Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/172

 subordination. The Orthodox Church swayed the minds of mediaeval men and regulated the aims of their "knowledge: it was thought necessary to elaborate the revealed teaching of the Church into a well-balanced system of concepts and to develop it in a chain of regular syllogisms.

This subordination enslaved science and produced scholastic learning. This principle is represented, for instance, by St John Damascene: his treatise on dialectics, in which he tried to adapt the logic of the ancient schools to the teachings of the Orthodox Church, was translated into "Slavonic," and circulated in Russian copies of the 15th century and later. Maxim the Greek, one of the disciples of John Damascene, formulated this theory in Russian as follows: "logic can be useful in so far as it is employed by us to glorify the Lord and stirs up our love for Him; but it cannot contradict His holy words and must endeavour to agree with them ." Zinovy Otensky, a pupil of Maxim the Greek, conformed to the same doctrine, though he admitted that reason must play a certain part in theological controversies. A friend of Maxim the Greek—the monk Artemius, also expressed the same idea in one of his letters to the Tsar Ivan the Terrible: "true reason," he said, "is always confirmed