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c h a p t e r e l e v e n Toward Russia The Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy and the Patriarchate of Jerusalem Since the formation of the Slavic alphabet by Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century and the Christianization of the Rus in the tenth century, the intellectual influence of Byzantium on Russian culture had been primary. One might therefore expect that, along with other cultural and religious aspects, the Russians would be influenced by Byzantine science throughout centuries of relations with the “homeland of Orthodoxy.” Although one can detect such influences, these are rather weak, because in Russia science was not seriously cultivated until the seventeenth century. Unlike in Byzantium, the ancient Greek scientific corpus was almost unknown in Russia until then, though books on nature (such as brontologia or selenologia, describing in a simplistic way meteorological phenomena or the phases of the moon) had significant diffusion after the fourteenth century. Later on, in contrast to what happened among the Orthodox of the Ottoman Empire who went abroad to study beginning in the fifteenth century, the first Russian to obtain a European diploma, at the University of Padua, did not do so until the end of the seventeenth century. Until recently, Russian historians of science accepted the Russian author Alexander Pushkin’s apothegm that “the influence of the Mongols, who were Arabs without Aristotle and without algebra , contributed nothing on the level of proto-scientific concepts and interests”; historians of Russian science began their accounts with the eighteenth century.1 However, this severe judgment was advanced in order to condemn the backward role of the church and to valorize Peter the Great’s reforms; it has been moderated by recent research.2 In fact, the Russian church, very sensitive to the mystical tendencies of the Orthodox Church, did oppose scientific culture, whether Byzantine or other. Scientific education was rarely offered in Russian monasteries, which acquired great influence under the Tatar régime of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. After the fourteenth century, Hesychast teaching had a great influence in Russia, which Toward Russia 141 was propitious terrain for welcoming such a movement. An example of the Orthodox fundamentalism of the Russian church is the banishment of the Latin language. Indeed, for several centuries the Russian church considered Latin (and its documents) to be diabolical. So it is not surprising that the only man of the Renaissance period who was influential in Russia was Maximus the Greek (c. 1480–1556), a prolific translator of ecclesiastical texts into Russian. Nor is it surprising that the cosmology that prevailed in Russia was that of the school of Antioch (see chapter 2) and that the mysticism of a Cosmas Indicopleustes remained in vogue in the seventeenth century. This withdrawal from (and negation of) scientific learning would gradually be modified in the course of the seventeenth century. Here again, the initiative came from the Russian Orthodox Church. Patriarch Nikon (1605–81) undertook a great battle to modernize Russia by trying to purge the church of any mystical and magical element. At the same time, a debate over the control of the Russian church was taking place, between him and Tsar Alexis (r. 1645–76). It was a “battle of giants” between the two supreme authorities of the vast kingdom. During this period, Russia acquired the Ukraine (1654), where the metropolitan Petro Mohyla (1633–46), in order to counter the Jesuit penetration, had founded the Theological Academy of Kiev, where Latin was taught. In this context favorable to change, Paisios Ligarides arrived in Moscow. Prophets and Science Paisios Ligarides was a Greek Catholic from the island of Chios who had studied at the College of Saint Athanasius in Rome under his compatriot Leo Allatius (see chapter 9), who trained him as his successor. Very brilliant, he acquired the reputation of the most cultivated man of the Ottoman Empire. In 1647 he converted to Orthodoxy and in 1652 became bishop (metropolitan) of Gaza, where he stayed only two years. He then went to Bucharest, where he negotiated with officials for permission to go to Russia to participate in Russian ecclesiastical affairs, specifically the struggle between Patriarch Nikon and Tsar Alexis. Meanwhile , the patriarch of Jerusalem, Nektarios, learning that Paisios had not broken off relations with the Vatican or with the Catholic Allatius and that he was not refusing Rome’s money, removed him as metropolitan, something that did not prevent Paisios from continuing to bear this title when he addressed the Russians...

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