Like the tenth order in Swedish Masonry, this secret lodge had nine members and was dedicated to "returning the society to Christianity." The pursuit and dissemination of knowledge was to be intensified but placed under Christian auspices, for "science without Christianity becomes evil and deadly poison."95 In 1782 the Moscow group formed a "fraternal learned society" with an affiliated "translator's seminary" for publishing foreign books and an "all-supreme philosophic seminary" of thirty-five learned figures, twenty-one of whom had been chosen from the seminaries.
The final form of "higher order" which the leading Moscow Masons adopted was Prussian Rosicrucianism, into which Schwarz was initiated on a.trip abroad in 1781-2. He had set out as the Russian delegate to the Wilhelmsbad Convention of 1781-2, which had been summoned to try to bring order out of chaos in the higher Masonic orders. Disillusioned with die charlatanism of so much of higher order Masonry, Schwarz fell under the sway of the Prussian Rosicrucian leader, Johann Christoph Wollner, who had also converted Crown Prince Frederick William and was shortly to preside over a purge of rationalistic teachings in the Prussian schools.96 Schwarz was initiated into the Rosicrucian order and empowered to set up his own independent province in Russia, which he called the society of the "Golden-rosed Cross." The central conviction of the "Harmony" group was that science and religion were but two aspects of one truth. As Novikov put it in 1781 in the first issue of his new series of publications for flie university press:
Between faith and reason . . . philosophy and theology there should be no conflict . . . faith does not go against reason . . . does not take from us the savor of life, it demands only the denial of superfluousness.97
For Schwarz's Rosicrucians the world itself was the "supreme temple" of Masonry and their brotherhood the final "theoretical level" for which all other grades of Masonry were mere preliminaries. The attainment of this level involved a flight from the rationalism of the Russian Enlightenment as Novikov clearly indicated in the opening number of his new journal, Twilight Glow, in 1782:
comparing our present position with that of our forefather before the fall who glistened in the noon-day light of wisdom, the light of our reason can hardly be compared even to the twilight glow. . . ,98
The "light of Adam" is, nonetheless, "still within us, only hidden."99 The task is to find it through inner purification, and a dedicated study of the "hieroglyphics" of nature-and of the most ancient history, which still contained some reflections of this lost light. In a series of lectures given in both the university and the lodges, Schwarz sought to provide a guide. Reason, he explained, was only the first and weakest path to the light; feeling (the aesthetic sense of the rose) the second; and revelation (the mystery of the cross) the third. Each led man to the progressively higher stage of knowledge : the curious, the pleasant, and the useful. Following Boehme, Schwarz contended that all of the cosmos was moving in triads toward perfection. Both the triune God (for whom the world was "created out of his own inner essence," as an "endless wish of his unfathomable will") and God's image, man (who also contained a "trinity" of body, mind, and spirit), were moving toward reunion in the ultimate trinity: "the good, the true, and the beautiful."100 In order to help bring "unripe minds" back from Voltairianism, Schwarz and Novikov published a series of mystical tracts in large editions in the early eighties, ranging from Boehme's Path to Christ and Arndt's On True Christianity to such anonymous compilations as The Errors of Reason and The Secrets of the Cross.
The death of Schwarz early in 1784 was caused largely by an excess of ascetic self-discipline in his quest for inner perfection and knowledge. A large crowd of mourners gathered at his funeral even though it was held in a remote village; and a memorial service was also spontaneously organized by his students in Moscow. He played an important innovating role in the development of Russian thought even though he spent less than five of his thirty-three years in Russia and never formally enjoyed noble status. He was in many ways the father of Russian romanticism, with
his deprecation of natural reason, his belief that art was closer to the inner harmony of nature, and his love of twilight, mystery, and chivalric ideals. At the same time he was the first of a long line of German idealistic philosophers to impart to Russia a thirst for philosophic absolutes, insisting that perfection could be realized through the special knowledge and dedication of a select brotherhood. The Moscow Rosicrucians of the eighties began the tradition of semi-secret philosophic circles which became so important in the intellectual life of Russia. They introduced practices which were to become characteristic in varying forms of such circles: assumed names, bonds of friendship and mutual aid, secret discussion and mutual criticism, and an obligatory system of quarterly confession to the grand master of
the order.
The casual moralism and philanthropy that had dominated early Masonry was, under Schwarz, transformed into a seductive belief in the realizability of heaven on earth through the concentrated effort of consecrated thinkers. It seems fitting that Schwarz was apparently the first to use the term intelligentsiia. Though using it in the sense of the Latin term intelligentia ("intelligence"), Schwarz gave the term its distinctive Russian spelling, intelligentsiia, and the sense of special power which would eventually come to be applied to the class of people who went by its name. "Chto takoe intelligentsiia?" "What is intelligence?" asks Schwarz in a phrase that was to be much repeated in subsequent Russian history. It is, he says,
that higher state of man, as a mental essence, free from all base, earthly perishable matter; eternally and imperceptibly capable of influencing and acting on all things.101
Intelligentsia was the magical force for which Catherine had prayed at the beginning of her Nakaz: "Domine Deus … da mihi intelligentiam . . ," But it was given a different, mystical meaning by Schwarz. The first comprehensive history of Russian Masonry claimed with some justice that Russian Masonry first gave the aristocracy "a sense of mission as an intellectual class" {??? intelligentnoe soslovie).102
After Schwarz's death, a new grand master arrived from Germany convinced that "true Rosicrucians are the true restorers of order in Europe," and that a leading role in this restoration would be played by Russia ("a camel that does not realize it is laden with precious goods").103 Numerous young Russians flocked to Berlin for fuller study of the order, some hoping to unravel there the secret of eternal life. The movement received new encouragement in 1786 when a practicing Rosicrucian, Prince Frederick William, became king of Prussia. A bewildering profusion of occult fraternities flooded into Russia in the late eighties: the "New Israelites," or
"people of God," who called themselves true Masons but seemed more like religious sectarians; the "children of the New Jerusalem" who were followers of Swedenborg; and an aristocratic group formed in Avignon by Admiral Pleshcheev and Prince N. Repnin, which was transferred to St. Petersburg under the ideological guidance of Dom Pernety, a former Benedictine and librarian of Frederick the Great, who had taken up occult studies.104
Novikov became uneasy about the new occult turn that Masonry had taken, and proposed forming a more purely Christian and philanthropic order in the late eighties. His harsh criticism of the Jesuits in 1784 as being a political order and thus a betrayal of the monastic ideal had brought a sharp rebuke from their benefactress, Catherine. Increasingly she stepped up her harassment of all Masons, wrote three satirical anti-Masonic plays, closed down Masonic printing presses, and finally arrested Novikov in his village home in 1792.