protestant rationalism' and 'Roman dictatorship.' Ignatius Lindl, a great preacher and leader of the Bavarian Bible Society, came to Russia in 1819; Johann Gosner came from Bavaria by way of Switzerland and Silesia the following year. They all played a leading role in the effort under Golitsyn to devise a system of instruction in which 'simple unlearned people' could be 'tutored by the Holy Ghost.'68
Spiritual regeneration was to be accomplished not only through the Bible Society and a new system of spiritual instruction but also through such philanthropic societies as the nationwide 'Lovers of Humanity,' which was founded by Alexander for 'the fulfillment of the divine commandments that the Bible Society teaches us.'59 Most important of all was the florid expansion of higher order Masonry, which Alexander encouraged by visiting lodges both in Prussia and in Russia. His birthday became one of the two special holidays of Russian Masonry, and regional lodges began to spring up in the provinces as a counterpart to the regional chapters of the Bible Society and the 'Lovers of Humanity.' In 1815 higher Masonry was subordinated to the Grand Lodge Astrea, named for the Goddess of Justice, who had been the last to leave the earth at the end of the Golden Age. New Masonic hymns, inspired by the Holy Alliance, spoke of restoring the golden age 'when love illuminated all with its beauty and men lived in brotherhood.' Lutheran and Catholic priests joined, and prayers of invocation were addressed to 'God, Odin, Zeus, Jehovah, Thor, and the White God:'60 Pietists were particularly active in the rapidly expanding chain of
provincial lodges, and German became the main language within the lodges.61
Quirinus Kuhlmann was venerated as a prophet of the new religion. Lopukhin included a statue of Kuhlmann in his garden of heroes, a kind of outdoor pantheon of the inner church. Labzin, in his introduction to an edition of The Path to Christ in 1815 by 'our father among the saints, Jacob Boehme,' suggested that Kuhlmann's teachings had been well received by 'some of the boyars closest to the Tsar.'62 Certainly, Labzin's mystical writings gained such favor. He published nine books on Boehme, and in 1816 was decorated by the Tsar and asked to revive his Herald of Zion. He became a kind of coordinator-in-chief for publications of the new supra-confessional church. In addition to the Herald, twenty-four books of a new devotional manual entitled 'The Spiritual Year in the Life of a Christian' appeared in 1816. Other 'spiritual journals,' like Christian Reading and Friend of Youth (to which had been added and of All Ages), flourished as part of a general program to 'bring thinking people back to faith.'63 Previously proscribed prophetic works by Jung-Stilling were published. His famous Homesickness, which was serialized by the Moscow University Press throughout 1817-18, included among its subscribers twenty-four from Irkutsk alone.64 The Herald of Zion had among its sponsoring subscribers the Tsar, the Grand Duke Constantine, and all the theological academies of the empire.
In 1817 the Herald added a special section, The Rainbow, purporting to reveal new symbols and prophecies pertaining to the unification of the churches and of all humanity. Rainbows were a key symbol for higher order Masonry, because they combined sunlight (the light of the past) with rain (the sins of the present) to give men a hint of the future transformation of the world.65 The spectrum of colors in the rainbow was likened to the various churches and nationalities that were all formed from the One True Light.
For the optimistic, romantic imagination,
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity.66
As supervisor of heraldic symbols, Golitsyn sought to invest the official iconography of the state with the portentous symbols of occult Masonry. Classical mythology and esoteric, pseudo-Oriental motifs were incorporated into the coinage, architecture, and embellishments of the period.
The principal coin struck to commemorate the victory over Napoleon
bore the legend 'Not ours, not ours, but thine be the praise, oh Lord.'07 Alexander participated in prayer meetings with Quakers and Methodists; and the Moravians were gaining followers among the Kalmyks to the east and the Latvians to the west. The curator of the university at Tartu was converted, and the Moravians grew from about three thousand to forty thousand in the Baltic provinces under Alexander.68
By the late years of Alexander's reign, the pietistic idea of a universal church and an inner spiritual regeneration seemed to be endangering the stability of the established order. The hierarchy complained that Labzin's Herald of Zion had supplanted the patristic writers in the seminaries, and sectarian preachers the Orthodox clergy. Selivanov, the prophet of the self-castrated sects, was given opulent quarters in St. Petersburg by Golitsyn and continued to proselytize freely until 1820. In that year the ubiquitous Fesler returned from the Protestant consistories that he was supervising in southern Russia to deliver prophetic sermons in St. Michael's Church in Moscow, while Gosner arrived from Bavaria to begin his preaching career in St. Petersburg. Mme Krudener came to St. Petersburg in 1821; but by then, another German noblewoman had eclipsed 'the lady of the Holy Alliance' with an even more exotic form of supra-confessional revivalism. Mme Tatarinova, the German widow of a Russian colonel, was sponsoring devotional meetings which were climaxed by her own inspired prophecies, recited in a semi-trance in the manner of the flagellants. She held frequent meetings with the Tsar and, like the native Russian sectarians, claimed mysterious links with extinguished branches of the royal family.
This wave of emotional Pietism receded in the mid-twenties with the same sudden finality that the Catholic wave had ebbed a decade before. The fall from grace of Golitsyn and the dissipation of the Pietistic euphoria in 1824 followed the realization by the Orthodox clergy that a new syncretic church was in effect becoming the established church of the empire. Baader had spoken in his dispatches to Golitsyn about the 'invisible church' coming into being on Russian soil and was formulating the idea of establishing a new type of Christian academy in St. Petersburg.69 Gosner had lived at Sarepta and published a manual for the new faith in St. Petersburg, The Spirit of the Life and Teaching of Christ. Fesler had published a new liturgy in St. Petersburg, supplementing it with his Christian Sermons of 1822 and his Liturgical Handbook of 1823.™
The campaign to oust the German mystics was fought largely over two other texts that they introduced in the early twenties. One was a government-sponsored translation of Mme Guyon's earlier quietistic tract Call to People on the Following of the Inner Path to Christ, which was denounced
for rendering the Orthodox Church completely irrelevant. Even stronger was the opposition that developed to Gosner's essay on the gospel of St. Matthew. By juxtaposing the spiritual kingdom of Christ with the material kingdom of Herod, Gosner was thought to be attacking tsardom. His talk of a church without a hierarchy was disturbing to fellow Catholic as well as Orthodox priests. His books were confiscated and burned along with Mme Guyon's work. The witch hunt for subversive preachers was under way, and both Golitsyn and the Bible Society were bound to suffer. Fesler became a 'well-known Jesuit-Jacobin,'71 'worse than Pugachev,'72 and all Methodists (the leaders of the Bible Society) 'deceptive intriguers.'73
When Golitsyn tried to bring Franz Baader himself to St. Petersburg, Baader never got beyond Riga and was forced to return to Bavaria late in 1823. He was a victim both of the general campaign against foreign influences and of the fear in official circles that a new religion was coming into being on Russian soil. Baader vainly pleaded directly to the Tsar in December, 1822, protesting that he was not in touch with 'a certain Pietist sect in Russia' and had 'no links of principle with Pietism in general, separatism or raskolnikism.'74 The charge was being made
