The Icon and the Axe

By the late years of Alexander's reign, the pietistic idea of a universal church and an inner spiritual regeneration seemed to be endangering the stability of the established order. The hierarchy complained that Labzin's Herald of Zion had supplanted the patristic writers in the seminaries, and sectarian preachers the Orthodox clergy. Selivanov, the prophet of the self-castrated sects, was given opulent quarters in St. Petersburg by Golitsyn and continued to proselytize freely until 1820. In that year the ubiquitous Fesler returned from the Protestant consistories that he was supervising in southern Russia to deliver prophetic sermons in St. Michael's Church in Moscow, while Gosner arrived from Bavaria to begin his preaching career in St. Petersburg. Mme Krudener came to St. Petersburg in 1821; but by then, another German noblewoman had eclipsed "the lady of the Holy Alliance" with an even more exotic form of supra-confessional revivalism. Mme Tatarinova, the German widow of a Russian colonel, was sponsoring devotional meetings which were climaxed by her own inspired prophecies, recited in a semi-trance in the manner of the flagellants. She held frequent meetings with the Tsar and, like the native Russian sectarians, claimed mysterious links with extinguished branches of the royal family.

This wave of emotional Pietism receded in the mid-twenties with the same sudden finality that the Catholic wave had ebbed a decade before. The fall from grace of Golitsyn and the dissipation of the Pietistic euphoria in 1824 followed the realization by the Orthodox clergy that a new syncretic church was in effect becoming the established church of the empire. Baader had spoken in his dispatches to Golitsyn about the "invisible church" coming into being on Russian soil and was formulating the idea of establishing a new type of Christian academy in St. Petersburg.69 Gosner had lived at Sarepta and published a manual for the new faith in St. Petersburg, The Spirit of the Life and Teaching of Christ. Fesler had published a new liturgy in St. Petersburg, supplementing it with his Christian Sermons of 1822 and his Liturgical Handbook of 1823.™

The campaign to oust the German mystics was fought largely over two other texts that they introduced in the early twenties. One was a government-sponsored translation of Mme Guyon's earlier quietistic tract Call to People on the Following of the Inner Path to Christ, which was denounced

for rendering the Orthodox Church completely irrelevant. Even stronger was the opposition that developed to Gosner's essay on the gospel of St. Matthew. By juxtaposing the spiritual kingdom of Christ with the material kingdom of Herod, Gosner was thought to be attacking tsardom. His talk of a church without a hierarchy was disturbing to fellow Catholic as well as Orthodox priests. His books were confiscated and burned along with Mme Guyon's work. The witch hunt for subversive preachers was under way, and both Golitsyn and the Bible Society were bound to suffer. Fesler became a "well-known Jesuit-Jacobin,"71 "worse than Pugachev,"72 and all Methodists (the leaders of the Bible Society) "deceptive intriguers."73

When Golitsyn tried to bring Franz Baader himself to St. Petersburg, Baader never got beyond Riga and was forced to return to Bavaria late in 1823. He was a victim both of the general campaign against foreign influences and of the fear in official circles that a new religion was coming into being on Russian soil. Baader vainly pleaded directly to the Tsar in December, 1822, protesting that he was not in touch with "a certain Pietist sect in Russia" and had "no links of principle with Pietism in general, separatism or raskolnikism."74 The charge was being made with increasing frequency against Golitsyn and his associates. The military governor of Riga was faced with a particularly acute increase in the strength of the Moravian Brethren within his province. As an emigre friend of De Maistre, he must have been glad to block Baader's efforts to proceed beyond Latvia. De Maistre was, in effect, wreaking a kind of belated revenge on the Pietists who had supplanted him at the Imperial Court. The Russian court seemed to be accepting at last his judgment that

in truth Martinism and Pietism penetrate one another such that it would be very difficult to find a sectarian of one of these systems who did not adhere to the other.76