The most consistent opponents of astrology and alchemy in Muscovy were the official Josephite ideologists. In a formulation which, again, seems closer to Roman Catholic than Orthodox theology, Joseph's principal disciple, Metropolitan Daniel of Moscow, argued that "man is almost divine in wisdom and reason, and is created with his own free power"; and again "God created the soul free and with its own powers."41 The individual was, thus, responsible for working out his salvation without reference to the humors of the body or the movements of the stars. The good works evidenced in the disciplined and dedicated life were as important to the Josephites as to the Jesuits. But this emphasis on human freedom and responsibility was a lonely voice in the Christian East-never fully developed by the Josephites and totally rejected by others as threatening the social order.42
Not all early Russian writings about the heavenly bodies can be dismissed as occult astrology. The Six Wings of the late-fifteenth-century Judaizers provided an elaborate guide to solar and lunar eclipses and was, in effect, "the first document of mathematical astronomy to appear in
Russia."43 Such_a__dijcjurrieritJ5fas‹J^^ver, jieeply suspect to Josephite ideologists; forj^jva^jhe^ translated work of a fourteenth-century Spanish Jew based on Jewish and Islamic authorities who seemed to propose that a logic ofthe stars replace that of God. Throughout the Muscovite period there was an enduring fear that "number wisdom" was a challenge to divine wisdom-although mathematics was-as a practical matter-widely used and even taught in monasteries.44
The Josephite^ feared that Russian thinkers would make a religion of science if left free of strict ecclesiastical control. To what extent the Judaizers and other early dissenters actually intended to do so will probably never be known. But it is clear that the fear of the Russian Church gradually became the hope of those who resented its authority-and the supreme reality for the revolutionary forces that eventually overthrew that authority.
A final aspect of the early Latin impact was the muffled echo of Renaissance humanism that was heard in Muscovy. Early-sixteenth-century Russia produced a small band of isolated yet influential individuals that shared in part the critical spirit, interest in classical antiquity, and search "for a less dogmatic faith which were characteristic of Renaissance Italy. It is, of course, more correct to speak of randomjnfluences and partial reflections than of any coherent humanist movement in Russia; but it is also true that this is generally characteristic of humanism outside the narrow region stretching up from Italy through Paris and the Low Countries into southern England.
A critical attitude toward religion became widespread among the civilians in the tsar's entourage who traveled abroad on diplomatic missions in the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century. Both Fedor Kuritsyn, who headed the foreign office under Ivan III, and Fedor Karpov, who headed the much larger one under Ivan IV, became thoroughgoing sceptics; and the perspectives of Ivan IV's most trusted clerk, Ivan Viskovaty, and his leading apologist for absolutism, Ivan Peresvetov, appear to have been predominately secular.45 Sacramental worship-and even the unique truth of Christianity-was implicitly questioned in the mid-fifteenth century by a literate and sophisticated Tver merchant, Afanasy Nikitin. In the course of wide travels throughout the Near East and South Asia, he appears to have concluded that all men were "Sons of Adam" who believed in the same God; and, although he continued to observe Orthodox practices in foreign lands, he pointedly wrote the word "God" in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish as well as Russian in his Journey over Three Seas.*6
The search fan a more rational and universal form of faith appears to have attracted considerable interest in cosmopolitan western Russia, where a syncretic, unitarian offshoot of the Protestant Reformation had to be
anathemized by a special church council of 1553-4. Like the Judaizers who were condemned by a-eouncil just a half century before, this movement is shrouded in obscurity. Once again, some connection with Judaism seems probable in view of the importance that the leader, Fedor Kosoy, attached to the teaching of the Pentateuch and his later marriage to a Lithuanian JewessT^Kosoy insisted eloquently at the council oi 1553-4 that "all people are as one in God: Tatars, Germans and simple barbarians."48 It seems reasonable to assume that this movement like that of the Judaizers continued to have sympathizers after official condemnation; and that the rapid subsequent flowering of anti-trinitarian Socinianism in Poland continued to attract attention in western Russia.
Four influential Russians of the mid-sixteenth century, Andrew
Kurbsky, Fedor"Karpov, Ermolai-Erazm, and Maxim the Greek, repro-
, duced ofrRussian soil the philosophic opposition to both superstition and
"scholasticism that was characteristic ofWestern humanism. Each of them
had a vital interest in classical antiquity-particularly Ciceronian moralism
and Platonic idealism.
Despite his traditional, Muscovite view of politics and history, Kurbsky was the most deeply enamored with the classical past and was the only one to leave Russia to soak up the Latinized culture of the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. Having acquired a direct knowledge of Platonic and early Greek thought from Maxim the Greek, he added an even more extensive knowledge of the Latin classics during his long stay abroad. Informally associated with a coterie of Latinized White Russian noblemen, Kurbsky visited the easternmost Latin university of medieval Europe at Cracow and sent his nephew to Italy. In the later stages of his correspondence with Ivan the Terrible, he included a long translation from Cicero as a means of proving that forced flight cannot be considered treason.49
An even deeper absorption of classical culture is evident in the writings of Karpov, a Latin interpreter and leading official for more than thirty years in the Russian foreign office. He consciously strove to write with "Homeric eloquence" in a pleasing, grammatical "non-barbaric" way,50 His few surviving compositions reveal subtlety of intellect as well as considerable style and a sense of irony and concern for moral order."1 This latter quality bordered on the subversive in Muscovy, for it led him tb conclude that *fnoral laws were Higher than the will of the sovereign. Almost alone in his day he contended that civil.and ecclesiastical affairs,should be separated, and that justice is both a moral imperative and a practical necessity for human society. The monastic virtue of "long suffering" is not sufficient for civil society, which will be ruined if law and order are absent. Law is, however, not bracketed with terror as it was in the writings of Peresvetov. To-
gether with justice must go mercy, because "mercy without justice is faintheartedness, but justice without mercy is tyranny."52
In keeping with the spirit of the time, Karpov invokes a providential theory of history; but his style is ironic and his conclusion pessimistic. Man has progressed frornlTprimitive law of nature through the Mosaic law to the Christian law of grace; but the men who live under this law do not live by^ it. Greed and lust prevail, so that even the first of the apostles would be denied a hearing in contemporary Muscovy without money for bribery. ArTequally pessimistic view of Muscovite life is propounded in the writings of the monk Ermolai-Erazm, who echoes another favorite theme of Western reformers: the dream of a pastoral Utopia, of aTTeturri to a naturaTecoffiJiny and true Christian love. The source of all the world's ills is pride and estrangement from the land; peasants should be freed of all duties save" a single donation of a fifth of each harvest to the tsar and nobility. Other exactions should be taken from parasitic merchants and tradesmen; gold and silver exchange should be eliminated; knives should be made unpointedTo discourage assassins-such are some of the often naive ideas"containedTri his handbook of the 1540's: On Administration and Land-measurement.53 The number mysticism and cosmic neo-Platonic theologizing of the high Renaissance is also apparent in Ermolai's efforts to vindicate the doctrine of the trinity by finding triadic patterns hidden in almost every natural phenomenon.54