The supreme danger of modern universities was, in Magnitsky's view, their teaching of philosophy, which was bound to raise doubts about repealed religion. He found an invaluable ally in Runich, the first curator of the new university in St. Petersburg, who was called "Magnitsky's echo"
and "a corpse stimulated to life by Magnitsky." A German professor had been dismissed at Kharkov in 1816 for teaching that Napoleon's crimes lay in overthrowing the natural rights of the people rather than the traditional rights of monarchs. In 1820 Runich and Magnitsky broadened the assault with a combined attack on a professor of the Imperial Lyceum at Tsarskoe Selo who had just presented a copy of his book, Natural Law, to the Emperor. In the following year they succeeded in obtaining the dismissal of three key professors from St. Petersburg University.
Early in 1823 Magnitsky launched an expanded campaign against the "Hellish Alliance" which he claimed was now at war with the Holy Alliance. He claimed to find the "doctrines of Marat" in one professor's book and the secret plans of "illuminists" in another. In February he proposed the outlawing of philosophy, warning that "from one line of a professor can come 200,000 bayonets and 1,000 ships of the line."95 In May he denounced the "bloody cap of freedom" which "used to be called only philosophy and literature and is now already called liberalism."™
"Down with altars, down with sovereigns, long live death and hell." They are already howling forth in several countries in Europe. How can one fail to recognize who is speaking? The Prince of Darkness himself is coming visibly closer to us; the veil covering him is becoming more and more transparent and soon, no doubt, will fall altogether. This assault, the last perhaps that he will lead against us, is the most terrible, for it is spiritual. The word is being spread from one end of the world to the other invisibly and rapidly like an electric shock, and suddenly culminates in a shattering of the earth. The human word, that is what transmits this diabolical force; the printing press is its arm. Godless university professors are distilling the atrocious poison of disbelief and of hate towards legiti mate power for our unhappy youth. . . .97
Russia should simply
separate herself from Europe so that not even a rumor about the horrible events taking place there could reach her. The present war of the spirit of evil cannot be arrested by the force of arms, for against a spiritual assault an equally spiritual defense is needed. A clairvoyant censorship united with a system of popular education founded on the unshakable base of faith is the only dike against the flood of disbelief and depravity engulfing Europe.98
There was little support within the ministry of education and spiritual affairs for such an extreme position. One member pointed out that countries like Spain and Portugal in which revolutions had occurred were precisely the ones in which enlightenment was least far advanced;89 another wrote
that a successful state could not function in this manner even "if we could surround our fatherland with a Chinese Wall. . . transplant to Russian soil the Spanish Inquisition . . . and blot out everything that has ever been written about philosophy."100 But Magnitsky found more powerful allies in Archimandrite Photius, a young ascetic influential with the Tsar who had recently turned from long friendship with Golitsyn to violent denunciation of the Bible Society. "It is the cleverness of Hell itself that the ancient faith is being destroyed by pious foreigners," echoed an anonymous informant of Admiral Shishkov.101 Runich wrote that it was essential "to pluck even one quill from the dark wing of the foe of Christ."102
Magnitsky followed the new Metropolitan of St. Petersburg, Seraphim, to the Winter Palace in the spring of 1824, when the latter went to request Golitsyn's dismissal. He waited outside on Admiralty Boulevard in order to tell immediately from the expression on Seraphim's face whether or not the Tsar had acceded to the request. The news was, of course, good for the Orthodox reactionaries: Golitsyn was dismissed from all posts: replaced as head of the Bible Society by Seraphim, as minister of education by Shishkov. "Foreign cults" were placed in a separate category, subordinate at last to the Orthodox Synod and to the Draconian Arakcheev. Thus, Golitsyn's unique concentration of spiritual and pedagogical authority was broken up; and the dream of a new universal church destroyed.
The Orthodoxy which Magnitsky opposed to syncretism made use of the same supra-confessional terminology from higher order Masonry that Lopukhin had used before him. He described life as "passing through the Great Temple … in holy darkness" in order to reach "the all-seeing eye of holiness … the Church of the first centuries."103
Like De Maistre, Magnitsky's main concern was the mobilization of Russia to combat the infection of Russia with the rationalism that had been spawned by the Protestant Reformation in religion and by the French Revolution in politics. But there were critical differences between the absolutist remedies proposed by the two men. Whereas De Maistre had sought the rule of an international church hierarchy subordinate to the pope, Magnitsky looked rather to the Russian tsar as supreme authority and to his civil and ecclesiastical bureaucracy as the "hierarchy." Whereas De Maistre assumed that the new Christian civilization would be suffused with the classical culture of the Latin world, Magnitsky insisted that Russian civilization must deepen its sense of identification with the East.
Magnitsky's fascination with the East was in part a reflection of occult Masonry and the related vision of a new church coming from the East. Masonic temples were always built facing the East, and the term "Orient" was used as a synonym for a city in which Masons were active.104 Pietist
missionaries and the vernacular translators of the Russian Bible Society had spoken excitedly of the rich "harvest" they hoped to reap in the Russian East; and Lopukhin had insisted that Russia's "most sincere collaborators" in combating revolution and secularism were to be found among "Asians [Aziattsy] from Peking to Constantinople."105 Magnitsky criticized Karam-zin for saying that the Mongol period was one of decline for Russia, since the Tatars saved it from Europe and enabled it to preserve the purity of its Christian faith at a time when all others were failing into heresy. Beginning with his proposal of 1819 for evangelizing the Tatars, Magnitsky displayed a romantic fascination with the idea that the cultivation of Eastern links would help qualify Russia for the role of redeeming the fallen West.
Orientalism received a new boost with the establishment of a chair in Arabic at St. Petersburg in the same year; and in 1822 Magnitsky drew up a plan for an "Institute of the East" to be established in Astrakhan to train future Russian civil servants and place them "in touch with the learned circles of India." He cherished the belief that an unspoiled apostolic Church still flourished in India and claimed to see Biblical influences in Hindu sacred writings. The wife of Brahma, Sara-Veda, was thought to be Sarah, the wife of Abraham in the Old Testament. He organized the search for lost treasures in the monasteries of Armenia and sought to sponsor cultural safaris to Siberia and Samarkand.106
The career of Magnitsky illustrates the vulnerability of the Russian body politic to extremist pressures. The very extremity of his denunciations exercised a certain fascination and made some of his victims almost anxious to believe that they were as powerful and purposeful as Magnitsky alleged them to be. In a confused intellectual atmosphere he offered a simple explanation for all difficulties: an enemy to replace Napoleon as a stimulus to national unity. All difficulties came from the "illuminists." Revolutions in Spain, Naples, and Greece were interrelated parts of their eastward-moving plot. Students in Germany had already been infected; but Orthodox Russia, the anchor of the Holy Alliance, was its principal target. In denouncing a Masonic leader in Simbirsk, Magnitsky added the accusation of secret links with the Carbonari; in denouncing Fesler, he hinted at Jewish and Socinian connections.