When Organizations Lose Their Way — War and Peace

Nearly two years before this, in 1808, Pierre, returning to Petersburg after visiting his estates, involuntarily finds himself in a leading position among the Petersburg Freemasons. He arranges dining and funeral lodge meetings, enrolls new members, busies himself uniting lodges and acquiring authentic charters. He gives money for temples and supplements the collection of alms, in which the majority of members are stingy and irregular. He supports almost singlehanded a poorhouse the order has founded in Petersburg. His life meanwhile continues as before, with the same infatuations and dissipations. He likes to dine and drink well, and though he considers it immoral and humiliating he cannot resist the temptations of the bachelor circles in which he moves. Amid the turmoil, at the end of a year, he begins to feel that the more firmly he tries to rest upon Masonic ground, the more it gives way. The deeper it sinks, the closer bound he involuntarily becomes. Joining had felt like stepping onto the smooth surface of a bog: one foot sank; he put the other down to make sure, sank deeper, stuck, and waded knee-deep.

Joseph Alexéevich is not in Petersburg; he has stood aside from the Petersburg lodges and lives almost entirely in Moscow. All the members are men Pierre knows in ordinary life, and it is difficult to regard them merely as Brothers and not as Prince B. or Iván Vasílevich D., weak and insignificant in society. Under Masonic aprons he sees the uniforms and decorations they aim at in ordinary life. After collecting alms and reckoning twenty to thirty rubles, received for the most part in promises from a dozen members half of whom could pay as well as himself, he remembers the vow to devote all belongings to one's neighbour, and doubts arise on which he tries not to dwell. He divides the Brothers he knows into four categories: mystics occupied with the threefold designation of God, sulphur, mercury, and salt, and the meaning of the square; seekers like himself who waver; men who care only for the external forms and ceremonies; and men who have joined to be intimate with the wealthy Brothers and gain connections. After much study he goes abroad, and in 1809 returns with a reform speech demanding that the order pass from talk to action, that virtue be rewarded, that Brothers quietly influence governments. The lodge splits between supporters and men who fear Illuminism, the wish to substitute republican for monarchical institutions.

Even those who seem to be on his side understand him in their own way, with limitations and alterations he cannot agree to; what he always wants most is to convey his thought just as he himself understands it. At the end of the meeting the Grand Master, with irony and ill-will, reproves Bezúkhov for vehemence and says it was not love of virtue alone, but also a love of strife, that moved him in the dispute. Pierre does not answer. He asks briefly whether his proposal will be accepted. He is told that it will not, and without waiting for the usual formalities he leaves the lodge and goes home.