the seventeenth century, when Muscovy was struggling out of Byzantine
barbarism. The late-recovered treasure of ancient folk-poesy,
partly preserved by chance among the northern peasantry, tells of
the complete rupture wrought in the racial life by the imposition
of Byzantine Christianity from the south. As early as the fourteenth
century the Strigolniks, who abounded at Novgorod, had held strongly
by anti-ecclesiastical doctrines of the Paulician and Lollard type;
[1554] but orthodox fanaticism ruled life in general down to the age
of Peter the Great. In the sixteenth century we find the usual symptom
of criticism of the lives of the monks; [1555] but the culture was
almost wholly ecclesiastical; and in the seventeenth century the
effort of the turbulent Patriarch Nikon (1605-1681), to correct
the corrupt sacred texts and the traditional heterodox practices,
was furiously resisted, to the point of a great schism. [1556]
He himself had violently denounced other innovations, destroying
pictures and an organ in the manner of Savonarola; but his own
elementary reforms were found intolerable by the orthodox, [1557]
though they were favoured by Sophia, the able and ambitious sister of
Peter. [1558] The priest Kriezanitch (1617-1678), who wrote a work on
"The Russian Empire in the second half of the Seventeenth Century,"
denounced researches in physical science as "devilish heresies";
[1559] and it is on record that scholars were obliged to study
in secret and by night for fear of the hostility of the common
people. [1560] Half-a-century later the orthodox majority seems to
have remained convinced of the atheistic tendency of all science;
[1561] and the friends of the new light doubtless included deists
from the first. Not till the reforms of Peter had begun to bear
fruit, however, could freethought raise its head. The great Czar, who
promoted printing and literature as he did every other new activity
of a practical kind, took the singular step of actually withdrawing
writing materials from the monks, whose influence he held to be wholly
reactionary. [1562] In 1703 appeared the first Russian journal; and in
1724 Peter founded the first Academy of Sciences, enjoining upon it
the study of languages and the production of translations. Now began
the era of foreign culture and translations from the French. [1563]
Prince Kantemir, the satirist, who was with the Russian embassy in
London in 1733, pronounced England, then at the height of the deistic
tide, "the most civilized and enlightened of European nations." [1564]
The fact that he translated Fontenelle on The Plurality of Worlds
tells further of his liberalism. [1565] Gradually there arose a new
secular faction, under Western influences; and other forms of culture
slowly advanced likewise, notably under Elisabeth Petrovna. At length,
in the reign of Catherine II, called the Great, French ideas, already
heralded by belles lettres, found comparatively free headway. She
herself was a deist, and a satirist of bigots in her comedies;
[1566] she accomplished what Peter had planned, the secularization of
Church property; [1567] and she was long the admiring correspondent
of Voltaire, to whom and to D'Alembert and Diderot she offered warm
invitations to reside at her court. Diderot alone accepted, and him she
specially befriended, buying his library when he was fain to sell it,
and constituting him its salaried keeper. In no country, not excepting
England, was there more of practical freedom than in Russia under her
rule; [1568] and if after the outbreak of the Revolution she turned
political persecutor, she was still not below the English level. Her
half-crazy son Paul II, whom she had given cause to hate her, undid
her work wherever he could. But neither her reaction nor his rule
could eradicate the movement of thought begun in the educated classes;
though in Russia, as in the Scandinavian States, it was not till the
nineteenth century that original serious literature flourished.
ยง 4. Italy