Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/175

 contamination and to square with its principles all the ideas, more or less intimately connected with the Catholic of Protestant confessions and their sects. Thus Maxim the Greek was somewhat troubled by the ideas he learned during his residence in Italy; Silvester Medvedyev was accused of having expressed Latin rationalistic opinions on transubstantiation; and Matvei Bashkin was perhaps influenced by Protestant or Calvinistic ideas as regards transubstantiation and some other doctrines.

But the fundamental point of view, from which all this knowledge acquired some unity, continued to be religious. The Russian scholars of the 16th and 17th centuries were obliged to conform to the precepts of Russian Orthodoxy, as expounded in the "Profession" of Peter Mogila and the later treatises of Stephen Yavorsky and Theophan Prokopovich, though these were influenced to some extent by Catholic and Protestant ideas. Orthodoxy continued to subdue reason and to humble its independent creative power: for a long time it preserved among Russian scholars the dogmatic and traditional conception of science and learning, and produced such a view as might be expected of natural and historical phenomena. This point of view was conspicuous even in branches of knowledge which, apparently, had nothing to do with theology: thus, the results of arithmetical operations were considered as "miraculous"; different positions of the signs of the zodiac were "explained" by movements produced by angels; peculiar habits of animals were explained in accordance with Christian traditions; and historical facts were selected in