The Icon and the Axe

The Pietistic reactionaries fell briefly out of favor in the years immediately after the alliance with Napoleon in 1807. Labzin's journal was shut; Lopukhin was forced to leave Moscow for his country estate; and Grabi-anka's "New Jerusalem" sect, which had taken to ecstatic prophecy in the manner of the flagellants, was shut down. But at the same time, the proponents of a counter-revolutionary "inner church" gained a key disciple within the Tsar's immediate entourage. Prince Alexander Golitsyn, a former lover of the Encyclopedists and a descendant of one of the most learned and Francophile of Russian noble families, also underwent a kind of conversion. As Alexander's civilian procurator of the Holy Synod, Golitsyn decided to read (for the first time in his life) the New Testament. He found in Christ's life and teaching a wealth of inspiration that he had never found in Orthodoxy. As he looked about his empire, he began to feel that the Christian sectarians-particularly the Protestant Pietists-were better practitioners of New Testament Christianity than the Orthodox. He had ' particular regard for the Moravian Brethren's community at Sarepta, which he had often visited for mineral baths.45 Accordingly, in 1810, he resigned as procurator of the Synod to become supervisor of foreign confessions in Russia. What was ostensibly a demotion was to this new believer in inter-confessional Christianity a fresh opportunity.

Golitsyn brought Ignatius Fesler, a defrocked Trappist monk who had become an historian of German Masonry and leader of the Berlin "Society of the Friends of Humanity," to St. Petersburg in 1810 to teach philosophy at the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary.46 Nominally a Protestant, this Silesian pamphleteer was mainly interested in promoting a new inter-confessional "Society of Brotherly Love" (Philadelphia). Bitterly attacked by De Maistre, Fesler received full support from Golitsyn, who encouraged

him to pay a long visit to Sarepta and eventually made him superintendent of the special consistory created for the seventy-three evangelical colonies of South Russia.

Most important of all, Golitsyn persuaded the Tsar himself to read the Bible (also for the first time) and make it a kind of manual for the "spiritual mobilization" of Russia to combat Napoleon. Golitsyn lent his own Bible to Alexander, who read it on a voyage through newly conquered Finland in the summer of 1812. Especially moved by the prophetic books of the Old Testament and the Apocalypse in the New, Alexander attended Protestant churches in Finland and confessed that "a new world is opening up before me."47 The impressionable Tsar began to interpret contemporary events in Biblical terms, to attend prayer meetings and Bible readings in Golitsyn's inter-confessional chapel. He adopted as his own the idea of a new inner Christianity, an inter-confessional brotherhood of "Biblical" Christians who would heal the wounds of Christian division and revolutionary strife.

The key organization in this "spiritual mobilization" was the Bible Society, an organization which came to Russia through Protestant Finland from Pietism and its English version, the Methodist Church. It is interesting that this church, which played such an important role in steering English popular enthusiasm away from revolutionary paths,48 should play a similar role in Russia. Alexander delayed his departure from St. Petersburg to Moscow to pursue the retreating Napoleon late in 1812 in order to meet with the English leader of the society, who had just arrived by way of Turku in Finland to help set up a Russian chapter. The Tsar and his two brothers became patrons of the society, and Golitsyn its president.

At the founding meeting of the society in January, 1813, there were representatives of a variety of domestic and foreign Protestant churches, with the Moravians playing the key role. Under Golitsyn's leadership the original plan to print Bibles only in foreign languages was expanded during the next two years to include Russian-language New Testaments and Bibles; its primarily Protestant clerical leadership was expanded to include Orthodox and even Catholic clergy; and chapters spread out all over Russia for dissemination and discussion of Holy Scripture.49

As Alexander moved slowly into Europe behind the advancing Russian army, his movements at times resembled more an inter-confessional religious pilgrimage than a military campaign. He read the Bible daily, interpreting events about him in Biblical terms. As he explained to a Lutheran bishop from Prussia:

The burning of Moscow brought light to my soul, and the judgment of God on the icy fields filled my heart with the warmth of faith which I had not felt till then. I then recognized God as He was described in holy

scripture. I owe my own redemption to [God's] redemption of Europe from destruction.50