The Masonic science of Man initially was largely a creation of the German professor Schwarz, using his position at Moscow University to spread Masonic ideology. The impression produced by Schwarz's lectures was tremendous. According to A. Labzin, who became one of the most noted mystics in the beginning of the nineteenth century, became one of the most noted mystics in the beginning of the nineteenth century.

He refuted Helvetius, Rousseau, Spinoza, La Mettrie, and others, compared them with other philosophers opposing them, and, by demonstrating to us the difference between them, taught us also to discover the merit of each one.

To the listeners, it was as though a new light began to shine! ... The most important, and for that time a dumbfounding phenomenon was the force with which his simple word took away from the hands of many the seductive and godless books in which, it appeared at the time, the entire intellect was contained, and replaced them with the Holy Bible. (Biograficheskii sLovar', 11, 592) On a popular level, the questions that Schwarz raised in his lectures were discussed, almost verbatim, in many Russian Masonry-related magazines. Man was an "extraction of all things," repeatedly stated Russian brothers following Schwarz. With his physical nature, man is connected to the rest of the world, and this connectedness does not allow him to become the perfect man ("true man," or "new Adam," as Russian Freemasons often referred to). At the same time, man is God's creature that has divine elements in his essence.

Schwarz lectured that the Creator sent down and implanted a new soul into the material body of each infant born; that this soul was incarnated for the purpose of trial and retribution, and was to be rewarded after death by dwelling in a Heaven of bliss, or to be punished in a hell of torment. Accordingly, the human condition, like the history of the universe, needed to progress through the stages:1) before conversion, 2) during the conversion, 3) after the conversion. During the conversion (i.e. bis life on Earth), man was only a traveler on the way towards bis eternal life. Man's lot was to suffer, recalling bis past sins. Through suffering his conscience was awakened, and this was the knowledge of self which gave birth to the longing to be reunited with the source of all things, God. The ultimate goal of human life was, according to Schwarz, a union with God. This ideal state in which man was fully united with God and was in possession of a pure spirit could be achieved in three successive stages: through intensive knowledge of oneself, knowledge of Nature, and knowledge of God. Schwarz emphasized the power of feeling and spiritual regeneration, as weIl as individual illumination to perceive the Grand Architect's design.

The idea of Man developed by Schwarz has little to do with mechanistic ideas of many enlighteners who saw man as a thinking machine conditioned by external environment. In materialistic philosophy man was regarded as a body of such excellent workmanship in which functions of the brain, spinal cord, nerves, and other organs sufficed to fulfill all his actions of man and to furnish his consciousness, will, emotions, and mental faculties. Freemasons did not deny the mechanical composition of the body. But they insisted that this view excluded altogether the need for, or the very existence of human soul or spirit. In his lectures, Schwarz emphasized that the Reason, being refined by useless sciences and reinforced by self-love or belief in own abilities makes our imagination bigger, which conveniently brings a person either to the perfect good or the perfect evil." Touching upon the ideas of the philosophes who affiliated that man was a perfect machine of the finest structure, manifesting mind, will and action; those who granted man a Soul and Body; and those who conceived of man as spirit, soul, and body, forming a human triad, Schwarz insisted that man was a complex composition of four components: spirit, human soul, animal soul (including intuition and passions), and material body. Schwarz taught that human being is made up of a spirit (dukh), a soul (dusha), and a body (lelo). He defined spirit as the highest soul (v)'sshaia dusha), i.e., the spark of original Adam's soul in man. On the other hand, the soul, anima sensitive was to him an animal soul in Man (dusha zhivotnaia), ruled by human passions and desires, which may lead a person away from a spiritual goal. Finally, the body was anima vegetative, which reflected physical feelings. Schwarz elevated heart, soul, feelings, faith, poetic inspiration, and imagination to the level of reason. He insisted that human beings were capable of "understanding" not only with their reason, but also with their heart. Moreover, reason could claim its knowing power only if aided by feeling, intuition, inspiration, and revelation. Going in the same direction, Tolstoy's character Mason Bazdeev in the War and Peace castigates those who strive to understand God and bis Creation as "more foolish and unreasonable than a little child, who playing with the parts of a skillfully made watch dares to say that, as he does not understand its use, he does not believe in the master who made it." (Tolstoy, War and Peace, 382.)

For ages, Freemasons labored "to attain that knowledge [of God and Universe] and are still infinitely far from our aim; but in our lack of understanding we only see our weakness and His greatness..." But to come to "know Him [God] is hard." In his utopia Noveishee puteshestvie, through the character living in a "perfect" society in the Moon, the author Freemason V. Levshin insisted that "It is enough that we acknowledge our omnipotent Maker who created all these wonderful things. .. and [we] do not doubt that the cause of their existence is in the omnipotent God's will." In the society that Narsim, a man who travels on the Moon, finds there [al thorough exploration of the unknown, and to say even more, aspiring to know the unknown is considered ... as utter foolishness. With his limited reason, man cannot and is not supposed to understand or penetrate the unyielding shield of the wise intentions of the Creator. Although the ultimate "knowledge" is hardly attainable, an intern al sensibility is inherent in every human being, and can and should be developed by a proper education. To understand things outside of them, stated Schwarz, people had nerves and feelings that were intractably connected into one "Sensus Comunis: the main sense, i.e. the feeling ofthe soul with which [we] feel beauty of a thing without further investigation, without any syllogisms. (NIOR RGB, fond 147. folder 142, Schwarz's lectures. 23rev.)

Complicated by "human" components, reason itself acquired more dimensions and departed from the mechanistic ("Euclidian") reasoning of the philosophes. It was this complex mixture of human emotions, feelings, and reasoning that made people akin to the Creator. Man was a world hirnself, and just "like God' s imagination is able to create, so is human imagination." (NIOR RGB, fond 147, folder 142, Schwarz's lectures, 19rev.)

Masons of related groups also in Germany and in France, postulated that humanity's very existence, with its rational and irrational side, constituted a perfectly harmonious system. On the physicallevel, a human was deemed a resemblance and copy of the greater world. Repeating the Rosicrucian postulate, leading Russian Masonic theorists insisted that man was a microcosm, and the world (or, Nature) was a macrocosm. Man was not alone in the world; he was "an extraction from nature, in which the wise creator breathed a breath of life." ( NIOR RGB, fond 14, folder 564, 4O rev.)

All the elements of Nature, spirit, and matter come together and dash in a man, and this is his strength and his weakness. "Man is ... the creature that connects moral with material; he is the last among the spirits and the first among the material creatures" - so Schwarz and related groups, defined man's place in the hierarchy. Nature in Masonic philosophy represented not only the macrocosm but also macroanthropos, something dependent and defined by the end directions and goals of man' s development. The organic unity of the world was one of the foundational ideas of Russian Freemasons. This union was not a simple sum of the elements, but the building blocks connected into one organism by the ties of universal sympathy. The whole living totality of the world was created in a specific harmonious order out of love and benevolence. The idea of the organic body appealed to those Freemasons who had to withstand the authority of the State and established Church hierarchies and correlated with their need to legitimize the inspirational freedom of the spirit. (See, for instance, similar ideas expressed in Johanna Geyer-Kordesch, "Georg Ernst Stahl's Radical Pietist Medicine and its Influence on the German Enlightenment," in The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, eds. Andrew Cunningham, Roger French, Cambridge University Press, 1990,67-87.)

In his lectures, Schwarz pursued the relationship between the heterogeneous elements opposing each other to form a harmonious union, and the universe seemed to him a dynamic, living whole that affirmed the organic unity of nature and humanity. Like man, Nature was "the unity of forces of movement and resistance, even the forces of opposition that are constantly trying to destroy each other." The constant beneficial rotation of elements that the "infinite Wisdom" guided and coordinated the forces of Nature, explained V. A. Levshin in his discussion of Voltaire's Destruction Of Lisbon. Mutual attraction, "magnetism," the notion often used by the Freemasons by the end of the century, strengthened the ties of mutual love and affection. According to Professor Schwarz, in the grand scheme of things, individual's perfection and high purpose were not, however, in his likeness to the world of Nature, but in building the "Temple of the Living God." God was in man and man in God, and salvation was to rise through love to the life of the "spirit," to union with God. However, at this time, as Schwarz asserted, man was not able to reach the desired union with God. Man was perfect in the past but had fallen from grace.780 After the fall (Adam's fall from grace) man lost his purity, and with it all his knowledge about God and Nature that were given to him by God himself. The fall was reflected not in man' s perpetual life in sin and pain, but the loss of the knowledge he once had. A fallen man lost his harmony and bis moral essence and donned on a decaying body. Created from the "dark soil," man, at the same time, in potential was ''the most perfect of all the creatures" because he belonged "to heavens with bis reasoning soul," and had, in bis essence, an ability to comprehend the world. (NIOR ROß, fond 147, folder 142, Schwarz's lectures, 88 (108)-88rev (108rev.)

According to the medieval mystical elements borrowed by the Russian Freemasons, bodies were not made of earth only, but the Matter in its various forms. Medieval philosophy also added heat, then considered as an element, but now described as a mode of motion. But without the realization of his potential, this vulnerable, sinful, imperfect, fragile, fallen, mortal man "cannot rise to the skies. They are unreachable to him." The goal of the "rega science" of Freemasonry was pronounced by Schwarz as a "secretive moral revival" of fallen Nature and this "dark and decaying temple of the fallen essence" (ORKR NBMU, fond V. V. Velichko, inv. number 3975-6-60, 4rev. "Instruktsia masteru lozhi".)

Thus the above rooted in Medieval Mysticism as it was, through the idea of "enlightenment" the Russian Masonic ideologues attempted to find a possibility of moral renaissance for Man and Nature. Man, alienated as he was from the source of light through bis fall, was, nevertheless, a microcosm of the macrocosm, the universe, and the three components of man .- the body, soul, and spirit -­ corresponded to the hierarchical gradations in the great Chain of Being, from the lowest matter to the highest spiritual being. Russian Masonic ideologues c1aimed that they could raise a new moral man and restore the broken Chain of Being. To help man make the ascent from body through soul to the life of "spirit" and union with God, they proposed joining together for the common good and making "chain by uniting ... hands." For the path to enlightenment, the Bible, the book of inspiration, was the only legitimate authority. The Bible contained a plan for the restoration and working of the rough stone that could be read as a coded message sent by the Great Architect of the Universe to those who could understand it. According to Schwarz's s and common to  Freemasons of his persuasion, they were heirs of the Jewish sects, especially the Essenes and the Theraputes. Essenes it was told, left their knowledge of the mysteries to the medieval Rosicrucians, and the Rosicrucians transferred the knowledge to the Masons. The book of Genesis written by Moses also retained remnants of the "spark of the light," and that is why Freemasons in Russia analyzed the book thoroughly along with the Bible. "God's word did not disappear from earth, because what is said by God once cannot be lost or destroyed," insisted Schwarz in his lectures on the types of knowledge. Echoing Renaisance philosophers like Pico de la Mirandola and Marchello Ficino, Schwarz encouraged his students to look for hidden messages in the Bible by saying that the first three books of Genesis were written in "kabalistic manner" (kabbalisticheskim obrazom) and that "for their [books']understanding it is necessary to work and try to interpret them with God's help." (OPI GIM, fond 398, opis' I, folder 23.)

The Freemason was to learn not only about himself, but also about the world around him through learning the main Masonic "sciences." To the question, "What sciences should be known to a Freemason?" a Russian version of the catechism offers poetry, music, painting, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and architecture. Arts and sciences were not classified by the Russian ideologues as "worldly futility," but often contemporary methods of sciences were looked upon with suspicion because they aimed either at showing that God did not exist or showing that God and the Universe were ultimately knowable. In the Pietist tradition(for that is what we are partly dealing with here), Schwarz insisted that spiritual growth was inexorably linked to imagination and emotion. Both curious and pleasant knowledge were useful and should be cultivated as gifts of God to man, but they were nevertheless double-edged weapons which could bring armful consequences unless checked by the third, poleznoe (profitable), knowledge. This one came from initiation and inspiration that taught people "the meaning of true love, prayer, and aspiration of the spirit towards higher knowledge." These three types of knowledge can, in fact, be identified as rational knowledge, feeling, and mystical revelation. If everything in the Universe was in a harmonious union, and "the great mechanist [the Grand Architect o fthe Universe] created a stupendous rotation and conformity one among another," then analogy could be taken as the best way to learn about the world and the nature without losing sight of the Creator of everything. Schwarz insisted that since "He [the Grand Architect of the Universe] loves to vary the same mode of operation a thousand ways," this "curious diversity" points to the fact that "all his works seem ... [to] equally proclaim him their common founder and contributor."( NIOR RGB, fond 147, edinitsa khraneniia 142, "Lektsii Schwarza" 1782, 22rev-23.)

In using analogy, the investigator intended the relationship and participated fully in the process. The intimate intertwining of the human being into nature forced the ideologues of Russian Freemasonry to overcome the experience of alienation common to "objective" Enlightenment science. They propagated a scientific investigation that was individualized and reflected in a process profoundly dependent on the person and his capacities to see pattern, form, and the archetype within the multiplicity of nature.

Many Russian Freemasons also were also involved with Philology, in the form of the discovery of "slavonic" ("slavenskie," ) tales and "ancient wonders" ("starinnye dikovinki,"). Combining the genre of tale with the influence that poetry was thought to have on emotions, by the end of the eighteenth century many Russian intellectuals turned to a Russian bylina, a poetic heroic narrative carrying a moralizing grain. At the same time, a new concept of man emerged. The new hero was an individual with a unique personality. He was emotionally intense, sensitive and idealistic. Alienated from life, he c1ashed with the reality and defeated, fled from it. Such is the nature of the heroes in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloise (1761), which in turn provided the models for the heroes and heroines of the Russian sentimental tales and novels: Fedor Emin's Letters of Ernst and Dorara (1766), Nicolai Emin's Roza, A Partially True and Original Tale, P. L'vov's A Russian Pamela, or the History of Maria, a Virtuous Peasant Girl (1789), and Karamzin's Poor Liza (1792).816 If we define Russian Sentimentalism (or pre­ Romanticism) as in essence the "transference of allegiance from reason to the heart but with a strong retention of c1assical restraint, a meeting point between Classicism and Romanticism, then a correspondence of its ideas and the ideas propagated by Freemasons in Russia after the 1770s becomes apparent.

Freemasons furthermore, believed in direct correspondence and communion between human psychic inner world and external nature, and no subject within the intersecting realms of man's imagination and physical world, inc1uding alchemy, physiognomy, or chiromancy, could be excluded from the legitimate sphere of interest. While earlier, Russia did not undergo the Western European Renaissance; therefore, the classical revival, and with it the trends of physiognomy, astrology, and alchemy entered Russia rather late. While in the West, the pursuit of these "sciences" was at its peak several centuries earlier, Russia remained relatively isolated from most Western developments until the large-scale Westernization. Freemasons thought of esoteric sciences as useful for the betterment of man and enthusiastically promoted them. A significant part of Freemasons in Russia was toying with the ideas of what came to be called ‚Rosicrucianism‘, fascinated by a theory of nature and the principles of alchemy and astrology on which it rested. They treasured the secret knowledge of the hidden cosmic forces and of the ultimate harmony of the world of which Man was a vital extract of all essences.

Criticism of the philosophes, stress on religiosity and moral temperance and recognition of the irrational undercurrents of the human mind could develop into extreme mysticism, obscurantist asceticism, rejection of learning as such, or excessive interest in occult. In his famous lectures Schwarz employed Boehme's cosmological ideas to describe the genesis of the world, from the gigantic outflow of the elements of divine nature forming the ideal universe to the stark tragedy of its temporary detachment from the divine matrix. Magic, for instance, was considered to be "that Godly science, with the help of which the Magi find the natural light and natural spirit. The Magus is the searcher of truth with whom nature speaks in all its created form through its spirit and explains its signature." In the study of the "practical" sciences, Russian Freemasons placed special emphasis on alchemy (and chemistry), astronomy, and physiognomy. As Elagin indicated, Freemasons were looking for a "I arger philosophy that could inc1ude not only an infinite amount of pompous words but would be based on the geometrie proofs and chemical tests."( NIOR RGB, fond 147.) On a similar note, Schwarz customarily opened his lectures with the statement:

"Hermetic Philosophy is a mother: it is founded on the knowledge of Nature, it possesses the knowledge of the Elements, Matter, perfection of metals, and many other things, so that she [Hermetic Philosophy] is a Natural Teaching, i.e. Physics and Alchemy."(idem) According to the Freemasons immersed in the study of alchemy, any body was composed of three essences: salt, sulphur, and mercury. Every metal had in itself other metals "hidden" within. Gold was the most perfect metal because it contained equal proportions of all the three essences. Metals lived their life in aspiration of becoming gold. Since the difference between any metal and gold was deemed only in proportion, it was considered possible to find "semen of met als" (semia metalov) that, in its turn, formed a basis of the "philosophers' stone." It was believed that if the philosophers' stone was mixed with metals in a special proportion, it was possible to turn that metal into gold. The philosophers' stone was also deemed to cure all maladies and that is why it was often called a "universal panacea" or "general and universal medicine."

Concerning alchemy, the Freemasons who believed in the postulates of a1chemy, can be divided into two categories: those who passionately pursued it and those who considered alchemy, with its search for gold, an occupation contrary to Masonic belief in the futility of worldly possessions. For instance, Lopukhin, whose printing house was responsible for almost all the books on alchemy printed in Russia in the 1780s, labeled all alchemists the servants in the "anti-Christ's Church." According to him, people who were "attached to gold-making and to searching the means of prolonging [their] sinful life, to exercising in the letters of theosophy, kabala, secret medicine and in this magnetism" could easily become "the best means for dissemination of and preparation for the actions of the dark forces." Besides theoretical confrontation, the problem with learning the tenets of alchemy was, as Schröder explained to the leader of German Rosicrucians, that Russians were simply not interested in alchemical work because they were not skilled in the practical aspect of it. This opinion can be indirectly supported by the fact that compared to the amount of publications concerning moral perfection and  spirituality, books on alchemy are relatively rare. When answering questions of potential candidates into Freemasonry, a member of the Moscow circle pointed out that "only those who are chemists in their rankings deal with simple chemistry." Novikov lamented the fact that Russian Freemasons did not devote any serious attention to magic and kabbalah because they were in lower grades, and he knew nothing of these sciences except for the names. Chemistry, on the other hand, should have been on the radar, but Freemasons in Russia "reluctantly did not start because there was no one to show them the basic principles."( NIOR ROB, fond 147.)

Physiognomy was one of the tools for the study of mankind and the means of putting the mysterious and organic unity of man and the constant interaction of the inner and the outer self into a practical science built on observation and categorization. The concept of man as harmony of body, reason, soul, and will forms the basis of Lavater's physiognomic studies. If Wolff described man as either "free" when in use of bis reason, or a "slave" when subject to his passions, following the Pietist tradition Freemasons in Russia propagated medical theory giving substantial support to the idea that emotion and mind were to be seen holistically. Although they recognized that the correlation between psychological and physical reflected in physiognomy had not necessarily reached absolute accuracy and distinguished between theory and practice, they, nevertheless, were generally persuaded of the validity of physiognomy as a science. In these comparisons, references to medical science were a part of the demand to denounce the traditional reliance of medical practitioners on "hypothetical explanations" and "imaginary systems" in favor of scientific experiments and clinical observations. The attitude towards physiognomy among the Moscow Masons seems to be of a dual nature, just as there was a dichotomy among them in their attitudes to alchemy or, in general, to rational and irrational. In a Russian-language Masonry-related magazine, for instance, we can also find an anonymous artic1e clearly opposing physiognomy in 1785. (Mentioned in N. S. Tikhonravov, Sochineniiia, vol. 3, Moscow, 1898, 77.)

However, the most influential figure among Moscow Freemasons, Professor Schwarz, was most definitely a defender of physiognomy, as he lectured on the "justification of physiognomy" in his course on aesthetics. He insisted that the basis of physiognomy was observation and experiment and not sheer imagination and speculation. Masonic adepts of physiognomy departed from a pseudo-c1assical ideal of l'honnete homme and attempted to capture individuality and complexity of a human being as a mixture of features that reflected the inner self onto the outer self. Rather than simply providing a portrait or a visual image of man' s perfect physical features, physiognomy offered the Freemasons an opportunity to glorify people' s virtuous behavior. In recognizing the fluidity of man's character, Freemasons postulated that a real human being was not an unchangeable "icon." (The Languages Of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought. ed. G. S. Rousseau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 297-98.)

This theory opposed the idea that all men were born with the same natural abilities and characteristics, and that environment and educational opportunities alone shaped man' s character as well as his particular mind and talents. Providing the depiction of moral and the beginning of psychological analysis and evaluation was stimulated by the study of man on the anthropological level and by the rational, scientific approaches of anatomy and physiology. Given the commitment to the study of man which characterized the epoch, it was only natural that the increasing preoccupation with man' s existence and with explaining the "vital phenomena" of life should lead to the study of the "whole man." With this development, the concrete external began to assume an ever-increasing significance in the total structure of man; it provided a new means of understanding man and in turn a new means of character presentat Activities related to medicine thus also, played an important role in Masonic undertakings in Russia, although they are often overlooked. On a theoretical level, benevolence, a pertinent tenet of the Craft, figured in the work of many physicians of the time. But the practical implication of Masonic theories for the development of medicine went even further. The need to consider Nature and Man in their harmonious interrelationship is reflected in a common Masonic parallel between the doctor and theologian. Both medicine and theology are theoretical and practical; the theologian's theory is the revealed world and that of the physician is the laws of nature. A tale found in the papers of the eighteenth-century Russian Freemasons demonstrates their ideas about interconnectedness of body and soul: A man came to a hospital and asked the physician if there was a medicine to cure his sins. Without hesitating, the physician gave the man a detailed recipe: take obedience, prayers, and patience, the flowers of purity, fruits of good deeds, and grind them in the pot of silence; and filter them through the sieve of reasoning; then pour into the pot of humility; add water from the prayerful tears; light the fire of godly love; cover with charity, and when the light intensifies, cool down; add salt of brotherly love; and consume with the spoon of repentance; and you will be absolutely healthy. (NIOR, fond 237, carton 33, folder 9, 22-26. )

Instead of separating mind and body, as Descartes had done, the Masonic objective was to incorporate the spiritual into the material. Freemasons tried to establish a correlation between cognitive, emotional, and physiological changes in human development. The intention of Masonic medical theory was to prove that subconscious perceptions affect the mind and the body as a unity. If so, then the cure of the body and the cure of the soul were the same kind of activity, related to the phenomena of emotion, reason, and imagination that were coordinated in the individual organism. Schwarz told his students that Freemasonry could be considered as a general healing beeause it cured the diseases stemming from vice; and vice is from sin; and the sin is in the soul. (NIOR RGB, fond 14, folder 618,8 (Sbornik molitv, izrechenii, vypisok iz besed 1. A. Pozdeevai L. E. Schwarza, 1806-09).

As Karamzin put it in his Letters of a Russian Traveler, Why the moralists are not doing enough to make people better? That is because they [moralists] consider them healthy, and talk to them as to healthy people when they are sick, so then instead of wordy persuasions they [people] should have been given several rounds of a purgative. Disorder of soul is always a result of the disorder of the body. When in our machine everything is in a perfect balance, then all the vessels are in order and dutifully exude different fluids; in a word, when every part executes a function that was vested in it by Nature, then soul is healthy; then a man thinks and acts well; then he is wise and virtuous, elated and happy. (This part is not included in the English-language edition Karamzin, Letters of a Russian Traveller. For the quote in Russian, see Karamzin, Pis'ma russkogo puteshestvennika, 84.)

Freemasons viewed man as a composition of four worlds (or, four principles): divine, moral, intellectual, and emotional. Body and spirit were considered connected, balancing one another, allowing Man' s spiritual and material nature to achieve equilibrium, counterbalancing each other, creating the "universal harmony." The assumption that there was a strong relation between ethical values, morals, and soul contrasted sharply with mechanist and dualist assumptions. In his post-Cartesian enlightenment philosophy, for example, Christian Wolff divided imagination into components that were either subservient to reason (the ability to envision abstract concepts) or subservient to the passions (images that stir up feelings). In his lectures on aesthetics, Schwarz emphasized a transitional shift from the rational aesthetics of Boileau to the aesthetics of sensibility advocated by Ch. Batteux in his Les Beaux Arts reduits a une meme principe (1747). Schwarz was the first professor who lectured on Batteux in Russia. His students followed the lead. For instance, for Karamzin's indebtedness to Baneux, see Nebel, N. M. Karamzin, a Russian Sentimentalist, 88-90. Compare also H. Rother, N. M. Karamzins Europäische Reise: Der Beginn des russischen Romans (Bad Hamburg, Berlin, Zürich: Gehlen, 1968), 59-62, A. Mashkin, "Esteticheskaia teoriia Batteux i lirika Derzhavina," Vestnik obrazovaniia i vospitaniia (Kazan', 1916); /storiia estetiki, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1964), 376-89; Peter Brang, "A. M. Kutuzov als Vermittler des europäschen SentimentaJismiuses in Russland," Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie 30 (1962): 44-57.

In contrast, for Freemasons, emotion was connected to reason as well as to the imagination; they were coordinated in the individual organism. At the same time, it was a common understanding among eighteenth-century Freemasons that the mechanistic concepts that were embodied in the first three degrees of speculative Freemasonry were also applicable to the study of medicine. Since body and soul were a unity, health was regarded highly. In this life body was an instrument of soul, an essential vessel for thought and feeling, and it was necessary to educate people on how to make it work properly. Health had often been held as a supreme virtue, showing a living in accordance with nature. In contrast, the rational, scientific approaches of anatomy and physiology. Given the commitment to the study of man which characterized the epoch, it was only natural that the increasing preoccupation with man' s existence and with explaining the "vital phenomena" of life should lead to the study of the "whole man." With this development, the concrete external began to assume an ever-increasing significance in the total structure of man; it provided a new means of understanding man and in turn a new means of character presentation. See John Graham, "Character Description and Meaning in the Romantic Novel," Studies in Romanticism 5 (1966): 208-218. Edmund Heier, Studies on Johann Caspar Lavater, points out that since it was related to medicine, physiognomy was believed to supply a cornerstone and support for the philosophy of man in which improved public health would be indivisible from enlightened morality.

Freemasons viewed man as a composition of four worlds (or, four principles): divine, moral, intellectual, and emotional. Body and spirit were considered connected, balancing one another, allowing Man' s spiritual and material nature to achieve equilibrium, counterbalancing each other, creating the "universal harmony." The assumption that there was a strong relation between ethical values, morals, and soul contrasted sharply with mechanist and dualist assumptions. In his post-Cartesian enlightenment philosophy, for example, Christian Wolff divided imagination into components that were either subservient to reason (the ability to envision abstract concepts) or subservient to the passions (images that stir up feelings). In contrast, for Freemasons, emotion was connected to reason as well as to the imagination; they were coordinated in the individual organism. At the same time, it was a common understanding among eighteenth-century Freemasons that the mechanistic concepts that were embodied in the first three degrees of speculative Freemasonry were also applicable to the study of medicine. (FHL, R. William Weisberger, John Theopilus Desaguliers: Promoter of the Enlightenment and of Speculative Freemasonry (typescript. n. d.), 8. For instance, the idea that just like Sun was deemed the center of the solar system, the heart likewise operated as the nucleus of the human body.)

Since body and soul were a unity, health was regarded highly. In this life body was an instrument of soul, an essential vessel for thought and feeling, and it was necessary to educate people on how to make it work properly. Health had often been held as a supreme virtue, showing a living in accordance with nature. In contrast, sickness was a manifestation of God's wrath: "no illness might happen unless if sent to man from God as punishment, from which God did not create a special medicine or antidote... God also created a universal remedy from any illness."( NIOR ROß, fond 14, folder 690,4 ) Disease was deemed a result of the imbalance between material and spiritual, going too far in either direction of the body and spirit. As Schwarz pointed out, "[a]ncient philosophers defined that a human being consists of body, soul, and spirit, distinguishing illnesses into external and internal maladies." So when body was exhausted, then its spirit was affected too.Equally, when soul was not well, then mind could function normally. (NIOR ROß, fond 147, folder 102,91-J 11, Schwarz's lectures).

Accordingly, there had to be special techniques and medicine to cure the illnesses of soul that modern doctors could not even cure." Considering the interrelations between mind and body, Masonic doctors started interpreting, intellectualizing disease as an indication and result of disharmony. If illness was disharmony, to prevent it, Masonic tracts advised maintaining a balanced life: "Every malady can be prevented by modest and moderate way of living, especially in food, sleep, and daily exercise." (NIOR ROß, fond 147, folder 102. The had-written copy of the document was created on 8 October 1781. Judging by the number of Oerman words in the text, it was translated from Oerman.)

"Organic" or "harmonious" to Freemasons meant a coordinated and integrated whole, the organism adjusting to its environment both on a conscious and unconscious level (sensually, emotionally and mentally) with immediate psychological results. As Schwarz taught his students, the network of nerves connected organism to external reality. If disturbed by the outside irritants, nerves transmitted signals to internal functions. According to him, it was because of nerves that people perecived subjects: every part of human body had nerves to transmit information to the center in the brain. In the brain human beings had "a governor of the body, or mind," that created "images of the outside world" on the basis of this information. (NIOR RGB, fond 14, folder 378, 14-17; fond 147, folder 102,91,111).

This medical theory about the interconnectedness of material and spiritual and the organic nature of human organism was a substantial part of the Masonic thought. Medical contributions to social progress were to be found in health care issues, such as, for example, the founding and reform of institutions (such as hospitals), or in the introduction of new standards of professionalisation. This was a medical theory that drew on and influenced the structure of ideological processes, and did not depend on state decisions. Just as Novikov-published fictional work, Chrysomander, eine allegorische und satyrische Geschichte (1783), depicts a magus-king named Hyperion, who used alchemy to relieve the hardship of bis subjects, Freemasons in Russia wanted to be involved in pharmacology and medicine to relieve the hardsbips of people and, ultimately, with continuous experiments, to find a better eure for the illnesses of mind and body. It is as a part of the goal of inspiring a "Christian spirit" and curing bodies that Freemasons opened a pharmacy in Moscow. As Lopukhin pointed out, many people assumed that it was an "embarrassment" for the nobles to be involved in the book trade and the pharmacy. He, however, strongly disagreed." (OPI OIM, fond 398, opis' I, folder 24, 13.)

There is nothing nobler than book trade and pharmacy because these bring people only good." During the reign of Catherine the number of private pharmacies rose. In the last quarter of the century, St. Petersburg had at least three main and four collateral state-managed pharmacies and ten private. As William Tooke reports, the yearly salaries at the private pharmacies amounted to 6750 rubles a year, which could have been attractive for any foreign apothecary to take on a journey to Russia. However. the difficulty of introducing the new medical constitution and obtaining a sufficient number of expert physicians and surgeons remained until the ful1. scale commission by Zimmermann. The state-employed medical stuff received 800 rubles a year. Masons must help the humanity as much as possible, insisted Lopukhin, because it was "suffering from maladies, even through the loss of OUf property, trying to prepare the best medicine that would be different from the one prepared in other places driven by profit." To accomplish this task, ''the best foreign apothecary, Weinheim was invited." Anyone could use a Masonic pharmacy. Those who had money paid the regular price, while many poor received their medicine for free. Weinheim's reputation became so well­ established that even after Novikov's arrest and the dissolution of Masonic lodges in Russia his Moscow pharmacy was still considered the best. Another influential Masonic apothecary was doctor Frenkel', who received the permission of the government to open bis Moscow pharmacy in 1785. (NIOR ROB, fond 147, folder 6,41, letter from Trubetskoi to Rzhevskii, 30 July 1783).

Frenkel's pharmacy seemed to face a promising future as a channel through which the idea of universal therapy could be made available to a larger public and supply Masonic circles with an attractive profit It was Frenkel' who was the first in Russia to import and prepare the so-called "Hoffman" drops, one of the most popular remedies in Russia. Frenkel' claimed to have received a recipe for making gold. The recipe that he sent to Wöllner turned out to be copies of the information contained in the book Annulus Platonis, a recommended reading for all Rosicrucians. But Frenkel's reputation did not suffer: he remained the authority on special prescriptions well into the nineteenth century.849 His assistants, Bindgeim, Kube, Linrodt, Ben, and Einbrot, opened their own successful pharmacies after the dissolution of the Novikov-Schwarz circ1e, and greatly contributed to the foundation of the pharmaceutical science in Russia. Schwarz stated that medicine was an experimental science based on the tests of those who practiced the craft. Medical knowledge was aposteriori knowledge. It is not coincidental that the majority of the students who were sent abroad by Russian Freemasons studied medicine. According to the story that Lopukhin told the authorities in 1792, the main goal in sending young Freemasons abroad was to prepare experienced teachers and translators. However, the majority of the students were sent to acquire knowledge either in medicine (like Mikhail Bagrianskii, V. Ia. Kolokol'nikov, and M. I. Nevzorov) or chemistry (like A. M. Kutuzov). It is notable that in Berlin the meeting place of the Masons related to Russia was the house of the Russian envoy and Freemason M. Allopeus. Baron Schröder met there with Kutuzov and Bagrianskii on several occasions.

In 1792, Turgenev testified to the fact that sending students abroad on Masonic money had public benefit in view. The students' benefactors urged them to study chemistry, medicine, and natural history so that they could become "more easily apprenticed in the method and system of that order and become our laboratory assistants." Upon returning, these students were to become the assistants who would provide their knowledge and guidance "to other members of Rosicrucian circles," the majority of whom did not "practice chemistry and alchemy." Their mission was the one of the enlightenment. Lopukhin thought that by sponsoring students to study medicine and chemistry he was "performing an obligation of virtue in helping the poor and in assigning them to such profitable profession as medicine." But sending students to study medicine and chemistry was not a simple-minded philanthropie enterprise. According to Rosicrucian instructions, knowledge of chemistry was the preparatory step toward admission to their "holy science," alchemy. In an article in the Morning Light we find reference to alchemy as a science that, unlike modern medicine, provides a cure for "internal diseases affecting breathing, heart, blood, and stomach. " The article also claims that ''There are on this earth certain alchemistic adepts chosen by God who can cure the intern al diseases and vices by the means of universal or general medication. But out misfortune is that such righteous men are extremely rare." Sent to Berlin, A. Kutuzov was supposed to carry out praetical work in chemistry and alchemy under the guidance of a bankrupt merchant from Dresden, Du Bosque. Among the Rosicrusians, Du Bosque enjoyed special farne by his earlier association with Schröpfer, who, in the 1770s, had claimed to produce thunder and lightning and conjure dead spirits. Karamzin, Letters of a Russian Traveller, 84-86, offers several anecdotes to demonstrate that "al1 his [Schröpfer's] secret wisdom was only charlatanism" and makes parallel between Schröpfer and Cagliostro. Despite the dates 1789-1790 indicated in the book's tide, as A. G. Cross establishes, the letters were written as a novel later, in the beginning of the nineteenth century (in N. M. Karamzin: A Study of His Literate' Career).

Kutuzov obtained from his teacher various alchemie recipes by paying him huge fees and relayed them to Trubetskoi. In the spirit of Renaissance, alchemy occupied a medial position between the arts and the sciences, a position also occupied by medicine. Thomas Aquinas, to cite one example, variously calls alchemy an "operative science," a "mechanical art," and an "operative art." He ranks "medicine, alchemy, and moral [philosophy]" together, since they have practical use and pertain more to specific subjects than do such fields as metaphysics, physics, and mathematics. But he also groups alchemy with agriculture and medicine as technological pursuits subordinate to physics. In a letter dated 13 February 1790, Trubetskoi asked Kutuzov to seek the advice of his teacher whether a combination called N could be applied to his niece and Novikov's wife who was dying from tuberculosis.858 Kutuzov answered that N and another prescription he obtained from Du Bosque, were both "applicable to all diseases.“ At the end, Tolstoy's Pierre turns away from Freemasonry, because "seeking and vacillating, he had not yet found in Freemasonry a straight and comprehensible path. But for many people in Russia, like Prince Golitsyn, a Freemason and member of a famous pre-Decembrist Souza russkikh rytsarei (Alliance of the Russian knights), "the ancient science of Freemasonry led ... to the truth that arranged ... the attitudes of man to God, to man, and to nature. (Quoted in A. Ia. Gordin, "Donos na vsu Rossiu," Zvezda 6, 1990, 121.)

Although Catherine regarded Freemasonry as politically subversive from at least the mid-eighties, the majority of Masons in Russia proclaimed themselves to be above politics. They chose to concentrate on reforming the passions and morals of Masonic members, and rejected Voltairianism and extreme materialism in favor of achieving the ideal of the virtuous, enlightened man. The concern about the more extreme forms of Westernization of their country was not limited to Freemasons. Russian literature of the eighteenth-century presents endless examples of satires against Francomania and the petits-maitres from Kantemir to Fonvizin.

It was the path of inner, moral regeneration, and not of political action. But by doing so they offered a way out of the impasse of superficiality and autocratic rule by urging re­-education of the individual as a preliminary to the restructuring of society. In this manner the Russian educated elite involved moral concern into their critical thinking and analytical ideas. The accusation most frequently leveled by historians against Russian Freemasonry in the eighteenth century is that dangers of intellectual obscurantism and reactionary social and political philosophy were inherent in the theosophical view of man and the universe which it introduced. But as we established, the intellectual position taken by the Freemasons in public, their emphasis on moral regeneration and self­ betterment, was the ideology of the Enlightenment in search of richer experience in the wider and deeper realms of Man's inner world and the ultimate mystery of Nature. Examination of Masonic theories reveals the paradox of the immediate and total acceptance of romantic idealistic philosophies (and literature ) while retaining a rationalistic and Enlightenment form of thought. In awakening and cultivating moral and religious sensitivity, Freemasonry on this level converged with Sentimentalism which was beginning to replace c1assic formalism. What appealed to the generation of young Russians in this reworked and adapted body of ideas was not the radical novelty or the originality of the thoughts and sentiments expressed in Freemasonry' s philosophy, but rather its familiarity. The Masonic attitude expressed through the medium of printed, spoken, and written word and the idealistic credo reiterated the values and ..feelings" that were already circulating in the educated society. Freemasons' influence on Russian society was both ideological and practical. They worked in an intellectual environment shaped by the forces of the Enlightenment. Freemasons' Enlightenment in Russia was not a formed system of great scientific originality but rather one of elaboration, popularization, and the dissemination of a worldview feit to embody the best and the most useful ideas. Just as in the West, Russian sentimentalism was built on Enlightenment philosophy in exploring the relationship between the self, a political and social order, and nature. Just as in the West, it examined the legitimacy of the subject, as a source of aesthetic and moral judgments. Just as in the West, it displayed an interest in biography, history, and folk tradition as much to trace how a particular state of affairs came about, as to seek answers in the past to the questions of the present. (Andreas Schonle,"The Scare of the Self: Sentimentalism, Privacy, and Private Life in Russian Culture, 1780-1820," Slavic Review 57.4: 723-746.)

By the end of the century, Russians had already been prepared emotionally and intellectually for the theories of sentimentalism. The Freemasons' search for divine and moral perfection in the individual and emphasis on religion and imagination was reflected in the idea that true philosophical knowledge should be based on the profound unity of all things in nature, and the insistence that the creativity of the spirit is a vital element of the humanity in a human being. These ideas appealed to the Russians because they fitted in so well with what they needed and seemed to give a complete synthesis of the emotional, sentimental, and strictly philosophical issues. Many young Russian intellectuals believed that in Freemasonry they had found what they wanted: a philosophy that would provide them with a metaphysical basis for their own ideas of Russian nationality, and for a new cultural and intellectual synthesis that was both peculiarly Russian and universal. Eventually, from religious mysticism and the rhetoric of self-improvement Freemasons in Russia turned to a patriotic assertiveness: Sincere love for the fatherland prompted in us the eagerness to try to become its worthy sons; and with this intention, we ventured to undertake the sharpening of our reason together with purification of our morals. The place in which we find ourselves in no small way helps us to carry out this double task, but our free will is the main motive for it and the most reliable support. Thus the subject of their concern was no longer the private world of feelings and sentiment alone, but also a larger entity called the fatherland and the civic society of which they regarded themselves as citizens. Expanding on the idea that there was so much variety in human and historical phenomena that it was utterly impossible to comprehend them in abstract and general terms alone, Freemasons in Russia viewed the process of betterment of the human beings in an organic manner. Applied to nationality, this meant that each human being, as well as "nations" had a soul and a body, and an individuality, which was expressed in its history, literature, religion, art, customs, and especially, in the language.

In Part 5 then we research the political implications of the above activities.
 
 

E. European Freemasonry P.1.

E. European Freemasonry P.2.

E. European Freemasonry P.3.

E. European Freemasonry P.5.
 

Archival Sources

Russian Federation

Nauchno-issledovatel'skii otdel rukopisei Rossiiskoi gosudarstvennoi biblioteki (NIOR RGB) [Manuscript Division ofthe Russian State Library, Moscow]

Fond 14, V. S. Arsen'ev collection of Masonic manuscripts
Fond 147. S. S. Lanskoi and S. V. Eshevskii collection ofMasonic manuscripts Fond 178, Museum collection
Fond 237, D.I. Popov collection

Otdel rukopisei Natsional'noi rossiiskoi biblioteki (OR NRB) [Manuscript Division of the Russian National Library, St Petersburg]

Fond 487, N. M. Mikhailovskii collection
Fond 550, Principal collection of the manuscript books

Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov (RGADA) [Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents, Moscow]

Fond 8, Kalinkin Dom and Files of Crimes against Morality
Fond 8, opis' 1, I. P. Elagin papers
Fond 10, Private Office of Catherine II
Fond 17, Science, Literature, Art
Fond 168. Relations of Russian Sovereigns with Governmental Posts and with Officials

Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA) [Russian State Historical Archive, St Petersburg]

Fond 796. Chancellery ofthe Ho1y Synod papers (1721-1918)

Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI) [Russian State Archive of LiteratUre and An, Moscow]

Fond 191, Efremov collection
Fond 442, M. K. and T. O. Sokolovskii collection
Fond 1189, M. M. Kheraskov papers
Fond 1270, N. I. Novikov papers
Fond 1764. I. P. Elagin collection and papers

Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv (RGVA) [Russian State Military Archive, Moscow]

Fond 175, Masonic Lodges and Chapters (1781-1939)
Fond 1311, Knightly Orders (1785-1931)
Fond 1412k, Documentary materials of Masonic Lodges
Fond 1311, opis' 1-2, Documentary materials of Masonic Lodges (1755-1928)
Fond 730, opis' 1, Masonic Lodge Astrea

Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) [State Archive ofthe Russian Federation, Moscow]

Fond 1137, G. V. Vemadskii collection

Odel pis 'mennykh istochnikov gosudarstvennogo istoricheskogo muzeia (OPI GIM) [Division of Wrinen Sources of the State Historical Museum, Moscow]

Fond 17, Uvarov's personal collection
Fond 281, Document collection of the history of culture, science, and sodal movements
Fond 282, Document collection of the Museum of the Revolution
Fond 398, P. P. Beketov col1ection
Fond 440, I. E. Zabelin collection
Fond 450, E. V. Barsov collection

Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Tverskoi Oblasti [State Archive of the Tver' Region, Tver']

 Fond 103, opis' 1, folder 1169, collection of Masonic documents.

Great Britain

Archive and Library of the United Grand Lodge of England, Freemasons' Hall (FHL), London

Archive of the United Grand Lodge of England (including Letter-books, Minutebooks, Freemasons' Calendars, and General Correspondence)
Personal Papers of Eighteenth-Century Masons

British Library, Modern British Collections and Manuscript Col1ections, London

Add. 23,644-23,680, Correspondence and papers of General Charles Rainsford Sloane 3329 f. 142, Masonic papers
Add. 20645 ff. 190, 199,211-256, Papers relating to Freemasons in Italy and France .
Add. 29970, Proceedings of the lodge at the Thatched House Tavem (1777-1817) Add. 23675, Papers relating to Freemasonry (1783-1796)

Bodleian Library, Oxford

MSS, Dep. Bland Burges, Burges collection
MSS Clar. Dep. C. 346-47, Clarendon papers
Fld MSFP(2)-70-71, Somerville collection
MS Rawlinson C. 136, Rawlinson collection of Masonic manuscripts

National Library of Scotland (NLS), Edinburgh

Ms 3942, f. 301v., 1. Robison's ]etters
Ace. 4796 Box 104, A. Ramsay's papers
Adv MSS 22.4.13, W. Richardson papers

National Archive of Scotland (NAS), Edinburgh

MSS Seafield Papers GD 248/518/6 H.M., Letters of Cameron' s workers GD 1/620, Rogerson papers
GD 156/62 Elphinstone papers, Keith papers
Abercairny MSS, GD24/1826, Mounsey letters

Aberdeen University Archive (AUA), Aberdeen

MS 3064/B 198, J. Keith papers MS 3064/B 146, J. Keith papers MS 3064/B 335, J. Keith papers
MS 2711/1-12, Correspondence, family and estate papers of Keith family (155078)
MS 2707 1/l1l and 1/l/2, Documents of A.W. Keith Falkoner
MS 3163, Documents ofH. Godfrey
Ms 3295, Documents from Marischal Keith's Despatch [sic] Box

Archive and Library, Grand Lodge of Scotland, Edinburgh

 Minutes of the Grand Lodge of Scotland (1770-1800)

Glasgow University Library, Glasgow

 Ms Murray 503, ff. 5-6, William Poner, paniculars respecting Mr. Robison (1769-1774 )
 Davis WestOn, Slavica: an Exhibition of Books and Manuscripts from the University's Collections (1990)

Latvia

Latvijas Valsts vestures arcivs (LVVA) [Latvia State Historical Archive, Riga]

Fonda 4038,2 apraksts (1394), documents of the Lodge zur kleinen Welt.

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