4. Family, Nation, and Freedom

Ivan Gagarin, the Swetchine Circle, and the Orthodox Road to Rome

The Countess d’Agoult, a prominent figure on the Paris social scene in the early 1830s, created a scandal when she left France in 1835 as the mistress of the Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt. For the next five years the couple traveled throughout France, Switzerland, and Italy, finally returning to the capital in 1840. Still connected to the aristocratic social circles that she frequented before her affair with Liszt, the countess was struck by a new religious tone she observed in the salons of Paris. While salonnières had earlier been satisfied to practice Catholicism without affectation, they now made a show of their devotion. “In the antechambers servants no longer said ‘Madame has gone out,’ but ‘Madame is at Vespers; Madame is at the sermon of Father such-and-such.’” For the countess, all this show of piety was a game played by young men and women who used their meetings at the fashionable churches of Saint-Roch and Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin as an occasion for romance with a religious twist. “Sighs and repentances, rosaries and scapulars: all of it a Catholicism of the bedroom, all of it angelic gibberish that would have made our mothers laugh.”1

Countess d’Agoult’s sarcasm extended to the salon of Sophie Swetchine, a Russian aristocrat who had lived in Paris since 1826 and maintained a salon in the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain that drew in the Catholic social and intellectual elite. According to the Countess d’Agoult, “Nourished by the sap of the flowers of the worldly paradise of Madame Swetchine, a whole swarm of converted converters spread into the world and filled it with a pious buzz.”2 The countess may have taken a jaundiced view of the fashionable piety of the day, but her remarks confirm the growing public interest in conversions during the July Monarchy, on display in literature and the theater, and in the work of Théodore Ratisbonne and the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion. Madame Swetchine was in fact a supporter of the congregation, assisting at the baptism of Eugénie Foa at the school on the rue de Regard, not far from her apartment on the rue Saint Dominique. In this chapter I will focus on Ivan Gagarin, the most prominent of the “converted converters” who emerged from the Swetchine circle. As with all the converts in this book, Gagarin’s religious choices involved long and painful struggles with himself, and with his family and friends. But his conversion brings into sharper focus the broader historical and international context within which religious liberty was being exercised in the post-revolutionary world. Gagarin’s intense relationship with Madame Swetchine highlights as well the role that women frequently played in mediating conversions, and the ways in which gender could shape the experience of religious liberty.

Gagarin’s conversion parallels in many ways the story of the Ratisbonne brothers. Like them, Gagarin embraced the right of the individual conscience to decide on the path that would lead to personal salvation. For Ivan Gagarin, as with Théodore and Alphonse Ratisbonne, baptism was a traumatic family event that led relatives to accuse him of abandoning them, despite his efforts to reassure them of his continuing love. Like the Ratisbonnes’, Gagarin’s conversion was based in part on a critical assessment of the religion of his family and nation, which led him to a career aimed at their conversion and salvation. For Gagarin, however, choosing Catholicism was also a political decision arising from his critique of the autocracy of Nicholas I (1825–1855). From the perspective of this Russian diplomat, concerned with the future of his country, the Roman Catholic Church as he came to know it in Paris in the 1840s was not a repressive bastion of conservatism but an institution that managed to reconcile freedom and authority, individual and community, innovation and tradition. Gagarin fits nicely into the category of “romantic Catholics,” described by Carol Harrison as seeking “a Catholicism that would be expansive, dynamic, and glorious.”³ As we will see in the following chapters, Félicité Lamennais, George Sand, and Ernest Renan shared some of these hopes but came to different conclusions, rejecting Catholicism as incompatible with human freedom. Gagarin’s conversion shows us an alternative vision of Catholicism, which the Swetchine circle embraced as the best hope for both personal salvation and the reconciliation of liberty and order in the post-revolutionary world. Following Gagarin on his road to Rome, which ran through Paris in the 1830s, can help us grasp the ambiguity and irony of the Catholic engagement with liberty.

Gagarin’s conversion can be traced through three periods in his life, starting in 1833 with his arrival as a young diplomat in Munich, where he first questioned his religious and political commitments. In 1838 Gagarin’s career brought him to Paris, where he was a regular participant in the salon of Madame Swetchine, who played a key role in his Catholic education and whose private chapel was the site of his baptism in April 1842. This dramatic step, however, was not the last one taken by Gagarin, who moved deeper into the Catholic world when he joined the Jesuits in 1843, beginning a third stage in his conversion in which he devoted himself to the reconciliation of Orthodoxy and Catholicism. For Gagarin, the healing of this rupture in Christianity would allow Russia to embrace on a collective level the freedom he had found for himself in the Swetchine circle of Paris.

Posing Questions: 1833–1838

Ivan Gagarin was born in Moscow in 1814 and raised in an atmosphere of privilege and piety. His father, Prince Sergei Ivanovich Gagarin, was a grand master at the Russian court while his mother, Varvara Mikhailovna, came from an old boyar family. Gagarin’s early education was managed by a French tutor, apparently a religious skeptic, but his mother also exerted a great deal of influence. Those who recalled his mother in later years described her as extremely devout, a characterization confirmed in the extensive correspondence she carried on with her son in the 1840s as he struggled with his religious identity. In an autobiographical fragment written after his conversion sometime in the 1850s Gagarin recalled his childhood as marked by “hard work for ten hours a day, and a severe surveillance that kept me from the shameful degradation that comes with vice.”4 There is no way to know if Gagarin was really compelled to work for ten hours a day, but the reading list he carefully maintained in his childish scrawl starting at the age of seven does indicate an environment that emphasized study and moral reflection, a regime that seems to have produced an earnest young man.⁵ Gagarin’s family routine normally meant winters in Moscow and summers on the family estate of Dankovo, home to some of the five thousand serfs that belonged to his father. This pattern was broken for three years in 1820, when his father’s health led the family to western Europe, where they lived for three years in Germany, France, and Italy.6

Figure 6. Ivan Gagarin in the 1830s. © Compagnie de Jésus-Archives jésuites, Vanves

Although Gagarin briefly attended Moscow University his curriculum vitae and autobiography suggest that it was his departure for Munich in 1833 at the age of eighteen that marked the end of his childhood.⁷ For the next two years Gagarin worked as a diplomat in Munich, followed by a year in Russia and shorter assignments in Vienna and London. Throughout this period Gagarin struggled to define a purpose for himself that would satisfy both his desire for personal integrity and his quest for some grander mission, a task he carried out in the company of friends and colleagues, many of whom shared his questions even while they moved toward different answers. A few months after arriving in the Bavarian capital, where he worked as a junior diplomat for his uncle Gregorii, the Russian ambassador, Gagarin began keeping a journal that he maintained, with significant gaps, until 1842. The journal, along with surviving correspondence and autobiographical fragments, reveals a young man in search of himself, in many ways a typical member of the romantic generation, ambitious but confused, anxious about his place in the world, drawn to poetry but also to politics, a religious skeptic but also a religious seeker.8 Gagarin fits very well into the context of religious doubt described by Victoria Frede as a defining characteristic of the Russian intelligentsia of this period. Gagarin and his colleagues were convinced that “the calling of every person was to identify the deeper meaning that underlies nature and history, the divine essence or purpose behind the world’s infinite diversity.”⁹ This quest could lead back to Orthodoxy, as in the case of Dostoyevsky, or to atheism, as with Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov, principal figures in Frede’s study. In Gagarin’s case, which was not unique, it led him to Roman Catholicism.¹⁰

Gagarin’s sense of inadequacy is apparent in his first journal entry in May 1834, where he challenges himself to “leave the passive state and take an active role. In place of submitting to ideas, think for yourself and produce them.”¹¹ This desire for an actively engaged and internally generated self recurs constantly over the next several years and may reflect the influence of Victor Cousin, whose work he read and who was much discussed by Gagarin and his friends in the 1830s. Cousin preached the importance of “a man who makes himself, a man who has a will, who is his own source of life” and was critical of “moderns” who are “filled with anxiety because they have not made for themselves a self that persists. They are not themselves, they are dispersed in everything that surrounds them.”¹²

Gagarin was concerned with his passive personality, his apparent weakness of will, but this anxiety was accompanied by another and related fault that he observed when he looked into himself. In order to be a “complete man” he would need to overcome the internal conflicts that divided intelligence from will and left him paralyzed and unable to act: “In a complete man, there is a mysterious unity, whether you call it the goal of his life, the vow of his heart, the appetite of his faculties, his moral thought, his ideal, it is nevertheless true that this unity governs him entirely, and through him rules over nature and society. . . . Knowledge, Will, Action, there is the triangle on which one can build with confidence. To know what one wills, and to do what one wills.”¹³ In this entry, and in similar passages from 1834, Gagarin adopts the distancing technique of the third person, reflecting on the problems of “man,” but in a long entry of July 1 he brings this analysis to bear precisely and severely on his own life: “Time is flying away. When I stop to look, the future appears to me more and more distant and difficult to attain, and the past no longer exists. I am taking a first step, I have only begun to see, and perhaps what I do see deceives me. A need for action devours me like a fever, like a poison. How to explain this inadequate present, this thirst for the future, this unhappiness of the moment, this hope, this faith that reason ought to temper, at least a little? In just one month I will be twenty? And what then? Where am I? What have I done? If I continue down this path, where will I be at the end?”14

Gagarin’s reflections in the spring and summer of 1834 present a passive and divided self, but on at least one occasion he recalls moving beyond such doubts to embrace a nihilistic view about his family relations and religion. “I became an atheist. . . . I acquired ways of looking at things that I would not wish on my cruelest enemy; for example, my manner of viewing relations with parents and women.”¹⁵ Gagarin is discreet about the nature of his scornful attitudes, but his comments suggest someone who was not only dissatisfied with himself, but in despair.

Gagarin’s unhappiness and anxiety are palpable, but they are balanced by his active engagement in seeking a way out of paralysis and disunity, evident in the very fact of keeping a journal. This sense of hope is evident in Gagarin’s effusive reaction to Goethe’s two novels that trace the apprenticeship and journeyman years of Wilhelm Meister. “[Goethe] is a sublime hierophant, rather than a mere thinker, a mere individual capable of regulating his activity. In our age Reason has no future unless it has received its baptism, its initiation from you. You the Great All through which all unities must pass in order to be formed and which contains all of them in embryo. I have begun to know you, so take me as your disciple, reveal yourself to me in entirety!”¹⁶ Gagarin was drawn to Goethe not as a “mere thinker” but as a writer capable of revealing the sacred mysteries that could lead to the formation of a coherent self. His reference to the sacred here is vague, indicating religious aspirations but no sense of how they might be fulfilled. But Goethe’s novels, particularly the first of them, offered him hope nonetheless, insofar as they traced the journeys of young men from youth to maturity, in which “error and suffering are justified as indispensable to the self-formation and self-realization of the mature individual.”¹⁷ Goethe’s novels, which helped establish the genre of the bildungsroman, thus provided Gagarin with a sense that his current state, as painful as it was, was also a necessary stage in a life that would lead him ultimately to his ideal of becoming a “complete man.”

Gagarin engaged in an extended introspective analysis in Munich, but he was not merely self-absorbed, for his journal and memoirs for this period include as well reflections about family, religion, and society. From these entries it becomes clear that Gagarin’s self-criticism and quest for personal integration resonated with a critique of the institutions that had shaped his youth, and vague hopes for some better future. Just after the passage in his memoirs where he recalls the “severe surveillance” and ten-hour workdays of his childhood he breaks into an extended meditation on his desire for liberty: “I felt a natural horror for everything that resembled oppression and tyranny, and every time I witnessed or heard anyone talk about such a thing, my heart boiled over with indignation and anger. In the ideal world that I imagined, freedom meant the overthrow of all material and external obstacles to happiness, and I believed that once these were removed, nothing could prevent us from being perfectly happy: a golden age, a paradise would exist on earth. But when it was a question of descending to the real world, I met many obstacles, and had no understanding of what liberty could be.”18 Gagarin’s comment can be read as a reaction to his family life, but also as a muted critique of the autocratic conditions in Russia under Nicholas I. In his journal Gagarin never overtly criticizes Russia, perhaps because he feared it would be read by someone other than himself, a point he makes in one of his entries. But while there is no evidence of revolutionary sentiment, Gagarin was deeply concerned with the political events of the day, and with the major questions that preoccupied political thinkers in the wake of the French Revolution. The basis for political legitimacy, the danger and appeal of democracy, the threat of revolution, and the role of the bourgeoisie were among the issues he pondered, with the help of writers including Tocqueville, Ancillon, and Jouffroy. His comments on legitimacy imply a position critical of the autocracy of Nicholas but not of monarchy, which might well be a legitimate form of government, assuming it was devoted to the rule of law. “A serious, important, and I would say almost mysterious question: the origins of legitimate power. Who is the sovereign? The question seems easy to resolve. The legitimate sovereign is the laws, and whoever is at the head of the government must rule through the laws, which are above him. Power exercised by a single man if this man uses it to govern through law is a thousand times more legitimate than that which arises from the people, when they place themselves above the law.”¹⁹ Gagarin’s analysis of politics in this passage indicates his concern that democratic government, as demonstrated in the French Revolution, could be as autocratic as the tsarist regime.20 François Rouleau, who edited Gagarin’s journal, characterizes him as a conservative, but I see him more as a liberal in the tradition of the “juste milieu” of Guizot, in which constitutional monarchy, limited suffrage, and representative institutions define an ideal government. Gagarin’s liberalism was combined with a passionate devotion to Russia, a romantic nationalism that offered him a possible solution to his personal crisis. This connection is apparent in his entry of September 1834, where he breaks into a celebration of his fatherland immediately after a moment in which self-doubt seems about to overwhelm him:

Why, insensitive to what surrounds me, do I lack the passion to pursue a noble goal, or beautiful and useful ideas, which would let me live every day, every second, with my entire being. O my fatherland! No, my devotion for you is not extinguished. It begins again to warm and enlighten my heart. It is to you, my fatherland, that I dedicate my life and thought. My studies, my labors, my life, all will be consecrated to you. O Russia, the youngest of the sisters of the European family, your future is beautiful, great, worthy to inspire the most noble hearts. . . . Now is the time for you no longer to be looked upon as the youngest of the family, for you to walk equally with the others, for you to leave behind your youth and become an adult, rich, enlightened, and happy.²¹

The juxtaposition of these sentiments of alienation and patriotism suggests the intimate connection between Gagarin’s personal and political anxieties, tied together by a concern for growth, maturity, enlightenment, and liberty. Here again his concerns match those of his Russian contemporaries, for whom personal religious stances necessarily carried political implications.²² Gagarin’s prayer-like evocation of Russia, with the nation standing in for God as an object worthy of total devotion, illuminates the powerful religious dimension to his quest for personal and political coherence.

As he contemplated religious questions, and their links to his personal development and political commitments, Gagarin was influenced by two important figures, Friedrich von Schelling (1775–1854) and Peter Chaadaev (1794–1856). Both were friends of Gagarin, intellectuals known for their personal charisma as well as their expansive philosophical systems. Gagarin was gratified by their attention and esteem, encouragement that gave him growing confidence as he continued to grapple with his personal and political doubts. Schelling’s long and distinguished career as a philosopher had led him to the University of Munich in 1827, an appointment that was part of King Ludwig I’s plan to make it a center of German intellectual life. Although it is not clear how carefully Gagarin studied Schelling’s particular version of German idealism, he was an active participant in his circle of friends in 1833 and 1834. Schelling was known as a charismatic teacher, brilliant in conversation and good humored.23 Gagarin came into contact with him at a point in his career when he had turned toward religion, working to reconcile his idealist philosophy with Christianity.²⁴ From Schelling Gagarin learned that history could be understood both as a theogony, in which God’s manifestation of himself through the mythological systems of the world culminated in the New Testament, and a psychogenesis, in which the human spirit came to understand itself.²⁵ This effort to reconcile God’s self-realization with human consciousness involved what Jerrold Seigel has called “a complex dialectic of determinism and liberty,” which in the end could be brought together only through a kind of “mystical consciousness.”²⁶ Schelling’s speculative vision of movement from alienation to unity, a process fully encompassed in an Absolute that could be identified with the Christian God, provided a broad philosophical and theological framework that resonated with Gagarin’s personal history. In the context of Schelling’s philosophy, Gagarin’s quest to become a “complete man” was more than a personal desire for integrity and coherence and was linked to the history of the universe, and of God’s plan for ultimate unity and reconciliation.

Although rumors that Schelling had converted to Catholicism circulated as far as Paris, he in fact remained a Protestant throughout his time in Catholic Bavaria, where he sought to avoid religious controversy by presenting his ideas with a philosophical vocabulary.²⁷ In a similar manner, during this period of his life Gagarin remained nominally within Russian Orthodoxy and kept his distance from either Protestant or Catholic Christianity. In one passage from 1834 he suggests that orthodox religious solutions are not available in the modern age, which must find moral principles through philosophy, which presumably referred to the reflections of Schelling but may have indicated as well his reading of Cousin and Jouffroy, who adopted a similar position. “In the century in which I was born most men unfortu-nately are no longer attached to serving God. . . . I would seek in vain to find my moral obligation in religion: we have broken with it; its voice is foreign to us. But moral law, certainty in our principles, and fixed rules of conduct are the primary needs of man. . . . We cannot hope to find moral law in religion; so let us try to find it in philosophy.”28 Looking back on this period in the 1870s, Gagarin recalled his first two years in Munich as a period when he “became used to the idea of an impersonal God, which was simply another way of professing atheism. The society in which I lived, far from combatting these tendencies, encouraged them. . . . I was never so far from religious ideas than my first two years in Munich.”²⁹ During his first years in Munich Gagarin was drawn at times to German idealism, atheism, and pantheism, without finding in any of these systems answers to his religious quest. Christianity, formerly the source of moral law, was an outmoded religion, but philosophy had yet to offer any substitute that could satisfy the human heart.

In 1835 Gagarin was called back to Russia and spent a year in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where he combined his work in the Foreign Ministry with intense conversations with the intellectual elite about contemporary literature, philosophy, and religion. At the urging of Schelling Gagarin became involved with the circle surrounding Peter Chaadaev, a key figure in Russian intellectual life, and the person responsible for challenging his new friend to consider the ways in which religion had shaped the trajectory of Russian history.³⁰ In the first of his philosophical letters, published in Moscow in 1836, Chaadaev unequivocally condemns Russia’s entire past as futile and empty, a catastrophic situation resulting from the schism that separated the Orthodox Church from Rome in the eleventh century. “[Providence] seems to have given no thought to our destiny. . . . We are alone in the world, we have given nothing to the world, we have taught it nothing. . . . While Christianity was majestically advancing along the path traced for it by its divine Founder and drawing whole generations after it, we did not move, for all that we called ourselves Christians. While the entire world was rebuilding itself, we constructed nothing, but went on squatting in our thatched huts. Christians though we were, Christianity did not ripen us.”³¹ Chaadaev’s letter had an electrifying impact on the Russian intelligentsia; Alexander Herzen described it as “a shot that rang out in the dark night.”³² It also provoked a quick reaction from Nicholas I, who immediately shut down the journal where it appeared and had Chaadaev declared insane and placed under house arrest. Gagarin was involved with Chaadaev at the moment when his new friend was at the center of the earliest quarrels between Slavophiles and Westernizers. This debate cast those who believed Russia’s future must be shaped by Orthodox Christianity and the peasant commune against those who advocated the rationalism and individualism that emerged from the Enlightenment in western Europe. According to Andrzej Walicki, Chaadaev played a paradoxical as well as seminal role in the origins of this dispute. Although from one perspective he was an ardent Westernizer, Chaadaev took a distinctive position when he idealized the Catholic middle ages rather than the liberalism that attracted most Westernizers. He was instrumental as well in the origins of Slavophilism, whose proponents adopted the terms in which Chaadaev condemned contemporary life but projected them on to the West. “Not Russia, but revolutionary and individualistic Europe, the Slavophiles insisted, was the land of disinherited people, unconnected by any bonds with no traditions to lean on.”33

Gagarin was intimately involved with the controversy around Chaadaev’s letter and defended him forcefully in the literary circles in which he traveled.³⁴ For the rest of his life Gagarin viewed Chaadaev as a key figure in his conversion, for even though the latter never abandoned Orthodoxy, he pushed his younger friend toward a positive evaluation of the Catholic Church.³⁵ But there is no evidence that Gagarin seriously contemplated conversion while in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1835 and 1836. Looking back on this period a few years later Gagarin insisted that at that time “I saw in the Catholic Church only a human institution; indeed, I believed that its time was past; I admired it as a magnificent ruin, I regretted it without thinking that it would have in itself the strength and life to conquer individuals and peoples.”³⁶ Gagarin may have taken a historical and instrumental view of the Catholic Church, but a letter from St. Petersburg dated January 14, 1836, with no named recipient and perhaps never sent, shows that he was still beset by the same personal doubts he felt in Munich. Gagarin here praises the “sublime idea of confession that Catholicism has brought to the world, but which it has also distorted.” Confession is needed at those moments when the soul “falls into a state of passivity” and requires the presence of a kindred spirit. Such moments can arrive even in the midst of a social gathering, when all at once “facts and things appear to you only as dreams and dust, while ideas, abstractions, become the real world . . . a singular state of the soul, which frees itself entirely from the action of the body.” Gagarin imagines a way out of this condition through a confessional relationship with someone who would share his own particular worldview, which he conceptualized through an analogy with the nation. “I think sometimes that in this world there are souls, just as in the world of reality and fact, composed of different nations, with languages unintelligible to each other. I believe that through our thoughts we are compatriots of one of these nations. Where is this mysterious fatherland? What are the laws we obey, in what climates do we live and breathe, from where do we come, where do we go, what do we do, who are we?”37 While it would helpful to know the intended recipient, Gagarin’s letter is nonetheless a comment on his psychological and spiritual mood during his time in Russia in 1836–1837. A young man at the start of a promising career, well-connected with the social and intellectual elite of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and fully engaged in the excitement that informed the political and literary discussions of the period, he was also continuing to probe himself, and to explore the ways in which he might connect to a “mysterious fatherland” that would provide him with laws to follow, air to breathe, and a coherent self.

The Salon of Madame Swetchine: 1838–1843

Ivan Gagarin left Russia to return to Munich in the winter of 1837 and over the next year worked briefly in Vienna and London. But in early 1838 he received a more permanent posting to Paris, where he was named the third secretary of the Russian ambassador to France. Very soon after his arrival Gagarin became a regular participant in the salon of his aunt Sophie Swetchine (1782–1857), a Russian aristocrat whose home had become a center for liberal Catholics, and for Orthodox visitors from her homeland.³⁸

Madame Swetchine was one of several Russian aristocrats who converted to Catholicism in the early part of the nineteenth century, a movement linked to the general spirit of religious experimentation and revival that swept through Moscow and St. Petersburg in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.³⁹ But Madame Swetchine’s religious sensibility had diverged from the mysticism that appealed for a time to Tsar Alexander and his social circle, including Swetchine’s close friend, Roxanne Sturdza. Her conversion in 1815 followed an extended period of independent study of the early church fathers and of ecclesiastical history, focusing on the differences between the Orthodox Church and Roman Catholicism, and on the issue of papal supremacy.⁴⁰ Her friend and confidant, Joseph de Maistre, ridiculed her for taking such an intellectual approach to her religious identity: “Never, Madame, will you arrive at your goal by the path you have chosen. You’ll exhaust yourself, you will moan, but without relief and without consolation. . . . Conversion is the result of a ‘sudden illumination’ according to Bossuet. There are innumerable examples of this, even among superior men most capable of reason.”41

Figure 7. Madame Sophie Swetchine. © Compagnie de Jésus—Archives jésuites, Vanves.

Despite this opposition from her close friend, Madame Swetchine insisted on the value of study, and of the liberty of a well-informed conscience, as the proper ground for conversion. “If one has reflected seriously, tested oneself, and obeys both duty and conscience in moving to another communion at the risk of one’s interests and personal attachments, one cannot, it seems to me, regret the sacrifice. One might say, with Gibbon, and with more justification than he had in writing the words: For my own part, I am proud of an honest sacrifice of interest to conscience.”⁴² Madame Swetchine’s conversion, based on the pursuit of ideas by a free conscience, provided a model that would later appeal to Ivan Gagarin.

Gagarin’s journal in the period after 1838 reveals someone more engaged with his work than he had been in his time at Munich. He read the newspapers and followed both domestic and foreign developments, carefully analyzed in his notes. But he continued as well to pursue the questions that had preoccupied him since 1833: how could he become a “complete” man, and how should such a person respond to the duties imposed by family, fatherland, and God, which might pull him in opposing directions? Perhaps because of his work as a diplomat, Gagarin continued to reflect deeply on the future of Russia and to develop his ideas along the lines he had begun considering in his conversations with Chaadaev. In his autobiography Gagarin recalled making constant comparisons between Europe and Russia and slowly arriving at a scheme that clarified for him the source of their differences. He saw in Europe a constant clash of doctrines, which rather than weakening its peoples was a source of truth and strength. “I loved this dualism which for every question proposed two doctrines, two contradictory opinions; truth seemed to me to flow from this battle. In Europe I found this dualism everywhere: in religion, politics, literature, the sciences, and the arts. Everywhere two opposed principles were a source of fecundity and life; I attributed the intellectual drabness of Russia to the absence of this dualism.” Gagarin’s reading and reflection led him beyond such abstractions to consider particular conflicts: Islam against Christianity, the Holy Roman Empire against the papacy, medieval heresies and Protestantism against Catholicism, Jansenists against Jesuits, the Enlightenment against Christianity. In all of these, Gagarin concluded, one term was constant, “the Catholic Church with its doctrine and hierarchy. From this it appeared evident to me that the Catholic Church was the pivot of European civilization.”43

Gagarin’s commitment to Catholicism in the late 1830s was still primarily intellectual, based on his analysis of religious history, and not connected to his affective life, to his desire to marry intellect and will. As an institution the Catholic Church might have redeemed Russia, but it did not offer a solution for Gagarin’s personal struggles. In the salon of Madame Swetchine he discovered an atmosphere that combined intellectual analysis and religious sensibility, a combination that became the basis for a dramatic choice about who he was that promised to satisfy both his sense of social mission and his search for personal integrity.

Madame Swetchine made an immediate impression on Gagarin. Soon after his arrival he became a regular visitor to her home, praising her as someone who “takes everything, every question, political, religious, literary, artistic, etc., in order to extract ideas that are elevated, grave, serious.”44 Reflecting on his experience a few years later, Gagarin recalled trying to discern a principle at work that would account for the atmosphere he found in the salon of Madame Swetchine.

[I followed] with an attentive ear the conversation in its unpredictable paths, trying to discover the hidden law by virtue of which this conversation, so free, so capricious in appearance, which seemed to obey no rule, always remained appealing and elevated. . . . There was in all of these minds a great deal of liberty, nothing which resembled anarchy or chaos. One felt the invisible presence of a doctrine common to everyone, respected in all of its consequences. This discovery was a revelation to me. I had no idea up until that point that an idea could exercise with such ease and authority its free empire over minds. It was not long before I noticed that this doctrine was the Catholic faith.⁴⁵

At Madame Swetchine’s Gagarin had discovered a place where freedom and authority could be reconciled, but how could such a marriage possibly work? In explaining the appeal of Catholicism, Gagarin contrasted the church’s authority with that of an autocrat, presumably with Nicholas I in mind. Catholicism was not experienced by the guests of Madame Swetchine as an external constraint, a crude imposition. Instead, it “penetrated into the will and the conscience,” so that Gagarin saw “for the first time minds that were fully free and diverse, submitting their judgments and opinions voluntarily to a law, a teaching that truly reigned over their souls.”⁴⁶

Madame Swetchine was just one of several women who maintained salons in the 1830s and 1840s, a period when they were still a vital element in the social and political life of Paris. Gagarin circulated easily among the homes of these women, including the Duchess of Rauzan and the Countess de Circourt. Although each had her own character, all of these salonnières saw themselves as mediators, providing forums for reconciling intellectual and political disputes that would otherwise threaten the authority and solidarity of the French “notables.” Like the salons of the Enlightenment, these institutions provided gathering places where elite women “achieved success by balancing and blending voices into a harmonious whole.”⁴⁷ By the time Gagarin entered Madame Swetchine’s circle in 1838 she had long experience in her role as a woman who presided over polite conversation and intellectual exchange among a select company. Her home was one of the “protected spaces for the reconciliation of differences whose neutrality was governed by the self-effacement and devotion to propriety of the salonnière.”48 In Strasbourg in the 1820s Marie-Louise Humann played a similar role in opening her home to Louis Bautain and his Jewish students, including Théodore Ratisbonne. Both Madame Swetchine and Mlle Humann encouraged the free exchange of ideas and the reconciliation of religious differences. For them this meant a movement into the Catholic Church, but not as a result of polemical arguments that would drive people away. They employed instead patience, prayer, and conversation as the way to touch the consciences of potential converts. The activities of Sophie Swetchine and Marie-Louise Humann suggest how a view of complementary gender roles inherited from the salons of the eighteenth century was adapted by Catholics as a means of negotiating the conditions of religious liberty they faced in the nineteenth century.⁴⁹

The freedom of the conversation in the salon of Madame Swetchine did not always lead to immediate and perfect harmony, for her visitors had sharply opposed views on a number of matters. French Catholicism in this period was riven by deep quarrels that divided Ultramontanists, devoted to papal authority, from Gallicans, who defended the autonomy of the French church.⁵⁰ Madame Swetchine struggled at times to preserve the peace between these factions, as when her friend the ultramontane Henri Lacordaire engaged in a six-hour argument with Father Duguerry, the curé of the parish of the Madeleine and “the most extreme Gallican in France.”⁵¹ Echoes of the bitter arguments of the early 1830s over the campaign of Lamennais to build an alliance between Catholicism and liberalism also still resonated in the salon of Madame Swetchine.⁵² Two of Lamennais’s most prominent supporters, Henri Lacordaire and Charles de Montalembert, were her close friends, and their involvement with the salon made it a center for a revised and more moderate form of liberal Catholicism.⁵³ Differences among Catholics were real, but it was precisely the free exchanges between them that he heard at Madame Swetchine’s that appealed to Gagarin.

Beyond encouraging open discussions, Madame Swetchine insisted on the central importance of freedom of conscience. In her view, such freedom was not incompatible with the acceptance of Catholic faith. Madame Swetchine summed up her position in which faith and freedom were reconciled by using the analogy of a moral code and the choice to be virtuous, for in both cases an accepted framework was a necessary precondition for individual liberty. “Why wouldn’t faith compel our intelligence, in the same way that morality compels our actions? Do we stop being free when we are virtuous? Why would we stop being free by being believers? Isn’t true liberty always experienced in a particular space? Doesn’t it always require a center that draws it and a base that supports it?”54 In light of this commitment Madame Swetchine was careful in her dealings with non-Catholics, avoiding any direct pressure on her friends and family, including her husband, who remained faithful to the Russian Orthodox Church.⁵⁵ In a letter to Gagarin in 1843, just as he was deciding on whether or not to become a Jesuit, Madame Swetchine insisted that such matters were between God and the individual soul. “As for me, my dear child, you know that without a specific mission to express an opinion, I would never say what I thought, and would never place myself between God and a soul!”⁵⁶ As Gagarin moved closer to a Catholic identity, he remained attached to an ideal of liberty, adopting a position similar to Madame Swetchine’s on the central importance of freedom of conscience. In an impassioned exchange with his close friend George Samarin, Gagarin defended religious liberty as a God-given right: “Never believe that I would think of violating your freedom. My friend, the kingdom of heaven is not like the kingdoms of earth. God never forces anyone to enter against his will. Nemo cogitur, nemo excluditur. [Compel no one, exclude no one.] In order to enter, you must want it, want it with a firm, constant, patient will. ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’ (Mark 8, 34) Freedom is the essential condition of man. . . . God, if he were to violate human liberty, would destroy his own work, he would break the foundation on which he has built the world.”⁵⁷ The Swetchine circle, with its cohort of former Mennaisiens and its openness to the language of liberty, might have provoked some animosity from ecclesiastical officials. But Madame Swetchine and her friends had rallied to the church after the condemnation of Lamennais in 1834 and never publicly challenged an official position.⁵⁸ They were, moreover, vigorous Ultramontanes, and insofar as they deployed the language of liberty in public forums it was in favor of the liberty of “cults” rather than “conscience,” which meant at the time a vigorous defense of the Catholic right to open secondary schools in competition with the state-run system.⁵⁹ In the Swetchine circle Gagarin had found a group that rooted the individual freedom he had identified as a central value at least since his time in Munich within the Catholic Church, which he saw as a source of European unity and Russian regeneration.

In another visit back to Russia in 1839 and early 1840 Gagarin once again became personally involved in the debates between Slavophiles and Westernizers, renewing his acquaintance with Chaadaev and with Samarin. As a result of this trip he would also have learned of the intensification of Nicholas I’s campaign against nonorthodox religions. During his time in Russia the tsar’s campaign against the Catholic Church in Poland was renewed, and an imperial decree deprived Russian apostates of their property and mandated that their children be raised in Orthodoxy regardless of their parents’ preferences.60 For Gagarin, the denial of religious liberty in Orthodox Russia in the early 1840s offered a sharp contrast with the freedom he found in the Catholic salon of Madame Swetchine.

Gagarin’s autobiographical notes about his conversion, apparently written in the late 1850s, confirm much of what we find in his correspondence of the late 1830s and early 1840s, and in other evidence as well. In addition to a concern with reconciling freedom and authority, both sets of documents show a deep involvement with the history of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, with the advantage going to Roman Catholicism, which had preserved an unbroken continuity with the church founded by Jesus Christ, mediated by the sovereignty invested first in Peter and then in all the subsequent popes. Doctrinal matters were also crucial, with Gagarin accepting the “filioque” of the Roman Church, whose credo insisted that the Holy Spirit proceeded from both God the Father and Jesus Christ, the Son. Jeffrey Beshoner is certainly right to emphasize the importance of Gagarin’s concern with theological issues in accounting for his conversion.⁶¹ But in the early 1840s Gagarin was also involved with men and women who were living intense spiritual lives and who had in the past converted themselves or were in the process of considering such a move. In addition to Madame Swetchine, in the early 1840s Gagarin became particularly close to two men whose religious crises resembled his own, Georges Samarin and Count Grigorii Shuvalov (1805–1859). These men do not appear in the autobiographical notes written in the 1850s, which in general focus on Gagarin’s historical analysis rather than his personal connections. Composed more than ten years after his conversion, these fragments reflect his preoccupation at that moment with the unification of Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, which had led him to found the Jesuit journal Etudes in 1855, originally dedicated to this project. The autobiography of Shuvalov and letters exchanged with Samarin give us a more personal view of Gagarin in the early 1840s and suggest that his move toward a Catholic identity was shaped by personal relations as well as a comparative historical analysis of the two churches.

Shuvalov and Gagarin met in Paris in October 1841 at a moment when both were close to a final determination to convert. But Shuvalov’s path toward Catholicism was different from the program of study and discussion that we have seen in the life of Gagarin. Shuvalov had spent most of the 1830s traveling through Europe with his wife, Sophie, and their two children. In 1834 while in Paris Shuvalov’s son was operated on for an abscess in his left leg, the first of a series of illnesses that would trouble the family over the next decade. The operation went poorly, and for six weeks the boy, eleven years old, suffered terribly, became emaciated, and was close to death. During this affliction Sophie Shuvalov prayed to God to take her life in order to save her son, a vow made just a few days before he began to recover. During her son’s illness she also invoked the same “miraculous medal” that had played such a prominent role in the conversion of Alphonse Ratisbonne. As her son recovered, however, Mme Shuvalov’s health deteriorated, and after years of debilitation and suffering, she finally died on February 10, 1841. During her illness, as a result of her son’s cure, and of her contacts with a number of Catholic clergy and converts, Mme Shuvalov came to accept Roman Catholicism, putting off her final abjuration only out of deference to her husband. She also tried to extract a promise from him that he would convert himself, which he refused to make.62

The death of his wife in 1841 threw Shuvalov into an extended religious crisis that concluded in January 1843, when he formally abjured Orthodoxy in favor of Roman Catholicism. It was in this period that he befriended Gagarin, who was in the midst of a spiritual crisis of his own. For the next several months they saw each other frequently, discussing their spiritual states and studying a number of works on the differences between the Roman and Orthodox churches, as well as Moehler’s Symbolique, a French translation of the German Catholic theologian’s account of the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism.⁶³ Their relationship went well beyond such intellectual exchanges, however, for it was in solidarity with his new friend that Gagarin renewed his participation in sacramental life. Shuvalov recalled sharing with Gagarin memories of his wife’s death, of his shame at having kept her from converting, and of his own desire to become a Catholic. As the anniversary of his wife’s death approached, Shuvalov decided to attend Mass and receive communion at the Orthodox chapel in the Russian embassy, and Gagarin agreed to join him. It had been four years since Gagarin had received communion, an absence based on his growing commitment to a Catholic identity, a situation shared by Shuvalov, who described himself as doubtful about the Orthodox Church but “not entirely Catholic. . . . We went to the holy table, in this Church where you deigned to remain captive, o my humble and glorious Savior! At this moment we were full of fervor and good will. The truth was our only goal, and we felt ourselves ready to sacrifice everything to obtain it. . . . We were ready to follow your inspiration, to remain in the Russian Church or to leave it. This communion was for us a final test, a final appeal to the truth.”64 Gagarin’s journal entry for this day suggests a less fervent disposition but confirms his sense of religious commitment and reveals the high religious standard he had established for himself: “God managed today to administer the Holy Mysteries to me. I pray and hope that they will help me to live a Christian life. I grieve that having intellectual faith, I did not feel the ardent faith of a pure repentant heart. I regret this, but I should not be depressed. A troubled heart hungering for purity is already the fruit of grace. I should pray for faith, but I cannot be depressed if it is not given to me instantly.”⁶⁵ Shuvalov, like Gagarin, was anxious about the persistence of doubt, about a lack of heartfelt faith that would sweep away all concerns, but both men were reassured by their spiritual counselor, the Jesuit preacher Father Xavier Ravignan, who also played a key role in advising Alphonse Ratisbonne after his conversion in Rome. For Ravignan, such doubts were an example of “spiritual dryness” familiar from the work of Catholic mystics such as Teresa of Avila. As such they were to be welcome as a sign of God’s love, a challenge to be faced and overcome by force of will, with spiritual peace as a final and hard-won reward. For Shuvalov such a decision in the end was driven by feeling more than reason, “because in us there is something more than mind, there is the heart that seeks happiness, and which has the right to it.”⁶⁶ In the months leading up to his conversion Gagarin was thus accompanied by a fellow-traveler who, while he came from a similar family background and had many of the same intellectual interests, was moved by personal tragedy more than study, and whose evolving religious identity had a powerful sentimental component. Gagarin had been moving toward a Catholic identity for several years, and in the end it is impossible to know with any certainty just what factors led him finally to convert in April 1842. But I want to suggest that the intense relationship with Shuvalov starting in October 1841 was an important precipitant. Certainly the atmosphere in the salon of Madame Swetchine was devout, but Gagarin and Swetchine both insist that they never talked about his conversion until the last minute. With Shuvalov, Gagarin seems to have been moving toward a more open and affective engagement with Catholicism, which he had already accepted on the basis of his doctrinal and historical study.

Letters exchanged with his friend Georges Samarin in 1842 provide another perspective on Gagarin’s evolving identity and reinforce the sense that his intellectual pursuits were now mixing with a more devotional religiosity. Many of their letters contain lengthy expositions of doctrine and church history, exchanges through which Gagarin was deepening and sharpening his arguments in favor of Roman Catholicism. But in a letter of August 1842 Samarin interjects a surprisingly contemporary note, acknowledging that he had read the pamphlet Gagarin had sent to him about the miraculous conversion of Alphonse Ratisbonne in January 1842. This account described how Ratisbonne had converted after several days of wearing a “miraculous medal” and saying the words of a prayer to Mary, actions he took as part of a wager with a friend to show how useless they would be in convincing him. As we saw in chapter 3, this story swept through Catholic circles in Paris, and in particular was preached from the pulpit of the church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires by Alphonse’s brother, Théodore, who was also a participant in the salon of Madame Swetchine. Instead of being persuaded by this miraculous account, Samarin was appalled by the mechanical nature of Ratisbonne’s conversion, in which his own will counted for nothing in the face of a supernatural act that overwhelmed him. “I confess to you frankly that in reading the history of Ratisbonne I experienced a feeling of terror, my heart was seized with fear and unease in regarding an irresistible force that takes possession of a man against his will, dominates him, strikes him down like the fate of the ancients and throws him into a state of supernatural exaltation. This is not how I understand the action of grace. It is impossible for me to sympathize with the order of ideas and beliefs within which this fact has occurred and been recognized. In the miracles of our Church I find nothing similar. It’s pure Catholicism.”⁶⁷

In his response to Samarin Gagarin briefly insisted on the credibility of Ratisbonne’s story but concentrated his defense of miracles by reference to those in the Bible.68 Gagarin was shocked by his friend’s assertion that miracles were simply natural occurrences that were interpreted as supernatural interventions by believers; he insisted on the facticity of the miraculous, on God’s willingness to intervene in human life outside of the normal workings of the natural world. And he pleaded with his friend to take up the same challenge that Alphonse Ratisbonne had accepted, to wear the “miraculous medal.” Samarin’s response was brief and blunt: “I don’t yet know how God should be adored, but I hope to know some day. For the moment, I am convinced it is not through the mechanical repetition of a prayer, nor in wearing a medal in which one does not believe. For my part, this would be an act of idolatry.”⁶⁹ Over the next two years the friendship between Samarin and Gagarin cooled considerably, and the correspondence broke off in 1844. Eventually Samarin joined ranks with the Slavophiles and engaged in bitter controversy with Gagarin starting in the 1850s over the religious future of Russia.⁷⁰ But as Gagarin moved toward Catholicism in 1842 he remained deeply attached to his friend, the only person he mentioned by name in the will he wrote in May of that year, just one month after his conversion: “I cannot keep myself from mentioning here in particular my friend Georges Samarin, who I hope will one day recognize the vanity of all systems derived from men, and will find peace of soul and true liberty of mind in the Catholic faith and the practices that it teaches.”⁷¹ In the months just before his final conversion Gagarin was deeply engaged with the religious struggles of close friends, one of whom eventually joined him, while the other moved toward Russian Orthodoxy. We have seen that Gagarin was intellectually serious and introspective as he contemplated moving across a religious boundary that involved a remaking of himself, and we have seen as well that he learned much about Catholicism in the social relations he formed in the salon of Madame Swetchine. The intellectual issues that Gagarin struggled with were also raised in the intimate relationships he formed with Shuvalov and Samarin, but in these friendships we see a personal and devotional element emerge, an affective dimension in his conversion that he discounted later in his life, but that was central to his religious journey in the 1840s.

In choosing a new religious identity Gagarin was accepting the truth claims of Roman Catholicism, but he was also reordering his social life, choosing new friends and a new family, and accepting as well a more personal relationship with God. But such choices did not come easily, for the family and friends of the old Gagarin challenged his new identity and tried to reclaim him as their own. As a result Gagarin’s conversion was both a break with the past and an occasion for struggling with it and against it, a process that lasted years and was never fully resolved.

Gagarin’s conversion on April 19, 1842, apparently came as a surprise to Madame Swetchine. In the weeks prior to his final abjuration Gagarin had been making the rounds of Parisian churches, listening to prominent preachers, as indicated by his notes on the sermons of the abbé Bautain, who spoke on the conversion of sinners and the return of the prodigal son at the parish of Saint Eustache during Holy Week, just prior to Easter, in March 1842. Bautain, who played a central role in the conversion of Théodore Ratisbonne, had moved from Strasbourg to Paris, where he was named a vicar general by Archbishop Affre. Bautain had accepted the papal condemnation of his major work, Philosophie du christianisme, but shared Gagarin’s conviction that Catholicism encouraged rather than suppressed liberty.72 Gagarin’s careful summary of the sermon on the prodigal son recalls many of the concerns that had preoccupied him over the last decade. In Gagarin’s notes we read that the prodigal son was in search of self-knowledge, which Christianity alone can provide. An “honest man” from a worldly perspective was in fact deluded about himself insofar as he did not acknowledge through gratitude and prayer his dependence on a sovereign God. And he was deluded as well in believing that he could accomplish his social duties without framing them within a broader relationship that included God as well as man.⁷³

Bautain’s preaching clearly struck a chord with Gagarin, for on the day after hearing about the prodigal son he asked Father Ravignan to help him make his final preparations to convert. Ravignan was the most prominent preacher of the time, replacing Lacordaire in the pulpit at Notre Dame, a post he held from 1837 until 1846.⁷⁴ From an aristocratic family in Bayonne, Ravignan had first pursued a career in law before joining the Jesuits, worldly experiences that allowed him to move easily in the highest circles of Parisian society in the 1840s. Although it is impossible to say exactly when Gagarin first met with Ravignan, their meeting in March 1842 produced a reading list of over forty books, a mixture of religious history, sermons, devotional works, and a healthy dose of Jesuit biographies.⁷⁵ But Ravignan’s relationship with Gagarin was much more than one between teacher and student. As he did with Alphonse Ratisbonne, Ravignan became a spiritual adviser who witnessed and encouraged Gagarin’s emerging Catholic identity.

We have little direct testimony about the immediate circumstances surrounding Gagarin’s conversion, what he referred to as his abjuration, which took place in the chapel of Madame Swetchine’s apartment on April 19. We know that his announcement of this move just two days earlier had led Madame Swetchine to ask for a delay while she consulted with Ravignan, so as to assure herself and her friends that the decision had not been made on the basis of a passing infatuation.76 One month after this momentous event Gagarin drafted a will that combines a sense of religious certainty with deep anxieties about the feelings of his parents, and about their salvation. After affirming his commitment to the Catholic Church, “out of which there is no salvation,” and vowing to set aside the nineteenth of each month as a day of recollection, he turns abruptly to family matters:

My father and mother are still unaware of my conversion or at least have only vague suspicions. I beg them to consider that I decided on this action only after a long internal struggle, a criminal resistance to the grace of God, and after several years of indecision and only with the goal of bringing my actions into harmony with my faith while in this world, and of making possible my salvation in the next. I beg them to forgive me the wrongs, both knowingly and unknowingly, that I have committed with regard to them, and for which I feel in my heart bitter sadness and violent regret, and above everything else I beg them to examine and with the most serious attention the motives that keep them in schism and separated from the communion of the Holy Catholic Church, in which alone they will be able to find true happiness in this world and the next. I make the same recommendation to my dear sister, to my brother-in-law and in general to all those who have for me feelings of friendship and affection.⁷⁷

Gagarin had found his way into the Catholic Church, but his “bitter sadness” and “violent regrets” for the wrongs he did his parents, along with his fears about their eternal salvation, indicate that he was still a troubled soul. Events over the next several months as his conversion became public knowledge only added to his inner turmoil. The coherent self he sought required more than an abjuration of Orthodoxy, it required a supportive family and social purpose that he seemed to have lost with his conversion to Catholicism.

Two months after his conversion, Gagarin left for an extended stay in Russia, carrying with him a handwritten personal “prayer for the Russians” that begins by affirming his devotion to the church, described through the conventional metaphors as a city on a hill, a lighthouse that calls to those at sea. The prayer then turns directly to Jesus, asking for his help in the trials he expects to face. Jesus is called on to shade him from the burning sun, to clothe him in the cold, to be a fence on a slippery slope, a port in a storm.78 There is nothing original in this language, but the piling up of metaphorical troubles nonetheless suggests anxiety about the coming trip, a sentiment that the coming months would show to be fully warranted.

In the summer and fall of 1842 Gagarin spent time both in Moscow and on the nearby family estate. In the city Gagarin again joined in the ongoing discussions between Westernizers and Slavophiles, but according to Samarin he was now much more openly critical of the Orthodox Church, “scattering to the right and left extracts of the works of Count de Maistre and Father Rozaven; preaching openly, freely, without hindrance his Paris Latinism.”⁷⁹ The story of Gagarin’s conversion was spread so widely that an old friend whom he hadn’t seen in years stopped him on the street to ask if he had changed religions. Gagarin was thus in a false position, comparable to what we observed with Jewish converts to Catholicism, unable to acknowledge openly his new faith, for as a declared Catholic he would be an outlaw, and particularly vulnerable since he was also still an official in the service of the Russian tsar. Gagarin was in a false position with regard to his countrymen, but also in his family relations. His anxiety about his position in Russia overflows in a passionate letter written to Ravignan from Moscow in September 1842, the first sent since his departure from Paris in June. Gagarin pleads with his adviser to tell him what to do: should he stay in Russia or join his family in Berlin, where they had gone for medical treatment for his brother-in-law? Beyond this practical matter, however, was the deeper concern of how to tell his parents about his conversion. “I know that I must consider seriously the age, the tender feelings, and the anxieties of my parents, but I must consider as well the state of my soul and the desires it feels. It is not my will, but God’s will that I must follow. That is why I ask you to make a decision, I will obey and obedience will give me peace and courage.”⁸⁰ Over the next few months Gagarin would continually adopt this deferential attitude in his letters to Ravignan, asking not only for help but for his adviser to take his future in hand and decide for him. This allegiance developed at the same time that Gagarin was breaking away from his family, a process that Ravi-gnan encouraged, while at the same time counseling him to act with compassion toward his heartbroken parents. Gagarin had chosen a Catholic identity as a way to achieve personal coherence, but he had not fully understood how difficult this would be, as he worked to remake the bonds that held him to both his past and his future.

Father Ravignan did not hesitate at all in his response to Gagarin, going so far as to claim (with only a modest qualification) that his advice could be understood as the will of God: “I believe I am able to tell you that such is the will of God.” Clearly concerned with Gagarin’s safety as well as the state of his soul, Ravignan advised (ordered?) Gagarin to leave Russia immediately and join his family in Berlin. Furthermore, he pleaded with Gagarin to hide his new Catholic identity, which might compromise his safety in Russia. “But in the name of God keep inside for some time your generous feelings, so that there would be no external manifestation [of your Catholicism] while in Russia; even outside of Russia, keep your religion a deep secret; prudence demands it. A day will come when you will be able to practice openly.”81 Over the next several months the relationship between Ravignan and Gagarin intensified, with Gagarin writing impassioned letters from Berlin, where he had gone in January 1843 to join his parents, sister, and brother-in-law. Ravignan’s responses consistently expressed concern for Gagarin’s family but always emphasized that Gagarin’s first duty was to God and himself, whatever the difficulties that such a commitment might entail.

Gagarin had one other crucial correspondent during this period, Sophie Swetchine, to whom he also revealed his religious turmoil, family conflicts, and concerns about his future. Together, Ravignan and Swetchine provided a kind of surrogate family even while his parents and sister expressed their doubts and at times their open opposition.⁸² When Gagarin addressed Ravignan as “mon révérend Père” he was using a conventional formula, but given the ongoing conflict with his father, Sergei Ivanovich, and the emotion invested in his letters to his adviser it seems fair to see this term as more than formulaic. Similarly, Madame Swetchine’s use of the phrase “mon cher enfant” may be generic, but repeated frequently in a series of long letters expressing sympathy for Gagarin’s delicate and difficult situation with his mother it suggests an emotional bond that could rival and in some sense replace the one he had with Varvara Mikhailovna. Such a claim does not have to be based on psychological speculation, for on one occasion Madame Swetchine made the comparison herself, when she wrote that she was “the one person in the world, and I don’t except your parents from this, whose thought turns itself constantly to you, who feels for you the most profound and lively tenderness in the midst of all preoccupations, who feels your presence as if you were before me. My respect, my admiration, my solicitude for you have so much identified me with everything that you are in the present, and everything to which God will consecrate you, I hope with all of my soul, in the future, that you have become this part of myself which consoles my other self, and on which it relies.”83 As he struggled to resolve his religious and familial conflicts between 1842 and 1844, Gagarin could rely on the advice and encouragement of a Catholic father and mother who could take the place of the Orthodox parents who resisted a conversion that he saw as the crucial step in establishing himself as a new and complete man.

Ravignan and Swetchine helped move Gagarin away from Orthodoxy and his Russian family, but at the same time they urged Gagarin to be considerate of the feelings of his parents, and in particular of his mother. Soon after Gagarin had revealed to his parents not only his conversion but his intention to join the Jesuits, Ravignan urged him to act with “the veritable tenderness of a son.” But when opposition in his family grew Ravignan insisted that filial devotion, as admirable as it was, must not compromise Gagarin’s higher calling. Citing a passage from the Gospel of Matthew (10:37), he reminded the new convert that “whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” It is typical of Ravignan that he follows this citation with the claim that in accepting his vocation Gagarin would “be more help to your parents than your presence with them; believe firmly that God will bless everyone who is dear to you.”⁸⁴ The pain that Gagarin was causing his parents, from Ravignan’s perspective, was insignificant and temporary compared to the benefits that his conversion would bring to them. Ravignan implies with this language that Gagarin’s conversion might be a means to ensure the ultimate salvation of his parents, thus adding a prudential motive to his argument and suggesting as well that a failure to remain firm could cost his family the blessings of God.

Madame Swetchine was equally pointed in her comments, for although she praised Gagarin’s mother for her resignation to God’s will at those moments when she seemed willing to accept her son’s choice, she also called on Gagarin to be “armed against himself” in order to resist her appeals.⁸⁵ In a letter of 1844, just a few months after Gagarin had become a Jesuit novice, Swetchine responds at length and with fervor to continuing attempts by his family and some Orthodox friends to reconvert him:

Your religious vocation, you would sacrifice it to achieve the happiness and ease the anxieties of your parents? But faith! Is it something that can sacrifice itself? Can you renounce your eternal salvation? Friends can speak of this, because they belong to the world; your parents, who have shown themselves to be Christians, should not. Your pious mother may be deeply hurt; but if she had the least idea that your life would be based on a lie, on something you did not believe, I am convinced her unhappiness today would be slight compared to what you would inflict on her in such an inadmissible situation. What can those who can claim some rights over you expect? Isn’t there a point at which one can say nature ends and God begins?86

Swetchine’s tone here is bitter and angry toward those who would persuade Gagarin to deny his attachment to Catholicism in order to succeed in the world, and she insists that no good mother would ask her son to betray his conscience. Madame Swetchine always insisted that Gagarin act on the basis of a free conscience, but once he had made the decision to convert and then to join the Jesuits she was willing to intervene forcefully, building up his Catholic identity with effusive praise for his conversion and belittling those who would pull him back to Orthodoxy.

Gagarin needed the support of Ravignan and Swetchine, for his parents were consistently opposed to his conversion and distressed by his decision to join the Jesuits. When he joined his family in Berlin in January 1843 Gagarin found himself in the midst of a family in crisis, with his brother-in-law Sergei Buturlin seriously ill and his own future in jeopardy. As troubled as they were by his conversion, however, it was the announcement of his decision that he would join the Jesuits that provoked the strongest reaction, which covered sentiments ranging from anxiety, disbelief, and resentment to outright anger. Just after Gagarin’s departure in June his parents pleaded with him to delay a decision that would be irrevocable. To judge by his mother’s description of him as he left—“your pale face, your sad expression, your soulful cry”—Gagarin was distraught as well by the prospect of never seeing his parents again.⁸⁷ Letters full of memories of his time with them and regret for his decision continued to arrive at the apartment on the rue Saint-Honoré, where Gagarin was staying, but the tone changed sharply in August 1843. Gagarin at some point that summer must have written his parents with a Chaadaev-like critique of Russia, and their own lives, a final justification for his decision to join the Jesuits. His mother wrote almost apologetically that “it is possible that I have false ideas, that my manner of looking at things is erroneous.” But she quickly took a more insistent tone and begged to be heard, since “a mother, a friend, can and even must communicate with her son.” Mme Gagarin was particularly upset because of her son’s disdainful treatment of his sister: “You say sometimes that foreigners appreciate you more than your family; I could say the same thing about you with regard to your sister. . . . Would charity, I won’t even say friendship, lead to such insults? Certainly, we have our faults, but where is your indulgence? Where is the consolation I expect from you?”88 Gagarin’s language must have become even more offensive, for in the next letter Mme Gagarin refers to his criticism of them for “a lack of enlightenment, of civilization, of elevated feelings. We’re narrow-minded, our conversations lack any interest whatsoever. Our friends are boring, drunks, unworthy of esteem, our acquaintances are unbearable.” Assuming that Gagarin’s mother accurately conveyed his criticisms, she seems justified in claiming that “this lack of indulgence in your judgments, in your conduct, can only dry up your heart.”⁸⁹ We do not have Gagarin’s response to this bitter comment, though it must have wounded him. From his mother’s perspective, Gagarin’s behavior amounted to cruel treatment from an ungrateful son, though one she still loved. From his perspective, he was following a higher call to become a “complete man,” one that necessarily involved crossing over not only from Orthodoxy to Catholicism, but from a Russian family to the Jesuits.

Gagarin the Jesuit

With the support of his Catholic friends Gagarin resisted the appeals of his parents, who by 1844 seemed to have reconciled themselves to his decision, and to the fact that they would never see him again. His brother-in-law, however, thinking perhaps that he would profit from a greater share of the family inheritance, denounced Gagarin to the Russian government, which led eventually to an official condemnation.⁹⁰ His parents were distressed by this behavior and continued to provide financial support, and to write regularly through the 1840s. But the pain of their separation was a constant theme, as were entreaties for him to write more often.⁹¹ Gagarin seems to have been a poor correspondent, which led to criticisms from family and friends. When his mother grew ill, paralyzed and blind, a friend (possibly another Russian convert) wrote to condemn his detachment in the strongest terms, and to note that his behavior was provoking comments among his friends. “That you would have sacrificed your parents in order to live a more perfect life with God is an act of Christian heroism. . . . But is it admissible that God would ask us to deprive our parents of the final consolation that we can give them, and which we are permitted by the rule that we follow? It is not for me to tell you what you must do, but in this present case I follow the voice of my conscience and my affection for you. I confess as well that I suffer too much from hearing condemned by others, apparently for good reason, a friend, a Catholic, a father of the Company of Jesus, not to warn you about this.”92 Gagarin’s mother died in 1854, but his final letter to her did not arrive on time, which led his sister Marie to write a recriminating letter condemning him for his silence and apparent indifference.⁹³ Like the Ratisbonne brothers, Gagarin maintained an attenuated connection with his family, and through his mother, sister, and later his niece kept abreast of news about their health, births, and deaths. The Gagarin name remained a source of pride and prestige, but Gagarin’s conversion had led him to the Jesuit family.

Gagarin’s attachment to the Jesuits was a self-conscious choice made as he contemplated the isolation he faced following his conversion and his separation from his family. At the conclusion of the retreat he made as he entered the novitiate in August 1843 Gagarin recalled that “in the long and painful internal battles that have led up to this decision, when my heart ached at the idea of the animosity that I would face after my conversion, and the isolation in which I would find myself, the Company of Jesus appeared to me in a distant future as a refuge.” But even as he faced the end of his retreat and the moment of final decision Gagarin felt torn by his family loyalty, fearful of leaving his parents. After a prayer to Jesus and Mary, Gagarin heard “an interior voice saying to me with great sweetness: Do you believe I am incapable of providing you with the most abundant and truest consolations that you might have? In this moment, all difficulties completely vanished, and I offered myself to God with all my heart and surrendered to him with great confidence the care of my parents.”⁹⁴ Gagarin struggled as he transferred his primary attachment from his biological family to the Jesuits, and we have seen that his parents were heartbroken by his distance, both physical and psychological, even while they were reconciled to his decision. The Jesuits, by offering Gagarin a surrogate family, compensated him for the loss of his parents while also encouraging him to maintain a connection with them. This arrangement led to considerable pain for all the parties involved, but there can be no doubt about the primary identity of Gagarin, who was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1848 and maintained an active career until his death in 1882.

Gagarin’s Jesuit career was based on a commitment to the conversion of Russia, a task that allowed him to remain connected with his fatherland even though he was banned from reentering it. Jeffrey Beshoner has described in detail the various projects that this mission to Russia entailed, and his judgment that Gagarin was naïve about the prospects for a Catholic Russia is sensible and persuasive.95 For my purposes, Gagarin’s commitment to converting Russia is important insofar as it allowed him to define himself as faithful to his youthful devotion to his country, even while he had apparently abandoned it. Gagarin never visited Russia again after his departure in January 1843, and Russian Orthodox critics, including some old friends from the 1830s, reacted with hostility to his schemes to Catholicize their country. But Gagarin continued to insist on the point that he had first come to in his conversations with Chaadaev in the 1830s, that only Catholicism could free Russia from the chains of despotism and poverty and bring the country into communion with the civilization of Europe.

Conclusion: The Spiritual Exercise of Freedom and Submission

Ivan Gagarin’s conversion to Catholicism and enlistment with the Jesuits resolved, although in an imperfect manner, the problems he posed for himself in the 1830s. He now could claim a coherent identity, albeit one that was troubled by echoes from his previous life, which could never be entirely silenced or forgotten. As a Catholic Gagarin had reconnected with religious practice, but in a way that established his freedom from the Orthodox Christianity of his parents. He had found as well a world-historical mission, one that allowed him to dream of reconciling his particular devotion to Russia with a commitment to universal reconciliation through the Roman Catholic Church. Such a union, unrealistic as it was, was based on Gagarin’s continued hopes for a Russia that would be freed from autocratic rule by virtue of its attachment to Catholicism. Gagarin managed to construct for himself an identity that matched in many ways his youthful vision of a “complete man.” But this process entailed an important adjustment in the way in which Gagarin thought about himself, one that led him to reimagine his sense of individual autonomy in favor of a self that was based on a corporate identity and on a relationship with God mediated by spiritual practices rooted in the Jesuit tradition.

In July 1843 Gagarin had left his family and was living in Paris, struggling to decide if he should make a retreat with Father Ravignan at St. Acheul. In a series of letters written between July 10 and August 3 Gagarin exposed all of his fears and doubts and described to Ravignan his paralysis in the face of such a momentous decision. Although he continued to pray and receive the sacraments, he claimed that “never had he felt to the same degree such sadness and weakness.” Although “the better part of himself” accepted that God had called him, he felt drawn to the world, and unable to leave it, the result perhaps of diabolical temptation. Gagarin’s description of himself at this moment recalls the language he used in his journal in the early 1830s, when he complained as well of his weakness and division. But even in this sense of abandonment Gagarin found consolation, comparing himself with Jesus and his struggles with his humanity in the Olive Garden:

Tell me if I am mistaken, but the more I study this state of apparent abandonment in which God has left me, the more I believe I am discovering hidden grace. . . . If the will of God is made known to me, if with the better part of myself I adhere to it with full submissiveness, it seems to me that I must not be upset by the rebelliousness of the inferior powers of my soul and of the pain it will cost me to control them. From this point of view it seems that this battle proves nothing against my vocation. On the contrary, the Gospel gives us a divine model [of Jesus] in the garden of Olives, battling with humanity, abandoned for a moment to himself. He said: my Father, let your will and not mine be done! The important thing is that the will of God be accomplished; if there is in us a human will to break in order for the divine will to triumph, this can only be a sacrifice agreeable to God, far from being an obstacle.96

As a young man in his twenties Gagarin had sought to be someone “who knows what he wills and does what he wills.” Such an autonomous self would respond to the political and intellectual world he confronted, but on his own terms. At the end of his spiritual journey this early vocation proved unsatisfying for Gagarin, whose connections with the Catholic milieu of the Swetchine circle, and then with the Jesuits, combined with prayer, religious practice, and spiritual exercise, led to a self that surrendered to God.

Gagarin’s new self was based on a willingness to forget himself, though the dynamics of this process are complex, insofar as they required him to choose this condition in the first place, to decide to accept God’s grace. This psychological state that involved a willful act to abandon one’s own will is at the heart of Gagarin’s mature identity. He reached this point with the help of a spiritual adviser, Father Ravignan, the first of several Jesuits who led Gagarin through retreats that established and reinforced over the years his priestly identity. First in their correspondence, and then in retreats conducted on the basis of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, Gagarin and Ravignan worked, in Loyola’s terms, at “preparing and disposing our soul to rid itself of all its disordered affections and then, after their removal, of seeking and finding God’s will in the ordering of our life for the salvation of our soul.” To attain this goal the exercises led retreatants through extended periods of prayer and contemplation, focusing on one’s sins and then following the life of Christ through his ministry, sufferings, and joys. The spiritual adviser was present, but his role was secondary, for “it is more appropriate and far better that the Creator and Lord himself should communicate himself to the devout soul, embracing it with love, inciting it to praise of himself, and disposing it for the way which most enables the soul to serve him in the future.”97 The person who would emerge from such a regime would be fully devoted to God, but only on the basis of an interlude marked by quiet and prayerful introspection, an exploration of the self in relationship to the divine will.

Gagarin’s notes from 1843 suggest the importance of the yearly retreats he made as a Jesuit, which allowed him to work through the paradox at the heart of his struggles, to achieve a coherent identity on the basis of his own actions, which was at the same time an identity subservient to the will of God.⁹⁸ Some of these notes take the form of a report to himself, and possibly to his adviser, on his spiritual state; others are reflections on topics such as the love of God; and still others are personally authored prayers. As in the days when he kept his journal, Gagarin’s writing served to focus his attention inward, but now this self-examination led outward as well, to the Jesuits, and upward to God. In contrast to the turbulence of the early months of 1843, Gagarin described the retreat in August that led to his vows as a Jesuit as marked by feelings “of profound peace, without trouble and without exaltation.” This serenity led, in his reflection “on the love of God,” to a capacity for self-surrender, which Gagarin claims led to a sense of detachment from himself. “We must give ourselves to God completely, but we belong to him already, and in giving ourselves we merely learn this truth. The knowledge of this truth purifies our vision and allows us to contemplate God in everything, in ourselves, in all that surrounds us. This calm, attentive, respectful contemplation shows us God perpetually concerned with us, without being disturbed; we feel the need to consecrate all our actions, our words, our thoughts, to live only in him, without ever ceasing to contemplate his perfections, and thus we come, without difficulty, without effort, with an ineffable sweetness, to a detachment from creatures, and from ourselves.”99

The self that Gagarin constructed as a result of his conversion was in many ways a “complete man” according to the terms he set out for himself in the 1830s—someone with a clear sense of himself and charged with an important mission that touched on the future of his beloved Russia. But in one crucial sense he had moved beyond this earlier formulation, which left no place for a personal God. We will see in chapter 7 how the historian and essayist Ernest Renan moved in precisely the opposite direction in the period 1843–1845, at the seminary of Saint Sulpice, very near the home of Madame Swetchine. Although the Sulpician spirituality in which Renan was trained differed in some ways from the teachings of the Jesuits, both of these traditions emphasized the presence of God as “the absolutely indispensable element of the Catholic vie intérieure.”¹⁰⁰ Gagarin was clearly an exceptional individual, but his story reminds us that some individuals, faced with choices about their identities, embraced patterns of self-construction that adapted powerful spiritual traditions to the conditions of the nineteenth century. At least twenty-three editions of the Spiritual Exercises were published in France between 1800 and 1850 and formed the basis for retreats that would address the substantial population of students in Jesuit secondary schools throughout the country.¹⁰¹ Anticlericals were appalled by Jesuit spirituality, as they understood it, as “an assault on individuality and selfhood” and subjected it to vicious attacks throughout the century, as in Eugène Sue’s Wandering Jew.¹⁰² The attacks by Jesuit opponents can perhaps be taken as a kind of backhanded compliment, a testimony to the effectiveness of the spiritual formation that was advocated and that was exemplified in the life of Gagarin. But they are also caricatures that represent individuals who become soulless automatons, blindly serving masters who seek world domination. Gagarin looks nothing at all like the mythic figures concocted by the anticlericals, although his decision to convert and to join the Jesuits did involve a loss of self. But Gagarin’s letters and notes show us as well an active self, pursuing self-consciously and constantly responding to what he understood to be God’s call. Believers and nonbelievers will differ about the reality of such a call, and historians are not in a position to adjudicate such questions. We can, however, acknowledge the ways in which individuals continued to examine their consciences on the basis of conversation, reflection, prayer, and spiritual exercises, practices that allowed them to construct identities centered on a relationship with God.