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
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.
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
