which investigated and uprooted the rationalistic "Illuminists" of Bavaria even before the French Revolution, he was looked to as an experienced and erudite veteran of the counter-revolutionary camp. During the reign of Alexander I almost all of his works were published inside Russia-most of them in several different editions.42 Alexander was reading his Cloud over the Sanctuary while drawing up his draft of the Holy Alliance; and Eckartshausen's fame encouraged Russian authorities to seek out other ecumenically oriented Bavarian mystics during the latter part of Alexander's reign.
The man responsible for popularizing this undistinguished (and elsewhere almost totally unknown) German was the second key figure in the Russian anti-Enlightenment: Ivan Lopukhin. In Lopukhin's career, sectarian Pietism and higher order Masonry were fused and given a clear counterrevolutionary bias.
Lopukhin had been, like De Maistre, an active Mason who slowly turned first against revolution and then against rationalism altogether. The first crisis in his life came in the early eighties when he was asked to translate Holbach's Code of Nature as part of his Masonic duties. When he realized that its materialistic philosophy was alien to Christian teaching, he burned his translation and immersed himself in the occult pursuits of the Rosicrucians. In 1789 he experienced a second crisis. Having just recovered miraculously from a life-long illness and shortly after hearing of the outbreak of revolution in France, he experienced a kind of mystic conversion while walking in the garden of Count Razumovsky. Henceforth he was to be -to cite the title of a tract he wrote in 1791-"A Spiritual Knight, or Searcher for True Wisdom." He resolved to write a great new treatise for the times, which he published after nearly a decade of labor in 1798: Several Characteristics of the Inner Church, or the One Path to Truth and the Different Paths to Error and Damnation.^ The work created an instant sensation in higher Masonic circles-and throughout Europe. In 1799 a French edition was published in Russia; in 1801 there was published another French edition in Paris and a second Russian edition; and, shortly thereafter, two German editions and several other Russian editions. The aged Eckartshausen particularly admired the work, established close relations with Lopukhin, and arranged for the translation into Russian of his own writings and those of other German members of the "inner church."
Meanwhile Lopukhin was sent by the new Tsar Alexander to southern Russia to investigate the growth of sectarian religion in the region. He discovered and lived among the spirit wrestlers, whom he proclaimed to be hidden saints of his new church in his essay "Voice of Sincerity." The foes of his mystical church were the secular learning and self-indulgence which
kept man from following Christ and gaining "true wisdom." In an essay of 1794, "The Baneful Fruits of Idle Dreams, of Equality, and of Tumultuous Freedom," he had seen the acquisitive instincts of the French revolutionaries as the cause of all Europe's ills; and in his church he expressed his ire at the equally materialistic response of the churches. He proposed that the inner church excommunicate beUevers in "the kingdom of property [tsarstvo jobstvennosti], who bear on them the image of Antichrists."44 In 1809 he became the guiding spirit behind the journal Friend of Youth, publishing such anti-rationalistic tracts as "Fruits of the Heart in Love with Truth" and "Paths of the Praying Heart." He was joined by another protege of Schwarz, Labzin, whose mystical journal Herald of Zion made its first appearance on January 1, 1806. Labzin had been "converted" to the new mystical Christianity after an initial infatuation with the Encyclopedists, whom he then denounced in a poem, "The French Shop."
The Pietistic reactionaries fell briefly out of favor in the years immediately after the alliance with Napoleon in 1807. Labzin's journal was shut; Lopukhin was forced to leave Moscow for his country estate; and Grabi-anka's "New Jerusalem" sect, which had taken to ecstatic prophecy in the manner of the flagellants, was shut down. But at the same time, the proponents of a counter-revolutionary "inner church" gained a key disciple within the Tsar's immediate entourage. Prince Alexander Golitsyn, a former lover of the Encyclopedists and a descendant of one of the most learned and Francophile of Russian noble families, also underwent a kind of conversion. As Alexander's civilian procurator of the Holy Synod, Golitsyn decided to read (for the first time in his life) the New Testament. He found in Christ's life and teaching a wealth of inspiration that he had never found in Orthodoxy. As he looked about his empire, he began to feel that the Christian sectarians-particularly the Protestant Pietists-were better practitioners of New Testament Christianity than the Orthodox. He had ' particular regard for the Moravian Brethren's community at Sarepta, which he had often visited for mineral baths.45 Accordingly, in 1810, he resigned as procurator of the Synod to become supervisor of foreign confessions in Russia. What was ostensibly a demotion was to this new believer in inter-confessional Christianity a fresh opportunity.
Golitsyn brought Ignatius Fesler, a defrocked Trappist monk who had become an historian of German Masonry and leader of the Berlin "Society of the Friends of Humanity," to St. Petersburg in 1810 to teach philosophy at the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary.46 Nominally a Protestant, this Silesian pamphleteer was mainly interested in promoting a new inter-confessional "Society of Brotherly Love" (Philadelphia). Bitterly attacked by De Maistre, Fesler received full support from Golitsyn, who encouraged
him to pay a long visit to Sarepta and eventually made him superintendent of the special consistory created for the seventy-three evangelical colonies of South Russia.
Most important of all, Golitsyn persuaded the Tsar himself to read the Bible (also for the first time) and make it a kind of manual for the "spiritual mobilization" of Russia to combat Napoleon. Golitsyn lent his own Bible to Alexander, who read it on a voyage through newly conquered Finland in the summer of 1812. Especially moved by the prophetic books of the Old Testament and the Apocalypse in the New, Alexander attended Protestant churches in Finland and confessed that "a new world is opening up before me."47 The impressionable Tsar began to interpret contemporary events in Biblical terms, to attend prayer meetings and Bible readings in Golitsyn's inter-confessional chapel. He adopted as his own the idea of a new inner Christianity, an inter-confessional brotherhood of "Biblical" Christians who would heal the wounds of Christian division and revolutionary strife.
The key organization in this "spiritual mobilization" was the Bible Society, an organization which came to Russia through Protestant Finland from Pietism and its English version, the Methodist Church. It is interesting that this church, which played such an important role in steering English popular enthusiasm away from revolutionary paths,48 should play a similar role in Russia. Alexander delayed his departure from St. Petersburg to Moscow to pursue the retreating Napoleon late in 1812 in order to meet with the English leader of the society, who had just arrived by way of Turku in Finland to help set up a Russian chapter. The Tsar and his two brothers became patrons of the society, and Golitsyn its president.
At the founding meeting of the society in January, 1813, there were representatives of a variety of domestic and foreign Protestant churches, with the Moravians playing the key role. Under Golitsyn's leadership the original plan to print Bibles only in foreign languages was expanded during the next two years to include Russian-language New Testaments and Bibles; its primarily Protestant clerical leadership was expanded to include Orthodox and even Catholic clergy; and chapters spread out all over Russia for dissemination and discussion of Holy Scripture.49