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c h a p t e r t e n A Rebel Patriarch Cyril Lucaris and Orthodox Humanism in Science The sciences and secular learning in general did not figure among the preoccupations of the Orthodox Church from the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 to the start of the seventeenth century. In fact, for a century and a half, the Patriarchate of Constantinople had a policy of teaching only what was useful for the renewal of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The only organized Orthodox school in the Ottoman Empire was the Patriarchal School of Constantinople, refounded in 1454; with regard to curriculum, it had nothing in common with its predecessor in the days of the Palaiologos. As we saw in the preceding chapter, other Greek schools, created by Greeks of the diaspora in Italy or in the Venetian possessions, were to be found outside the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire based its domination on the organization of millets, a system for controlling non-Muslim populations in which authority was delegated in large part to their religious leaders, appointed by the sultan. The first millet to be created was that of the Orthodox Christian Church, just after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, when Mehmed the Conqueror gave the privilege to Scholarios. This was followed by the Armenian millet and the Jewish millet . The millets had their own laws (e.g., when a member of a millet committed a crime, the law applicable was that of the millet of the person harmed), but when a Muslim was involved, then sharia trumped everything. Millets collected their own taxes in compensation for their loyalty to the empire, and they managed their own educational system, which largely liberated Orthodox communities from Islamic influences. The leader of the Christian Orthodox millet was the patriarch of Constantinople , who also gained control over the Bulgarian and Serbian churches, which had been independent during the Byzantine period. Thus, the power of the church with respect to education and science increased, compared to what it had possessed in the Byzantine era, when it had to share this responsibility with the A Rebel Patriarch 131 Byzantine emperor. As had been the case since antiquity, the scholarly language of Orthodoxy was Greek, and so education was dispensed in Orthodox schools in Greek. Thus, concerning science specifically, the policy adopted by the Patriarchate of Constantinople affected all Orthodox peoples (whether or not they were native Greek speakers) of the vast Ottoman Empire, which at its apogee extended over parts of three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. Until the start of the seventeenth century, only a few Christian Orthodox thinkers—not more than fifty during the sixteenth century—were involved with the sciences in the Ottoman Empire. Because organized schools did not exist in the empire, we do not find the usual debates on the nature of learning and on scientific teaching. Nevertheless, as we saw in chapter 9, discussion of the validity of secular learning of a humanist tenor had already taken place in the sixteenth century, among Greeks who were in contact with Italian culture. However, the creation of a scientific community worthy of the name among Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire would be a long and slow process; it would not be fully achieved until the century of the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, such a community began to make its presence felt already in the seventeenth century, with a movement that modern historians call “religious humanism.” Cyril Lucaris, the leading humanist in the Orthodox world, was born in 1572 in Crete, which was then under Venetian domination. He studied with a famous tutor in Heraklion, Meletios Vlastos, and continued his studies in Venice and then at the University of Padua. In 1593 he found himself in Alexandria, where his uncle, Meletios Pegas, was patriarch. After taking religious orders, he was sent to Poland in 1594–96 (and then again in 1601–2) to combat the influence of the Catholic Church, which was trying (with success) to convert Orthodox believers to Catholicism. Some years previously, in order to strengthen the Russian church against such a danger, the Constantinople Council of 1593 had founded the Patriarchate of Russia. During his stay in Poland, Lucaris realized the importance of Jesuit colleges, and analogously he organized the Orthodox Academy of Vilnius. At the death of his uncle in 1601, he became patriarch of Alexandria, at the age of twenty-nine. His studies in Italy as well as his trips to Poland inspired him to...

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