Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/174

 The enlightened metropolitan of Kiev, Peter Mogila, transformed the famous school at Kiev into a college in 1631; he himself had a humanistic conception of knowledge and education, but the place became later, under Polish influence, a centre of scholastic learning; the enlightened spirit of this college was well represented by Stephen Yavorsky, one of the professors who lectured there for some years before the college was transformed into a theological seminary.

The wise monk Simeon Polotsky, one of the opponents of the learned Epiphanius Slavinetsky, began, probably in 1664, to impart in Moscow the Latin learning, that he had got from the Kiev college and from the Polish schools in Vilna and other cities; one of his pupils—Silvester Medvedyev, was a zealous partisan of Latin learning and took a lively part in the contest, which arose thus early between the zapadniki and vostochniki, i.e., the partisans of "Western" Latin civilization and those who, like the monk Euthymius and the brothers Lihudy, maintained the "Eastern" Greek tradition.

These fears were not entirely unfounded. Men who applied themselves to Latin civilization were sometimes unable to preserve the Greek faith from