Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/88

 64 unbelievers to such a degree as to impose on Russian Sovereigns that custom of washing their hands after giving audience to foreign Ambassadors which so sorely offended Possevino at the Court of Ivan the Terrible. This isolation was aggravated by the adhesion of the Metropolitan Isidore, the elect of Byzantium, to the Florentine Union, and by the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, which last, though the triumph of Islam was taken to be a well-deserved chastisement, cast suspicion on the East itself. And at that period the legend of St. Andrew's sojourn in Russia, and consequently of the antiquity and indepnedenceindependence [sic] of local orthodoxy, sprang into life, and spread with great rapidity. The idea of a national religion expressive of the original features of the Slav spirit became general in every mind.

And yet the national Church, instead of beaming with an ever-brightening light, relapsed into constantly deepening darkness. We do not find a trace, at the close of the fifteenth century, of the monastery schools, the previous existence of which is proved by numerous witnesses. At the beginning of the next century St. Gennadius, Archbishop of Novgorod, notes with sorrow that the men presented to him for ordination can neither read nor write. Even oral instruction had disappeared, the pulpits were dumb, and, according to foreign travellers, hardly one native out of ten could say his Pater. A century later, in 1620, a learned Swede, John Botvid, seriously discussed the question of whether the Muscovites were Christians at all, or not.

The monasteries, to be sure, did go on collecting books: some of them even possessed librarians. But reading became the speciality of a small and select group. It rose to be a science, and more and more the only science in existence. To read all he could, and even learn the things he read by heart—was not that as much as any man might do? The learned man was called a knijnik, a man of many books (kniga, book). But what books? In the monastic libraries a place, and even the place of honour, was given to the Apocrypha—'Adam's Manuscript, confided to the Devil,' 'The Last Will of Moses,' 'The Vision of Isaac,' …, these enjoyed the same credit as the canonical books. Maximus the Greek, the corrector of the sacred texts summoned from the East at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was the first who dared to protest against the belief that the sun did not set for a week after our Lord's resurrection, and that, somewhere on the banks of the Jordan, a viper still guarded Adam's last will and testament. The catalogue of the library of the Troïtsa in the seventeenth century is still in our hands. Ancient literature is therein represented by 411 manuscripts.