The Myth of the State in the Age of Enlightenment and Its Destruction in Late Eighteenth-Century Russia*

THE STATE MYTH IN THE ERA OF ENLIGHTENMENT . THE MYTH OF THE STATE IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS DESTRUCTION IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIA* V. M. Zhivov I The genesis of the Age of Enlightenment as a whole and of the mythology of the state as part of the foundation of that period’s worldview is fairly complex. As Frances Yates has demonstrated, the Enlightenment, as generally understood, followed a “Rosicrucian Enlightenment,” which in turn derived from two sources: Renaissance ideology (primarily scientifi c Hermeticism) and religious dissent.1 Ever since the Reformation, religious discord had not only been an ecclesiastical issue (e.g., heresy and its eradication) but had also become a political problem. Religious wars and heterodoxy rendered prior views of state and polity moot, invalidating concepts of feudal fealty or notions of the monarch as God’s anointed steward of his state. Fratricidal chaos reigned in Europe and could be combated only by a new conception of the state. The depth of the attempts to fi nd a solution that engulfed Europe in the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries has evidently been undervalued until recently. But the intellectual achievements of that period had such a profound impact on the historical experience of subsequent centuries that without an appreciation of the relevant sources it is impossible to construct a spiritual history (Geistgeschichte) of the modern age. The movement of interest to us strove scientifi cally (in the then- current understanding of “science,” a holdover from the Renaissance) to * English translation © 2010 M. E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text, “Gosudarst- vennyi mif v epokhu Prosveshcheniia i ego razrushenie v Rossii kontsa XVIII veka,” in Iz istorii russkoi kul’tury, vol. 6: XVIII–nachalo XIX veka (Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2000), pp. 657–83. Translated by Liv Bliss. Reprinted with permission of the author. Notes renumbered for this edition.—Ed. — 239 — V. M. ZHIVOV uncover religious truths that rose above individual sectarian disputes and created an opportunity for religious reconciliation based on a far-reaching comprehension of the world system [miroustroistvo]. This theory had both anthropological and social aspects and assumed the transformation of a person as a microcosm who by assimilating the harmony of the macrocosm was fi lled with wisdom and love. It also assumed the transformation of society, in which learned initiates would gradually disseminate Hermetic knowledge and the principles of government founded thereon. That movement spread both internationally and interdenominationally: among others, Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella, and Paolo Sarpi in Italy; Sir Philip Sidney, George Dye, and Robert Fludd in England; Johann Valentin Andreae and Michael Maier in Germany; and Jan Amos Komensky [Comenius] in what is now the Czech Republic were all associated with it in one way or another. One expression of the movement’s social program was the utopia, which never underwent more intensive development (Sir Frances Bacon’s New Atlantis, Andreae’s Description of the Republic of Christianopolis, Campanella’s City of the Sun, Komensky’s The Way of Light, Samuel Hartlib’s Macarius, etc.). The aesthetic equivalent of the utopia was Arcadia or the Golden Age—both exemplars of undisturbed harmony; a perfect world from which enmity and discord, created by civilization gone astray, had been banished and in which the human (the social) had been brought into accord with nature, with the cosmos. Here Arcadia is the locus magicus, in which, due to the action of Hermetic science (practiced, for example, by Prospero in Shakespeare’s Tempest), the microcosm is brought into equilibrium with the macrocosm. Prospero lays open the way to the perfect society of which Gonzalo dreams early in the play:2 All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine, Would I not have; but nature should bring forth, Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance, To feed my innocent people. I would with such perfection govern, sir, To excel the golden age. (The Tempest, Act II, Scene I) The Golden Age as a paradigm of the social organism renewed is also constantly present in the literature of this period, from Sidney’s Arcadia to the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, in which the old duke and his court — 240 — THE STATE MYTH IN THE ERA OF ENLIGHTENMENT . “fl eet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world” (Act I, Scene I). In essence—although this is not readily perceived these days—we are dealing here with a tradition involving a scholarly art of a sort that, in partnership with Hermetic science, was expected to transform wayward humanity. The intellectual/aesthetic movement here described had great political ambitions. The program for society’s spiritual transformation was directly coupled with a political program, with a struggle against the old political structure of Europe that was supported by the Habsburgs. That intellectual/ political synthesis may be discerned in both the activity of Henry IV and in the schemes of the Union of German Protestant Princes. Hope for the establishment of a new order reached its apogee in the actions of Frederick V, Elector Palatine, who in 1619 accepted the crown of Bohemia off ered to him in the course of a local rebellion against the Hapsburgs—the event that was to usher in the last struggle against the old order.3 The future was portrayed as the gradual embodiment of the utopia or the attainment of Arcadia, involving an end to religious enmity, the establishment of a universal harmony of interests, and the rebirth of the inner person under the impact of the new science, scholarship, and art. Frederick’s accession to the throne of Bohemia marked the beginning, as we know, of the Thirty Years’ War, which began with the devastation of the Palatinate. This was the last religious war in Europe, but its spiritual fruits were a far cry from the new harmony that had been so hoped for in the fi rst decades of the seventeenth century. It led to a profound disenchantment in the transformation of human activity, in the transfi guring power of Hermetic science and art. The crisis of European consciousness in that period, so vividly refl ected in, for example, Komensky’s Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart, may be compared with the disillusionment as to civilization’s achievements that seized Europe after World War I, since the latter instance, too, exhibits a reaction to the expectations of the preceding period, which tied in to the scientifi c and technical transformation of the world and even its religious and cosmic transfi guration (from Fourier and Compte to Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov and Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadskii). The spiritual crisis of the Thirty Years’ War had various repercussions. In political thought, it led to the development of the theory of natural law and of the police state. An escape from the intransigence of religious discord was found in the idea of subordinating religion to the state, in the idea of a contract between the monarch and his or her subjects wherein those subjects renounce their individual will (including the manifestation of religious will) while the monarch takes responsibility for the public weal. (The revocation of the Edict — 241 — V. M. ZHIVOV of Nantes and the persecution of Catholics in England may be regarded as the practical product of this new political thought.) Just as rationalist philosophy was in a signifi cant degree a reaction to the Hermetic thought of the preceding age, which originated in symbolic Neoplatonism, so the theory of the police state was a reaction to the idea of Rosicrucian thought: in both cases, reason and natural mechanics came to replace arcane knowledge and the policy of religious reconciliation founded on it. But, however strong that reaction may have been, the rejection of the preceding era’s thinking was far from complete and consistent. In the political ideology of Hermeticism, the monarch took part in arcane knowledge and employed it to establish peace, love, and a social harmony that embodied the cosmic harmony. Like Prospero in The Tempest, the monarch was, in essence, the mediator of the cosmic order in the social sphere. That role—lacking only the invocation of arcane knowledge—was now transferred to the absolute monarch, who ruled in accordance with the theory of the police state. But the monarch was still responsible for the establishment of global harmony, and on this was founded the Enlightenment ideology of the state. It was a relic of a long-gone confi dence in a worldview system that aff orded no logical basis for such confi dence. A particular pointer to this genesis of the mythology is the symbolism of the Golden Age, which had been accepted by seventeenth- century literature and art and especially characterized the panegyric genres. That symbolism coalesced organically with the prior worldview system but was alien to the new. The idea of a reversion to primordial harmony, to the primeval order of the cosmos, was indeed a motive juncture of Hermetic and alchemical science but corresponded in no way to rationalist ideas of progress, which assumed not reversion but continuous forward motion. As Lev Vasil’evich Pumpianskii at one time pointed out, the state and its outcomes were a motif organic to European classicism, which had made “classical politics” “a distinct theme for all neo-European literature.”4 The state was the subject of poetic rapture and philosophical meditation precisely because it was presented as the steward of cosmic harmony on earth. Therefore, the monarch’s victories, welfare, alliances, and peace treaties were not only material for visual rendition but also a topic for philosophical and artistic introspection.

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