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  • “Un′utopia rosacrociana. Massoneria, rosacrocianesimo e illuminismo nella Russia settecentesca: Il circulo di N. I. Novikov” (A Rosicrucian utopia: Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and Illuminism in 18th-century Russia: The circle of N. I. Novikov), and: “Michail Speranskij e Aleksandr Golicyn: Il riformismo rosacrociano nella Russia di Alessandro I” (Mikhail Speranskii and Aleksandr Golitsyn: Rosicrucian reformism in the Russia of Alexander I)
  • Marc Raeff
Raffaella Faggionato, “Un′utopia rosacrociana. Massoneria, rosacrocianesimo e illuminismo nella Russia settecentesca: Il circulo di N. I. Novikov” (A Rosicrucian utopia: Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and Illuminism in 18th-century Russia: The circle of N. I. Novikov), Archivio di storia della cultura10 (1997), 11–276.
Raffaella Faggionato, “Michail Speranskij e Aleksandr Golicyn: Il riformismo rosacrociano nella Russia di Alessandro I” (Mikhail Speranskii and Aleksandr Golitsyn: Rosicrucian reformism in the Russia of Alexander I), Rivista storica italiana111: 2(05 1999), 423–75.

Few historians now would disagree that a major revolution occurred in the history of Western civilization with the development of modern science. Whatever its pre-history in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, the scientific revolution, symbolically associated with the names of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, marked the beginnings of a dynamic development in the intellectual life of the "West" that culminated in the triumph of the so-called first industrial revolution in the 19th century and has ever since continued at an increasing tempo and spread to the entire globe. In somewhat simplified terms, this radical turn may be characterized as anchoring a rational (scientific) understanding of nature and a broadly secularist approach to cultural and political issues. It meant jettisoning traditional beliefs deeply anchored in religious (theological) notions about the nature of the universe and of man's place in it. Such a drastic innovation (or "modernity") was not accepted without hesitation, qualms, and resistance by elites or by the general population. Consequently, alongside the "triumphant march" of the modern there was not only resistance and rejection, but also suggestions of alternative paths that endeavored to meld the new science with traditional preoccupations concerning man's spiritual and moral existential dimensions and his relationship to a divine order of the universe.

In recent decades, scholars have rediscovered these latter aspects of Western intellectual history, aspects that had been ignored or covered up by the triumphalist historiography of liberal secularism and rational science. This rediscovery, initiated a century ago by Pierre Duhem, who pointed to the scholastic and theological roots of modern scientific thinking, has been reinvigorated thanks to the works of Alexandre Koyré, Frances Amelia Yates, Robert Lenoble, Harry [End Page 434]Austryn Wolfson, and many others. 1These scholars have drawn our attention to the fact that, along with mathematics and empirical physics, there was another intellectual approach – a naturalist and organicist one that drew on neo-Platonic, hermetic, and Pythagorean (and cabalistic) speculations. They demonstrated their importance not only for the thinking of a Pico della Mirandola, Paracelsus, or Tycho Brahe, but for Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz as well. Yates, in her book The Rosicrucian Enlightenment(1972), has shown that interest in such speculations could well coexist with rigorous science and an "enlightened" (i.e., individualist, liberal, and reformist) outlook. In the guise of Freemasonry, it often was a significant undercurrent of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, especially outside of France.

Since, in the early 18th century, Russia had associated itself with Central and West European culture, it was natural for both aspects of the Enlightenment – the rational-scientific and Rosicrucian-Masonic – to be received as well. Modern Russian historiography has focused its primary attention on the rationalist, positivist, and "progressive" aspects of the country's history since Peter the Great. True, this ceased to be exclusively the case in the early 20th century, when much spade work was done on the history of Masonry and spiritualism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Revolution and the Soviet regime cut short these efforts; and whatever attention Soviet and émigré scholars paid to these trends was limited to their political role from a liberal, "Westernizing" (positivist) perspective. Quite strikingly, too, little attention was paid to the religious and ecclesiastical side of Russian intellectual history. Yet, clearly, the Church...

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