The Icon and the Axe

"I had no basis on which to work, no cornerstone on which to build spiritual tranquility, and therefore I unexpectedly fell into the society."60 His philosophic journal of the late seventies, Morning Light, was explicitly designed to "struggle with that sect which prides itself on the title 'philosophical' "91 by publishing the great classical and medieval philosophers. The turn to occult, "higher order" Masonry in Eastern Europe was part of the general reaction against French rationalism and secularism that was gathering momentum in the fifteen years prior to the French Revolution. The model was the so-called Swedish system, which had nine grades and a tenth secret group of nine members known as the "Commanders of the Red Cross," who met Fridays at midnight and conducted special prayers, fasts, and other forms of self-discipline. This idea of a new mystical-military order attracted wide attention in Germany, where the Swedish system became known as the "strict observance." Members of these new brotherhoods generally adopted new names as a sign of their inner regeneration and participated in communal efforts to discover through reading and meditation the inner truth and lost unity of the early Christian Church. The theosophic treatises of Jacob Boehme were supplemented in these circles by the works of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who from 1747 to his death in 1772 had written a long series of occult works, such as Secrets of the Universe and The Apocalypse Revealed. By 1770 there were at least twelve major lodges in eastern Germany and the Baltic region; and the next decade was to see a wild proliferation of these higher orders within the two great powers of the region: Prussia and Russia.92 Higher order Masonry appealed to the princes and aristocrats of Eastern Europe as a vehicle for fortifying their realms against the reformist ideas of the French Enlightenment. Two such princes, King Gustav III of Sweden and Crown Prince Frederick William of Prussia, played a major role in bringing the movement into Russia. Gustav gave Swedish Masonry a special stamp of respectability when he flaunted his Masonic ties during his visit to St. Petersburg in 1776 and won over Crown Prince Paul to friendly association if not full membership.93 He entered into negotiations for a royal marriage and sought to link Russian and Swedish Masonry in one system of lodges under the direction of his brother.

Even more important was the influx from Germany, where the idea of higher orders on the Swedish model was enjoying great vogue. In 1776 Prince Gagarin, a close friend of Paul and leader of the main Swedish type of lodge in St. Petersburg, journeyed to Germany to accept the authority of the Berlin lodge Minerva ("of the strict observance") and to bring back with him both an aristocratic German leader for the Russian "province" and a dynamic young teacher of occult lore, Johann Georg Schwarz.

A twenty-five-year-old, German-educated Transylvanian, Schwarz was given a position at Moscow University and rapidly threw himself into the business of transforming Russian Masonry in collaboration with the two key Russian admirers: Kheraskov and Novikov. Schwarz's lectures at Moscow University on philology, mystical philosophy, and the philosophy of history attracted the attention of a host of admirers, including two prominent visitors of 1780: Joseph II of Austria and Prince Frederick William of Prussia.

In 1781 Schwarz, Novikov, Kheraskov, and others combined to organize "the gathering of University foster children," the first secret student society in Russian history. The following year Schwarz was made inspector of a new "pedagogical seminary" to train teachers for the expected expansion of Russia's educational system and to reorganize the preparatory curriculum for the university. From this position, Schwarz tried in effect to integrate Russian higher education with higher Masonry. With Novikov organizing a supporting program of publication, Schwarz gradually gained the interest of a number of wealthy patrons who joined the two of them in the new "secret scientific [sientificheskaia] lodge, Harmony," of 1780.94

Like the tenth order in Swedish Masonry, this secret lodge had nine members and was dedicated to "returning the society to Christianity." The pursuit and dissemination of knowledge was to be intensified but placed under Christian auspices, for "science without Christianity becomes evil and deadly poison."95 In 1782 the Moscow group formed a "fraternal learned society" with an affiliated "translator's seminary" for publishing foreign books and an "all-supreme philosophic seminary" of thirty-five learned figures, twenty-one of whom had been chosen from the seminaries.