The Icon and the Axe

The Moravian Brethren soon became the dominant force within a steadily expanding community of non-conformist German Protestants (Mennonites, Hutterites, and so on) in the rapidly opening regions of the Russian south and east.32 Seeking at first the remnants of the original Moravian Church which they believed had settled in the Caucasus, they soon settled down in the desolate region of Sarepta, on the lower Volga, rapidly transforming it into a model agricultural community.

By the 1790's German Pietists were immensely popular with the Russian aristocracy. The Free Economic Society studied their efficient agricultural methods with interest; aristocrats flocked to Sarepta to patronize its fashionable mineral baths;33 and after the beginning of the French Revolution, Russians began to see in these pious and industrious people a kind of antidote to the abstract rationalism of the French Enlightenment. Zhukov-sky, who turned Russian poetry from classical to romantic patterns, was (like the great German romantic poet Novalis) largely educated by German Pietists. Tikhon Zadonsky, who founded his own "true Christian" community along the Don, emphasized the Pietistic idea that God's truth was to be found in reading the Bible and in acts of devotion and charity.34

The tolerance, industry, and devotional intensity of the Herrnhut communities made a profound impact on the budding romantic imagination of Europe. Novalis' education with the brethren probably influenced his only superficially Catholic vision of a reunited Christendom in Europe or Christianity. Mme de Stael devoted the fourth part of her On Germany to praise of the Moravian Brethren; and the Slavophile Kireevsky later called the movement the true germ of Christian unity.35

Pietism encouraged education and had been seen as an ally of enlightenment in Eastern Europe; but after the French Revolution it became increasingly mystical and traditionalist. Pietists found themselves increasingly close in spirit to the mystics within the higher Masonic orders, who had long spoken of a Europe-wide conservative alliance of "true Christians."

Both groups tended to speak of the Revolution in apocalyptical terms, blaming it on the rationalism of the Enlightenment. There was a tendency in Central and Eastern Europe to blame everything on "the plot against altars and thrones" of a small group of rationalistic Masons: the "ffluminists of Bavaria."36 Lavater, who was equally influential in Masonic and Pietist circles, felt that the only answer to universal revolution was a universal, inner church teaching "universal speech, universal monarchy, universal religion, universal medicine."37 Lavater almost certainly had a decisive influence on the turn to conservatism of Karamzin, who called him a "true Christ" and visited him in Zurich in 1789.38 Lavater and Saint-Martin both implored their followers beyond the Rhine to produce a new Christianity that would vanquish the apocalyptical beast of the Revolution. The response was extraordinary: the German "society of Christ" called for a universal biblical Christianity free of dogma; others advocated a link between higher Masonry and all Christian confessions; an influential Rosicrucian introduced a program of attending Catholic mass in the morning, Lutheran services in the afternoon, and "visiting in the evening either the community of the Moravian Brethren, the lodge, or the synagogue."39

The most widely read prophets of a mystical, counter-revolutionary union were Jung-Stilling and Karl Eckartshausen. In his widely read Victorious History of the Christian Religion of 1799, Jung said that humanity must either continue in endless revolution or subordinate itself to a higher form of Christianity. Jung's work helped influence De Maistre's concept of counter-revolutionary Catholicism;40 but Jung wrote that the new church would come from the East. The Moravian Brethren, among whom Jung had lived for many years, are to be its nucleus, and it will have new quasi-Oriental initiation rites in the manner of a Masonic temple. Jung took a new name in the manner of the higher orders, choosing one to dramatize his belief in the Pietist ideal of inner peace (StiUe).

The prolific Eckartshausen was even more influential in propagating the idea of a new mystical church in his writings of the eighties and nineties: A History of Knighthood, God Is True Love, Religious Writings on Light and Darkness, and The Key to Occult Science and the Mystical Night. In his last and most influential book, The Cloud over the Sanctuary of 1802, he took pains to point out that the new church would be above all presently existing ones. It was to be the primal religion (Urreligion) that lay behind all other religions: a "new world" known "to the hidden saints of all religions" in which "Christian, Jew, and barbarian go hand in hand."41