The Icon and the Axe

Eckartshausen's writings were probably the most important single vehicle for popularizing the idea of a new counter-revolutionary Christian alliance inside Russia. As a former leader of the government commission

which investigated and uprooted the rationalistic "Illuminists" of Bavaria even before the French Revolution, he was looked to as an experienced and erudite veteran of the counter-revolutionary camp. During the reign of Alexander I almost all of his works were published inside Russia-most of them in several different editions.42 Alexander was reading his Cloud over the Sanctuary while drawing up his draft of the Holy Alliance; and Eckartshausen's fame encouraged Russian authorities to seek out other ecumenically oriented Bavarian mystics during the latter part of Alexander's reign.

The man responsible for popularizing this undistinguished (and elsewhere almost totally unknown) German was the second key figure in the Russian anti-Enlightenment: Ivan Lopukhin. In Lopukhin's career, sectarian Pietism and higher order Masonry were fused and given a clear counterrevolutionary bias.

Lopukhin had been, like De Maistre, an active Mason who slowly turned first against revolution and then against rationalism altogether. The first crisis in his life came in the early eighties when he was asked to translate Holbach's Code of Nature as part of his Masonic duties. When he realized that its materialistic philosophy was alien to Christian teaching, he burned his translation and immersed himself in the occult pursuits of the Rosicrucians. In 1789 he experienced a second crisis. Having just recovered miraculously from a life-long illness and shortly after hearing of the outbreak of revolution in France, he experienced a kind of mystic conversion while walking in the garden of Count Razumovsky. Henceforth he was to be -to cite the title of a tract he wrote in 1791-"A Spiritual Knight, or Searcher for True Wisdom." He resolved to write a great new treatise for the times, which he published after nearly a decade of labor in 1798: Several Characteristics of the Inner Church, or the One Path to Truth and the Different Paths to Error and Damnation.^ The work created an instant sensation in higher Masonic circles-and throughout Europe. In 1799 a French edition was published in Russia; in 1801 there was published another French edition in Paris and a second Russian edition; and, shortly thereafter, two German editions and several other Russian editions. The aged Eckartshausen particularly admired the work, established close relations with Lopukhin, and arranged for the translation into Russian of his own writings and those of other German members of the "inner church."

Meanwhile Lopukhin was sent by the new Tsar Alexander to southern Russia to investigate the growth of sectarian religion in the region. He discovered and lived among the spirit wrestlers, whom he proclaimed to be hidden saints of his new church in his essay "Voice of Sincerity." The foes of his mystical church were the secular learning and self-indulgence which

kept man from following Christ and gaining "true wisdom." In an essay of 1794, "The Baneful Fruits of Idle Dreams, of Equality, and of Tumultuous Freedom," he had seen the acquisitive instincts of the French revolutionaries as the cause of all Europe's ills; and in his church he expressed his ire at the equally materialistic response of the churches. He proposed that the inner church excommunicate beUevers in "the kingdom of property [tsarstvo jobstvennosti], who bear on them the image of Antichrists."44 In 1809 he became the guiding spirit behind the journal Friend of Youth, publishing such anti-rationalistic tracts as "Fruits of the Heart in Love with Truth" and "Paths of the Praying Heart." He was joined by another protege of Schwarz, Labzin, whose mystical journal Herald of Zion made its first appearance on January 1, 1806. Labzin had been "converted" to the new mystical Christianity after an initial infatuation with the Encyclopedists, whom he then denounced in a poem, "The French Shop."