The Icon and the Axe

Catherine viewed all of this with a mixture of disgust and patronizing sympathy. Her attitude toward religion was the typically modern one of toleration-through-indifference. She had been born a Lutheran, educated by Calvinists and Catholics, and welcomed into the Orthodox fold. She was deeply suspicious of Jews and sectarian extremists; but was otherwise ruled by considerations of raison d'etat in matters of religion. She welcomed Jesuits for their intellectual and pedagogic abilities, encouraged the immigration of agriculturally skilled German pietists, and started the "one faith" (edinoverie) movement whereby Old Believers were permitted to rejoin the official Church, preserving most of their old rites so long as they recognized the authority of the established hierarchy.

But she correctly sensed that popular religious sentiment was deeply offended by her rule; and she may have felt that the secret groups meeting under Novikov in Moscow were, or would become, a focal point of opposition. Beginning with her edict of 1785, ordering supervision of the Masonic presses and interrogation of Novikov, she repeatedly expressed the fear that "Martinists" were fostering some concealed schism (raskol) in Russian society. In January, 1786, she referred to the Masons as "that crowd of the notorious new schism" and in a special note to the Metropolitan of Moscow, she suggested that there lay "hidden in their reasonings incompatibilities with the simple and pure rules of faith of our Orthodox

and civil duty."110 Although briefly reassured by the Metropolitan's vote of confidence in Novikov, she must have been disturbed by his statement that he could not pass judgment on Novikov's occult books, because he could not understand them. Her steady war on Masonry continued through both satiric writings and increased administrative pressure, particularly after the appointment of a new chief commandant for Moscow in February, 1790. A measure of her special concern about Novikov is the fact that his arrest in April, 1792, was carefully staged at a time when he was outside of Moscow, and carried out by an entire squadron of hussars. "A poor old man plagued with piles," said Count Razumovsky of Novikov, "was besieged as if he were a city!"111 He was sent under guard to Yaroslavl; and then, apparently realizing that this metropolis on the Volga was a center both of Masonic activity and of sectarian agitation, transferred to a more distant and secluded place of confinement.

The term "Martinist," which Catherine repeatedly used for Novikov's circles, was well chosen, for it highlights the central importance within higher order Masonry of the mystical teachings of Henri de Saint-Martin, the last of the long line of French thinkers to establish an overpowering influence on Russian thought in the eighteenth century. Saint-Martin was the anti-Voltaire of French thought, and his first and greatest work, On Errors and Truth, was a kind of Bible for the mystical counterattack against the French Enlightenment. Published in 1775, it became known almost immediately in Russia and was translated, copied, and widely extracted within higher Masonic circles.

Saint-Martin was in many ways a caricature of the alienated intellectual: a small, sickly bachelor with an oversized head, no real occupation, and few friends. As a wealthy aristocrat he had ample time to read and travel; but he appears to have found a sense of purpose and identity only when he met Martinez de Pasqually, said to be a Portuguese Jew, who introduced him to spiritualism through his own secret order of "elected Cohens (priests)." It was under the spell of this order that he wrote his On Errors, signing it mysteriously "the unknown philosopher."112

The meaning of the book is deliberately obscure, heavily draped with portentous talk of spiritual forces and sweeping attacks on the alleged sensualism and materialism of the age. "I was less the friend of God than the enemy of his enemies, and it was this indignation that impelled me to write my first book."113 The opposite of the animal man is the man of intelligence, whom he later also calls the "man of desire," the "man of spirit." Thus Saint-Martin gives to the term "intelligence" an even broader meaning than Schwarz. Intelligence can alone save the world, for it is impelled by desire and spirit and its object is a return to God. Following the Neo-Platonists,

Saint-Martin insists that all beings are emanations from God. The original perfection of man has been lost only because his spiritual nature has been diluted with matter; but "the reintegration of beings in their primal wholeness"114 is now possible through the use of "intelligence" within the new spiritualist fraternities.