The Icon and the Axe

To realize its destiny, however, Russia had to rid itself of many of its myths, and of its subservience to the Greeks in theology and the Germans in practical affairs. The idea that Kievan Russia was dependent on Varangian princes for political order was rejected by Krizhanich more than a century before native Russian historians began to question the predominant role of the Normans in early Russian history. Krizhanich also rejected the mythical descent of Russian imperial authority from Prus and the anti-Catholic idea of a Third Rome. Krizhanich's political recommendations were embellished with detailed commentaries on the language, history, economy, and geography of Russia. The cumulative effect of his prolific writings was to suggest that a great destiny lay before the Russian nation. To realize it, however, Russia would have to unify the oppressed Slavs, accept Roman Catholicism, and be the bearer of its mission to heathen lands east and south.

Krizhanich anticipated a number of different movements in modern Russian thought. He was one of the first to appeal on moralistic grounds for enlightened despotism as the best means of civilizing Eastern Europe. Indeed, it is interesting to note that the status and intellectual influence of Catholic priests in Russia was at its highest precisely during those periods when reforming despots were on the throne: Peter I, Catherine II, and Alexander I. Even Krizhanich, despite his exile, was not nearly so badly treated under Alexis as most other religious dissenters. Technically, he was not even under compulsion, having been officially sent on "government business." He was given a pension and freedom to write, and devoted much of his time to tasks that might conceivably have been assigned him by the central government: the gathering of historical and geographic material on Siberia and the refutation of the schismatics.

Krizhanich is most important, however, as the forerunner of two widely contrasting currents of thought that would reappear in nineteenth-century Russia with far greater strength: Catholic proselytism and militant Pan-Slavism. The fate which eventually met Krizhanich after his last sad departure from Russia was one worthy of veneration by either movement -and suitably heroic for the romantic temperament of the nineteenth century. Krizhanich remained in the Slavic East, drifting about Poland, taking monastic vows, and finally dying outside Vienna in 1683 with the army of Jan Sobieski as it turned back the last great Turkish assault on European Christendom.

If the visionaries of the Counter Reformation were to be rejected in

late-seventeenth-century Russia, extreme prophets of the Reformation were to fare no better. Just as Krizhanich sought to have Russia revitalize for Europe the strategic hopes of a revived Catholicism, so Quirinus Kuhlmann sought to realize through "the unknown people of the north" the fading messianic expectations of the radical Reformation.

Kuhlmann was born in Silesia, the heartland of European mysticism which lies along the ill-defined border between the Slavic and German worlds. His mother was Polish, his father German; the city in which he was brought up bears the dual names of Wroclaw and Breslau; and his own strange life was equally divided between East and West.

He was less interested in his formal studies at Breslau and Jena than in a personal quest for religious understanding. He set forth his ideas in mystical poems with that "alchemy of speech" based on hypnotic repetition which was so characteristic of the German baroque. Coming from a part of Europe particularly devastated by the Thirty Years' War, he sought to further a "cooling down" of passions, considering his own name an indication of divine selection for this Verkiihlung. He wrote a "cooling psalter" (Kiihl-psalter) and was briefly associated with a literary-patriotic fraternal order, "The Fruit-bearing Society," in which each member took a new name from the vegetable kingdom and swore to defend the florid peculiarities of German vernacular culture.15

Kuhlmann soon drifted to Amsterdam, where he became fascinated by the theosophical treatises of an earlier Silesian mystic, Jacob Boehme. Standing at the end of the Reformation, Boehme had rehabilitated the ancient Gnostic belief that esoteric inner secrets of the universe could be discovered both within and beyond the traditional source of revelation for older Protestantism: the Holy Bible. Boehme's gnosticism was particularly appealing to those who shared both the religious concerns of the age and the new taste for intellectual speculation freed from traditional authority. There was, after all, no higher goal for the mind to aspire to than "the wisdom of God"-the literal meaning of the word "theosophy," which Boehme used to describe his system of truth.