The idea of a new church unifying Christians and Jews was gaining grass roots support in the Orel-Voronezh region with the sudden appearance of the Sabbatarian (subbotniki) sect. They added to the usual rejection of Orthodox forms of worship opposition to the doctrine of the trinity, celebration of Saturday as the sabbath, and the rite of circumcision. The sect made its first appearance in the second half of Alexander's reign. Though the added increase in strength from the Synod's estimate of fifteen hundred in 1819 to the Council of Ministers' estimate of twenty thousand the following year probably reflects less an increase in real strength than a desire of the latter body to undercut Golitsyn, the sect was gaining strength. A new secret census confirmed the importance of the sect, which apparently included Karaite as well as Talmudic Jews. It taught that all men could be rabbis and that the coming Messiah would be an occult philosopher who would unlock the secrets of the universe.80
As it became evident in the last years of Alexander's life that there
would be no universal church on Russian soil, those who continued to believe in it became darkly apocalyptical. In St. Petersburg Levitsky preached the need for repentance in a famous sermon, "The Catastrophic Flood"; Kotel'nikov began to practice daily communion with his followers in imitation of the early apostles and in expectation of the coming end of the world. He addressed two meditations on the apocalypse, The Cruel Sickle, to the Tsar and his wife, likening St. Petersburg to Sodom and beseeching him to join the fellowship of the spirit bearers who alone would be spared in the coming judgment.
By 1824 many of the Tsar's key advisers had concluded that a subversive plot against the established order lay behind all this ferment; and that Jung-Stilling's prophetic writings contained the "hidden plan of revolution."81 Beginning in 1824 Levitsky was incarcerated in a monastery on Lake Ladoga; Kotel'nikov sent first to Schliisselburg prison, then to distant Solovetsk; Gosner and Fesler expelled from the country; Golitsyn relieved of all his positions of ecclesiastical authority; and harsh measures enacted to suppress the Sabbatarians. The Bible Society was weakened and soon shut altogether "in order not to produce schism in the church."82
The idea of a "universal church" as a counter to revolution, rationalism, and all forms of external coercion had been dealt a blow from which it could not recover. Its only point of reference had been the "internal life" of each member, and all its hopes had been focused on "the blessed Alexander" whom all of the "spiritual knights" felt to be their patron if not their messiah.
The main unifying concept among all the heretical prophets of a new universal church was the idea that occult spiritual forces ruled the world. Saint-Martin had led the intellectuals into spiritualism with his last two major works: On the Spirit of Things and The Ministry of the Man-Spirit, the titles of which dramatized his opposition to two works of the Enlightenment: Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws and La Mettrie's The Man-Machine. Following him, Lopukhin had written his books on "spiritual knighthood" and "the inner church of the spirit." These in turn had forged a link with the Russian sectarian and the German pietist traditions, both of which had tended to view the world of spirit as the supreme reality. The spirit bearers, who recognized Lopukhin's works as holy scripture, were the heirs of a sectarian tradition that included spirit wrestlers and "spiritual Christians."
The last years of Alexander's reign saw the degeneracy of this fashionable belief in disembodied spirits. Tatarinova's circle became a center for seances; Labzin's presses turned out vulgarized pocket guides for the understanding of the spirit world. Levitsky began referring to all his
activities as "spiritual deeds"; and great attention was devoted to Jung-Stilling's treatise on the functioning of the spirit world: The Science of Spirits. Matter was seen as an imperfect form of reality in which Christ had only seemed to exist. Christ himself became a disembodied spirit, "the representation of the wisdom of a thinking God."83
If all of this was shocking to rationalistic minds of the Enlightenment, it was equally abhorrent to the Orthodox Church, which saw in all of this romantic occultism the reappearance of the dualistic heresies that had periodically plagued Eastern Christendom. Well might the clergy complain that Golitsyn had substituted belief in spirit (dukh) for belief in the soul (dusha), and that Fesler was in effect "a new Manichean."84 They looked almost imploringly to the government to re-establish Orthodox Christianity in their land. Thus the Orthodox clergy played the last and most decisive role in the "reactionary uprising" against the Enlightenment. Orthodoxy supplanted Pietism; but the flight from rationalism continued just as it had when Pietism supplanted Catholicism at court a decade earlier.
Orthodox
In terms of sheer size and growth, the expansion of the educational system of the Orthodox Church ranks among the most remarkable accomplishments of the late eighteenth century. Whereas there had been but twenty-six "spiritual schools" in 1764, there were 150 by 1808.85 Administered by the state-controlled Synod, these schools imparted the rudiments of a pious and patriotic education to the majority of those civil servants and professional people who made the empire ran. Teachers and alumni provided the grass roots support for the reactionary counterattack against the secularism and rationalism of the more cosmopolitan universities and lyceums, and of the more urbane teachers in the Church, such as Platon Levshin, who markedly improved the quality of the teaching in Church schools during his long tenure as Metropolitan of Moscow from 1775 fo 1812, and fought to retain Latin rather than Russian as the basic language of instruction.
The generation of Orthodox leaders that rose to power after Platon's death resented the prominence of foreigners in the church school system, and shared the nationalistic enthusiasm that swept through Russia during the resistance to Napoleon. They were stung by the searching critique of De Maistre, who characterized the Orthodox Church as "an object of pity" incapable of understanding, let alone defending Christianity.
Take away the Catholicizing and the Protestantizing groups: the illumin-ists who are the raskolniks of the salons and the raskolniks who are the il-Iuminists of the people, what is there left to it?86
There was growing agreement that Orthodox tradition needed more aggressive spokesmen if it was to survive in an age of ideological upheaval and confusion. The first important plan for a distinctively Orthodox battle against impiety, heresy, and revolution was provided by Alexander Sturdza, a gifted Moldavian nobleman who had become fascinated with occult orders when commissioned by the Russian court to write a history of Russian relations with the Maltese order. His Considerations on the Doctrine and Spirit of the Orthodox Church, written in 1816 for the benefit of the Lovers of Humanity Society, proposed in effect that the Orthodox Church be transformed into a kind .of spiritual overseer for the Holy Alliance. Two years later, he wrote his widely discussed Memoir on the Present State of Germany, which dealt mainly with the problem of education.87
In Sturdza's view, Germany's unrest was a direct result of undisciplined student activities. The Western Church had mistakenly granted the universities autonomy from the guiding discipline of the Church. Germany should revoke the medieval liberties of its universities. Orthodox Russia should not permit any such liberties to be granted in its new universities "and should limit the numbers and regulate the curriculum of the German professors who were flooding into Russia's universities and seminaries.