The Icon and the Axe

Catholicism generally was at a high point of favor. The Jesuit order, which had been permitted to extend its activities to Siberia in 1809 and the Crimea in 1811, changed its collegium at Polotsk into a seminary in 1812 with university status and wide supervisory rights over secondary education in White Russia. In 1813 Alexander even expressed sympathy for the Roman Catholic position on the classical ecclesiastical controversy over the origin of the Holy Spirit. The appointment of Catholic emigres as governors of exposed western provinces, Paulucci in Riga and Richelieu in Odessa, was also a boon to Catholic activity.

However, the levee-en-masse against Napoleon in 1812 raised passions lhat were to sweep both De Maistre and the Jesuits out of Russia within a few years. Increased national pride and anti-foreign feeling made Roman Catholicism a particularly suspect faith; but Russia was in any case suddenly captured by a new religious infatuation that was anathema to De Maistre and Catholicism: ecumenical pietism. This syncretic and emotional offshoot of Protestantism was even more hostile to the secular rationalism of the Enlightenment than the ultramontanism of De Maistre. It was to be far more important in consolidating the anti-Enlightenment in Russia.

De Maistre had seen the new movement coming; and in his critique of (he Pietist-influenced course of study for the new St. Petersburg Theological Academy in 1810, he had tried to counter what he called the "German sickness" of vagueness with "the Parisian mercury otherwise known as ridicule."25 He remained in Russia long enough to voice his objections to the two main by-products of the new pietism: the Russian Bible Society and the Holy Alliance. He objected to the idea of distributing Bibles to the people without any guide for reading and interpretation, and to the subordination of religious activities to a state official. General discussions of scripture and intra-confessional prayer meetings merely "accommodate human pride by freeing it from all authority." Like the Bible Society, the Holy Alliance reduced Catholicism to the status of a subordinate cult, represented only by the Catholic Austrian Emperor who was one of its three signers. The Pope refused to sign or approve the text of the Alliance, and De Maistre denounced it as a "Socinian plot" and "mask for revolution."26

Nonetheless, De Maistre felt that the idea of inter-confessional toler-

ance would eventually benefit Catholicism, as the only participant certain to remain intolerant and proselytizing. The vague movements sponsored by Alexander were "a blind instrument of providence" preparing the world for "I don't know what kind of great unity" which will "drive out all doubt from the city of God."27 Thus, even after Alexander had turned to pietism and expelled the Jesuits from Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1815, De Maistre lingered on in hopes of playing some role in the mysterious march of providence. He wrote a valedictory appeal for tightened censorship and discipline, Five Letters to a Russian Gentleman on the Spanish Inquisition?* He may have been encouraged by a long interview with the Tsar in February, 1816, when Alexander assured him that the Society and the Alliance were but the first stages in the establishment of a universal church. Later in the year Alexander succeeded in enlisting the ranking Catholic prelate in the empire as a member of the Society and the following year sent a Catholic deputy to Rome to discuss a peace of the churches to accompany the peace of the nations. In moments of crisis, even after the departure of De Maistre in May, 1817, and the banishment of the Jesuits from Russia in 1820, Alexander turned periodically to Rome, coordinating his ban on secret societies in Poland in September, 1821, with the concurrent Papal bull, Ecclesia Iesu Christo. In 1825, the last year of his life, Alexander sent an old friend of De Maistre and fellow Catholic from Savoy on a secret mission to Rome apparently to procure a high Church official for instruction in the Catholic faith. Thus he may have been contemplating conversion on the eve of his death.29

Pietists