The Icon and the Axe

Boehme's speculations had been used by his followers as the basis for prophetic predictions about the coming of a new order. Just as man was to recapture the lost perfection of Adam before the fall, so was the whole world on the eve of a new millennium, according to many prophetic Protestants in the mid-seventeenth century. Jan Comenius, the brilliant educator and long-suffering leader of Czech Protestantism, had died in Amsterdam in 1671, predicting that the millennium would come in 1672. In his last great work, Lux e Tenebris, Comenius gathered together the writings of a

number of recently martyred East European Protestants and spoke in a Manichean manner of the coming struggle of light and darkness. Kuhlmann was much influenced by this work, which was published and widely discussed in Amsterdam (and perhaps also by Jewish Sabbataianism, which claimed Amsterdam as one of its centers). In his treatise of 1674, Boehme Resurrected, Kuhlmann announces his own expectation that the thousand-year reign of righteousness is about to begin on earth:

Jesus Christ, the King of all Kings and Lord of all Lords is coming with his Lily and Rose to bring back Adam's forgotten life of paradise on Earth.16

Kuhlmann sought to recruit various rulers of Europe as leaders of the righteous remnant, instruments of the New Jerusalem. His preaching took him progressively farther East: to Liibeck and Rostock on the Baltic in the mid-seventies, to Constantinople and the court of the Sultan in the late seventies. By the 1680's he had become a political extremist, urging the rulers of Europe to abdicate from power in preparation for the coming "Jesuelite" kingdom, implying at times that they should hand over power during the interim to the custody of the inspired prophet himself. Kuhlmann provided his own devotional literature of mystical songs and hymns. In his Kuhlpsalter the word "triumph" occurs several hundred times. His works circulated together with those of Boehme throughout the Baltic region and became known among German merchants as far afield as Archangel and Moscow. Sympathizers among the foreign colony in Moscow urged Kuhlmann to come to discover for himself the spiritual potential of this new land, and when Kuhlmann arrived in Moscow by way of Riga and Pskov in April, 1689, there was already a nucleus of sympathizers quick to respond to his preachings.

The purpose of Kuhlmann's visit was to prepare Russia for transformation into the apocalyptical fifth monarchy: the place on earth where Christ would come again and launch a thousand-year reign on earth together with his chosen saints. Before leaving England for Moscow, Kuhlmann had set forth such a program in a collection of writings addressed jointly to the young Peter the Great and his ill-fated co-ruler, Ivan V. It was similar to appeals that he had unsuccessfully addressed to the rulers of France, Sweden, and Brandenburg Prussia, and reflected an attempt to carry over to the continent the ideas he had picked up from yet another prophetic group: the rejected "Fifth Monarchy men" of the English Revolution.

Kuhlmann quickly established a following within the German suburb of Moscow. He appears also to have won supporters at the imperial court and to have written a memorandum for his Russian followers.17 He taught

that the Jesuits had taken over the world and that Lutheranism had betrayed the true Reformation, which was provided by the teaching of Boehme and the witness of the persecuted East European Protestants whom Co-menius had praised. Such views frightened the leading Lutheran pastor of the German community, who pleaded for help from the Tsar in silencing this disruptive prophet. Translators in the Russian foreign office advised that his teachings were, indeed, "similar to those of the schismatics."18 Probably fearing that he might gain influence over the impressionable young Tsar Peter, who was an habitue of the German quarter, Sophia designated Kuhlmann and his followers as bearers of "schism, heresy, and false prophecy." In October, 1689, just six months after his arrival, Kuhlmann was burned in a specially built thatched hut in Red Square together with his writings and his principal local collaborator. The English mercenary colonel in the Tsar's service, whose family had sponsored Kuhlmann's trip to Moscow, was placed in prison, where he committed suicide. Orders were distributed to provincial voevodas for the suppression of his ideas and destruction of his writings.19