Tolstoy subsequently became an archetype of Lopukhin's "spiritual knight" with his "conversion" to a new non-doctrinal Christianity that abjured violence and taught that "the kingdom of God is within you." Tolstoy's idea that man could rid the world of evil by reading the secret message on a little green stick represents a perhaps unconscious borrowing from higher order Masonry for which a green stick was the symbol of eternal life. Even his celebrated parody of the externals of Masonic rituals in War and Peace reflects the contempt for mere ritual which was central to Novikov's and Lopukhin's ideal of higher spiritual orders. Tolstoy's first youthful vision of a new fraternity "of all the people of the world under the wide dome of heaven" went by the name of "Ant Brotherhood" {muraveinoe bratstvo), which was apparently a mutation of the idealized Moravian Brotherhood (Moravskoe Bratstvo).114 Tolstoy's tendency to
keep himself surrounded with Bibles or Gospels in all languages116 and his general sympathy for pietistic Protestant teachings was reminiscent of the Bible Society. In his old age he devoted great energy to aiding the original persecuted sect of "spiritual Christians," the Dukhobors.116 Tolstoy opposed De Maistre's ideal of an inquisitorial Church, though Solov'ev implied that he secretly wished to set up one of his own.117 De Maistre's historical scepticism and pessimism also profoundly influenced War and Peace.118
However rich in speculative ideas, the Alexandrian age tended to discredit religion in the eyes of many thinking people. Alexander's personal vacillation encouraged a jockeying for imperial favor among the various religious confessions, which soon degenerated into inter-confessional polemic and intrigue. Terms like "Jesuit" and "Methodist" were used as epithets almost as often as "Jacobin" and "illuminist." Thus, ironically, Alexander's efforts to encourage tolerance only intensified sectarian bitterness.
To compound the irony, Alexander's manifest failure to provide leadership strengthened rather than weakened the adulation that he personally received. All the partisans of reform idealized the tolerant Alexander and cherished the thought that the benign and enigmatic emperor really subscribed to their particular views. Alexander was indeed until his death the one concrete focal point for all the vague hopes of the age. He remained Alexander the Great to a host of would-be Aristotles throughout Europe and a near god to the peasantry, who launched no great insurrection against him. Catholics cherished the thought that Alexander had contemplated conversion at the time of his death; and the popular religious imagination clung to the idea that Alexander was not dead at all but lived on as the wandering holy man, Fedor Kuzmich.119
The hopes for a transformation of Russia through Alexander were too vague and romantic, too unchastened by experience in the real world. Yet Alexander-like other well-meaning political leaders who have been looked to as saviors-appears to have become hypnotized by the adulation he received. In his late years he became even more incapable than before of sober statesmanship. "Moving from cult to cult and religion to religion," complained Metternich, "he has upset everything and built nothing."120 He died in a distant Southern retreat from reality, after visiting various churches, mosques, and a synagogue and rejecting medical treatment.121 The champion of tolerance had permitted Russia to become the scene of ideological interrogation, anonymous denunciation, and arbitrary exile. The most beloved tsar in modern Russian history had let Russia drift into policies that were in some respects even more reactionary than those of Paul.
Most of the leading theorists of the age-whether Russians like
Radishchov, Novikov, Karamzin, Speransky, Pestel, Lopukhin, and Magnit-sky, or foreign teachers like Schwarz, De Maistre, Baader, and Fesler- had been active in the Masonic movement. Though Masonry was formally neither a political nor a religious movement, it had profound influence in both of these areas. Higher order Masonry excited Russians to believe that self-perfection was possible and that the new temple of Solomon to be built by "true Masons" was nothing short of the world itself. But there was no way of knowing exactly how or where this rebuilding was to take place. "One can have knowledge about Masonry," one leader was fond of saying, "but Masonry itself is a secret."122
The lodges filled for the culture of aristocratic Russia something of the role that had been played by the monasteries in the culture of Muscovy. They provided islands of spiritual intensity and cultural activity within a still bleak and hostile autocratic environment. Like the monasteries of old, the Masonic lodges represented both a challenge and an opportunity to the ruling authorities. But Catherine and eventually Alexander chose to view Masonry as a challenge, just as Peter had regarded monasticism. If the various protest movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represent a kind of counterattack against the autocratic destruction of the old monastic culture, so the ideological rebellion of the nineteenth-century intellectuals appears in some ways as a form of protest against the autocratic destruction of the new Masonic culture.
The sacred chants of this Masonic culture were the declamatory hymns consecrated to abstract virtues and mythological deities. Initiation into the lodge was a kind of second, adult baptism. Sacred texts were those of Boehme, Saint-Martin, Jung-Stilling, and other mystical thinkers who were regarded as equal to the evangelists and early Church fathers. The Masons, however, sought no salvation in the next world, which was the goal of the monks, but truth in this world: pravda, the "two-sided truth" of wisdom and justice.
The icons of the Masonic culture were statues and busts of great figures of the past. It was only under Catherine that statuary had first assumed importance in Russian art.123 The bronze statue of Peter the Great was her monumental icon to Westernization, her statue of Voltaire her icon for private veneration. Lopukhin had a private garden full of symbolic sculpture and busts of the "spiritual knights" of his "inner church."124 Magnitsky made statuary crucifixes a key part of his decor for the reformed university at Kazan; and Runich kept a private bust of Christ with a crown of thorns.125
The extraordinary attention paid to physical characteristics of the face was partly the new enthusiasm of a people just discovering the naturalistic art that had been present in the West for several centuries but partly also a
new version of the iconographer's old belief that a painting was a means of communing with the saints. The private gallery of busts and paintings in the castle that Rastrelli built for the Stroganovs in St. Petersburg became a kind of hall of icons; and the Decembrist Bestuzhev's painting portraits in exile of all those who had participated in the uprising marked the beginnings of a new martyrological portraiture.126
Herzen, who launched the secular revolutionary tradition in an effort to avenge the fallen Decembrists, was also influenced by the culture of higher order Masonry: in his youthful oath-taking, his early talk of palingenesis ("rebirth");127 in the title of his first journal, Polar Star (which was taken from a Decembrist paper named after a key Masonic lodge and symbol); and in his decision to edit, even amidst the exciting early years of Alexander IPs reign, the works of the original "spiritual knight," Lopukhin. Many symbols of higher order Masonry seem, indeed, strangely applicable to the Russian revolutionary tradition: the basic slogan "Victory or Death"; the supreme symbol of the sword (representing the need to fight for an idea); the lower symbol of the knife (representing the need to punish traitors); the idea of inscribing messages on a cross; and the candles within the temple symbolizing the light of Adam within man and the perfection of the starry firmament which they would soon bring down to earth. In extinguishing these candles, the Romanovs did not succeed in snuffing out the spark that had lit them; and the journal in which Lenin first developed his revolutionary ideas was to bear the name of this key Masonic symbol, The Spark-again through the intermediacy of Decembrist usage.