Renaissance Influences and Religious Reforms in Russia: Western and Post-Byzantine Impacts on Culture and Education (16th-17th Centuries)

Abstract

It is perhaps axiomatic that we cherish more stereotypes about a society and its history the more distant from our own it seems to be. Russia is not so remote from the Euro-American tradition that its experience has been totally different from our own, and yet it has long been held to hover between the and the West (whatever they are) with a lingering ambiguity we seem unable to resolve. Chief among the stereotypes perpetuated about Russian history is that Russia persisted in a medieval isolation until Peter the Great Westernized it at the beginning of the eighteenth century. But this convenient truth, as transmitted by our general textbooks and our survey courses, is a gross oversimplification. The present book provides one of the most striking demonstrations of just how unreliable this oversimplification really is. Professor Medlin of the University of Michigan faculty is best known for his book, Moscow and East Rome (1952); Mr. Patrinelis, an archivist at the Academy of Athens, has published on post-Byzantine Greece and on intercultural relations between the Greek and Russian world. Together they have assembled a remarkable range of material that is not elsewhere presented in such a compact synthesis. What they offer is a picture of Russia's cultural dilemma during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Russia is to be understood here not only as the Muscovite Czardom alone but also the Ukraine, Ruthenia, and various related Slavic areas that were not a part of the Muscovite realm proper at this time but looked to Moscow for some degree of Orthodox leadership or support. The dilemma of these regions lay in their need to chart a course between the essentially backward-looking world of Greek Orthodoxy (i.e., the formerly Byzantine world by then under the rule of the Ottoman Empire) and the essentially forward-looking world of the Latin West. Caught between these two poles and recognizing that they were thus caught Russians faced a complex of decisions. To what extent were they to be guided by Greeks in purging from their religious life regional variants of their own that diverged from the wider Orthodox tradition? To what extent should they accept guidance and new ideas or institutional forms from either Protestant or Roman Catholic centers in the West? To what extent could they refine their own sense of mission and identity without