Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/89

 Rh This is very much the total reached by the Glastonbury library in the thirteenth century. But how different the composition! At Glastonbury the first rank is held by the Roman classics, historians, and poets. At the Troïtsa we find 101 Bibles, 46 liturgical works, 58 collections of the Fathers of the Church, 17 books on ecclesiastical law, and one solitary book on philosophy. The works on asceticism are the most numerous of all. Until the seventeenth century the ancient Greek and Latin authors were unknown to Russian readers. In profane literature chronicles were the favourite reading. But what chronicles! Those of Malala (or Maleles), with his quotations from Orpheus! The still more popular chronicle of George the Hamartolian, with its detailed description of the garment of a certain Jewish priest who went to Judæa to meet Alexander the Great! The authorities on geography and cosmography were George Pissides, and, above all, Cosmas Indicopleustes, whose conclusions as to the dimensions of the earth, founded on the form of Moses' tabernacle, were undoubtingly accepted, and whose teaching, a mixture of the Apocrypha, Ptolemy, Aristotle, and the dreams of the Manichæans and Gnostics, disseminated conceptions of the most preposterous nature. In philosophy, students held by John the Damascene and his theory of the reduction of science to the love of God. But the book of all, read, up till the eighteenth century, with the works of the contemplative school, of Basil the Great and Denis the Areopagite, was the 'Bee,' an incoherent compilation of Scripture quotations, extracts from the Fathers of the Church, and a medley of detached thoughts from Aristotle, Socrates, Epicurus, Diodorus, and Cato—a literary omnium gatherum.

Under the influence of the notions thus acquired, the prediction of an eclipse was held to be sorcery; books on mathematics—and arithmetic and astronomy, geography and music, were all confused together under this title—were proscribed as impious, and the knijnik was shut up within a narrow horizon, above which the light of European science could not rise, and forced to trample the same ground, ever and always, far from the current on which his Western neighbours were being borne onward.

During the sixteenth century, indeed, a beam of light, a breath of air, entered this dungeon. Maximus the Greek, an Albanian monk who had studied in Greece and Italy, was in some sense a European. Though his literary activity was confined to religious. and mare questions, he brought to Russia, on the soles of his shoes, a little of the dust gathered at Milan, Florence, Venice, Ferrara, and especially at Padua, where the mighty struggle between the partisans of Plato