The Icon and the Axe

The factjthat vodka apparently came into Russia by way of the medical profession points to the importance of Western-educated court doctors as channels for the early influx of Western ideas and techniques.4 The fact that vodka was popularly believed to be a kind of elixir of life wit^ occult healing qualities provides a pathetic early illustration of the way in which tbe_Ru_ssian_muz/uA: was to gild his addictions and idealize his boncL age. This naive belief also indicates that the initial appeal of Wester^ thought to the primitive Muscovite mind lay in the belief that it offered some simple key to understanding the universe and curing its ills. If one were to resist the overwhelmingly traditionalist Muscovite ideology it could best bg

in the name of another way to truth outside of tradition: some panacea or "philosopher's stone."

Together with the works of Galen and Hippocrates, which began to appear in Russian translation in the fifteenth century, doctors in Muscovy- and throughout Eastern Europe-began to incorporate into their compendia of herbs and cures extracts from the Secreta Secretorum. This work purported to Jje the secret revelation of Aristotle to Alexander the Great about the true nature of the world, contending that biology was the key to all the arts'aHd sciences, and that this "science of life" was ruled by the harmonies and confluences of occult forces within the body.32 This book held a key place among the works translated by the Judaizers and was destroyed during the Josephite persecution of heretics in the early sixteenth century, alongjsdjh_tiieJewjsh doctors who presumably either translated or possessed the work.

The interest in alchemistic texts continued, however, and became a major preoccupation of the translators in the foreign office, who soon replaced the doctors as the major conveyor of Western ideas. Fedor Kuritsyn, the first man effectively to fill the role of foreign minister in Russia, was accused of bringing back the Judaizing heresy from the West. One of the earliest surviving documents from the foreign office was a memorandum written by a Dutch translator at the beginning of the seventeenth century, "On the Higher Philosophical Alchemy."33 Later in the century Raymond Lully's 350-year-old effort to find a "universal science," his Ars magna generalis et ultima, was translated and made the basis of an influential alchemistic compilation by a western Russian translator in the same office.34

Hardly less remarkable was the Russian interest in astrology. Almost every writer of the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century was taken at one time or another with "delight in the laws of the stars" (zvezdoza-konnaia pretest'). Archbishop Gennadius was himself fascinated with the astrology he felt called on to destroy;35 and after his death, Nicholas of Liibeck, his original protege, became an active propagandist for astrological lore in Muscovy. Known as a "professor of medicine and astrology," he had come to Moscow by way of Rome to help draw up the new church calendar. He stayed on as a physician, translating for the imperial court in 1534 a treatise written in Liibeck on herbs and medicine, The Pleasant Garden of Health, and campaigning actively for unification of the Catholic and Orthodox churches. He produced astrological computations which lent urgency to his pleas for reunion by purporting to show that the end of the world had been merely postponed from 1492 to I524.36 Maxim the Greek devoted