Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/91

 Rh intellectual life, still in the earliest phases of its development, was destined to waver, for long years yet, between two opposite tendencies, which, nevertheless, occasionally combined, as we shall see, after a very curious fashion. These, an asceticism void of all ideal and a coarse sensuality, were the twin roads that led to general nothingness.

From the elementary and barren independence—the independence of savagery—in which it had lived till Christianity was introduced, the country had suddenly fallen under the yoke of an austere morality—as savage after its own fashion—which forbade liberty to know, liberty to create, and even to exist, in every quarter. Under this rule, all those living forces which have ennobled the human race were condemned, and even accursed. The world of free knowledge was accursed, as a centre of heresy and corruption; the world of free creation was accursed, as an element of corruption; and accursed, too, as an element of scandal, was free life, with its joys, its merriment, its profane delights. The bards have disappeared from the courts of Princes; the lively tone and poetic turn of thought of the chroniclers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries give place to dry didactic narrative, that disfigures and even proscribes the very documents on which it is founded; even an conversation that does not turn on religious subjects is anathema. Abstinence in every form has become the essential rule of life. In certain families, the very young children are made to do without milk, and by the time they are two years old they are expected to observe all the fasts. Meat is only allowed three times a week, and conjugal relations are likewise forbidden on three days in each week, on feast days, and during the whole of Lent. The Russian compilers from Byzantine writers were well acquainted with Cato's dictum, 'We rule the world, and the women rule us.' It occupied a prominent position in the 'Bee,' as also did the saying of Democritus, married to a tiny wife, 'I have chosen the smallest evil.' The Church, guided by these principles, looked on woman as the devil's chief instrument in his work of destruction, and therefore woman, too, was accursed, and accursed, with her, all forms of art, of which she has everywhere and always been the chief inspirer.

In the religious life, this tendency led directly to the stupid formalism of the ecclesiastical doctors, who perceived eternal truths and immutable doctrines in the trimming of a beard or the cut of a garment. After the Florentine Union and the erection of the national Church into the sole guardian