The Icon and the Axe

most of his early writings to a refutation of Nicholas' arguments but revealed in the process that he too had been fascinated by astrology while in Italy. Maxim's follower, the urbane diplomat Fedor Karpov, confessed that he found •astrology "necessary and useful to Christians,'' calling it "the art of arts."37 The first Russians sent to study in England at the turn of the sixteenth century were particularly interested in the famous Cambridge stud*ent of astrology, magic, and spiritism, John Dee.38 The rapid spread of fortune-telling, divination, and even gambling in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveals in part a popularization of astrological ideas current throughout Renaissance Europe.39 /*" Thus, during this early period of Western contact, Russians were fate-\ fully conditioned folook to the West noffor piecemeal ideas and techniques ft but for a ?????? ???? inner secrets of the universe. Early diplomats were / intergstedjnot in thejetails of economic and political developments abroad U bu^ m^asteolegic^l^angLalc^emistic^y^tems. These Renaissance sciences held out the promise of finding either the celestial patterns controlling the movements of history or the philosopher's stone that would turn the dross of the northern forests into gold. Thus, secular science in Russia tended to be Gnostic rather than agnostic. THere is, indeed, a kind of continuity of tradition in the all-encompassing metaphysical systems from the West that fascinated successive generations of Russian thinkers: from the early alchemists_andastrologers to Boehme's occult theosophy (literally, "divine knowledge") and the sweeping totalistic philosophies of Schelling, Hegel, and Marx.40

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.