The Icon and the Axe

Far more important than the Catholic reactionaries in the mobilization of Russia against revolutionary and Enlightenment thought were the religious thinkers that held sway over Alexander in the fateful second half of his reign: the Pietistic prophets of a universal, "inner" church. More amorphous than the Catholic party, the ecumenical party drew its strength from both higher order Masonry and mystical Protestantism. Indeed, this party represents the final forging of an alliance between aristocratic mysticism and popular sectarianism that Catherine had feared. This party left a complicated legacy; its truest spiritual heirs were anti-authoritarian moralists like Leo Tolstoy; but its immediate legacy to Russia lay, ironically, in the intensification and deepening of counter-revolutionary thought in Russia. Vaguely seeking a universal church, the proponents of a new

church helped lay the groundwork for the new restrictiveness and exclusive-ness of Russia under Nicholas I.

The new ingredient in this movement was Protestant Pietism, an ideological force that had been filtering into Russia ever since it began to dominate ecclesiastical life in Germany in the early eighteenth century. Pietism was the main rival to secular rationalism in the Age of the Enlightenment and the spiritual forebear of the romantic counterattack of the early nineteenth century. Like Methodism, its most familiar offshoot, Pietism first received its name as an epithet and was for a time little more than an impulse toward a more emotional, personal religious commitment within the established Church. Pietists generally sought to do away with dogma in favor of what they called "true Christianity," a phrase from the title of a book written at the beginning of the seventeenth century by Johann Arndt. Pietism first acquired identity through the movement to create a new inter-confessional and international brotherhood of Christians largely in response to two writings of the late seventeenth century: Philipp Spener's On True Evangelical Churches and Gottfried Arnold's Non-Party History of Church and Heresy. The Pietists' main base of operations became Halle University, where they set up a special program of devotional instruction and an institute for the study and evangelization of Eastern peoples. They paid special attention to Russia and exerted an ever-increasing influence within Russian theological academies of the early eighteenth century, still the major educational institutions of the time. Particularly in White and Little Russia, where there had been much crossing of confessional lines, Pietism seemed to offer a new approach free of traditional doctrinal bitterness. The most learned Russian Orthodox theologian of the early eighteenth century, Simeon Todorsky, was the Ukrainian son of a converted Jew who was educated by Jesuits but found his spiritual calling among the Pietists, translating Arndt into Russian along with the most complete version of the Bible yet to appear in Russia: the so-called Elizabeth Bible of 1751.30

Pietism was the first international missionary movement of Protestantism to accept the obligation of evangelizing the heathen as a primary duty of the church independent of state support. Even under Peter the Great, the Pietists had found Russia a fruitful field for evangelization. They set up small and short-lived schools in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Narva, Astrakhan, and Tobol'sk-all of them teaching at least one Oriental language for purposes of future evangelization.31

Of more lasting importance for Russia was the colonization that began soon after the founding of a central base for Pietism on the estate of Count Zinzendorf in Saxony in the 1720's. Known as Herrnhut ("Watch of the Lord"), this community attracted survivors of the old Czech Protestant

movement from Moravia, along with Lutherans, Calvinists, and even some Catholics. Zinzendorf s community became the germ of the religious fraternity known as the Moravian Brethren, or more properly, the United Brethren. Almost from the beginning, the Brethren were anxious to transplant to foreign soils not just Pietist ideas but the entire experience of the Herrnhut community. Settling everywhere from colonial Georgia to Greenland and India, they began in the I730's their most natural and extensive colonizing movement: into Eastern Europe. Moving partly through Latvia and Esthonia, partly through Poland and Hungary, they took advantage of Catherine's toleration decrees of 1762 and 1763 to enter Russia in large numbers.