A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

the seventeenth century, when Muscovy was struggling out of Byzantine barbarism. The late-recovered treasure of ancient folk-poesy, partly preserved by chance among the northern peasantry, tells of the complete rupture wrought in the racial life by the imposition of Byzantine Christianity from the south. As early as the fourteenth century the Strigolniks, who abounded at Novgorod, had held strongly by anti-ecclesiastical doctrines of the Paulician and Lollard type; [1554] but orthodox fanaticism ruled life in general down to the age of Peter the Great. In the sixteenth century we find the usual symptom of criticism of the lives of the monks; [1555] but the culture was almost wholly ecclesiastical; and in the seventeenth century the effort of the turbulent Patriarch Nikon (1605-1681), to correct the corrupt sacred texts and the traditional heterodox practices, was furiously resisted, to the point of a great schism. [1556] He himself had violently denounced other innovations, destroying pictures and an organ in the manner of Savonarola; but his own elementary reforms were found intolerable by the orthodox, [1557] though they were favoured by Sophia, the able and ambitious sister of Peter. [1558] The priest Kriezanitch (1617-1678), who wrote a work on "The Russian Empire in the second half of the Seventeenth Century," denounced researches in physical science as "devilish heresies"; [1559] and it is on record that scholars were obliged to study in secret and by night for fear of the hostility of the common people. [1560] Half-a-century later the orthodox majority seems to have remained convinced of the atheistic tendency of all science; [1561] and the friends of the new light doubtless included deists from the first. Not till the reforms of Peter had begun to bear fruit, however, could freethought raise its head. The great Czar, who promoted printing and literature as he did every other new activity of a practical kind, took the singular step of actually withdrawing writing materials from the monks, whose influence he held to be wholly reactionary. [1562] In 1703 appeared the first Russian journal; and in 1724 Peter founded the first Academy of Sciences, enjoining upon it the study of languages and the production of translations. Now began the era of foreign culture and translations from the French. [1563] Prince Kantemir, the satirist, who was with the Russian embassy in London in 1733, pronounced England, then at the height of the deistic tide, "the most civilized and enlightened of European nations." [1564] The fact that he translated Fontenelle on The Plurality of Worlds tells further of his liberalism. [1565] Gradually there arose a new secular faction, under Western influences; and other forms of culture slowly advanced likewise, notably under Elisabeth Petrovna. At length, in the reign of Catherine II, called the Great, French ideas, already heralded by belles lettres, found comparatively free headway. She herself was a deist, and a satirist of bigots in her comedies; [1566] she accomplished what Peter had planned, the secularization of Church property; [1567] and she was long the admiring correspondent of Voltaire, to whom and to D'Alembert and Diderot she offered warm invitations to reside at her court. Diderot alone accepted, and him she specially befriended, buying his library when he was fain to sell it, and constituting him its salaried keeper. In no country, not excepting England, was there more of practical freedom than in Russia under her rule; [1568] and if after the outbreak of the Revolution she turned political persecutor, she was still not below the English level. Her half-crazy son Paul II, whom she had given cause to hate her, undid her work wherever he could. But neither her reaction nor his rule could eradicate the movement of thought begun in the educated classes; though in Russia, as in the Scandinavian States, it was not till the nineteenth century that original serious literature flourished. ยง 4. Italy