From this point of view the Bible . . . supplied the place of scientific and learned works on nature and man ; pious commentaries . . . took the place of treatises on natural science ; and the lives of the saints . . . stood for monographs on moral and historical subjects.

Although Greek culture was much better fitted for such a rôle, Russian men of letters began to have recourse to Latin civilization and to study Latin books, particularly those which were of use for theological controversy and scholastic learning. by degrees some notions on formal logic, some dissertations of Aristotle on natural science, expounded in this spirit, some treatises of Thomas Aquinas on justice and other topics, and some works on history, for instance, the chronicle of Marin Byelsky, penetrated into Russia.

The movement developed first in Kiev, and somewhat later spread to Moscow.

The enlightened metropolitan of Kiev, Peter Mogila, transformed the famous school at Kiev into a college in 1631 ; he himself had a humanistic conception of knowledge and education, but the place became later, under Polish influence, a centre of scholastic learning ; the enlightened spirit of this college was well represented by Stephen Yavorsky, one of the professors who lectured there for some years before the college was transformed into a theological seminary.

The wise monk Simeon Polotsky, one of the opponents of the learned Epiphanius Slavinetsky, began, probably in 1664, to impart in Moscow the Latin learning, that he had got from the Kiev college and from the Polish schools in Vilna and other cities ; one of his pupils—Silvester Medvedyev, was a zealous partisan of Latin learning and took a lively part in the contest, which arose thus early between the zapadniki and vostochniki, i.e., the partisans of " Western" Latin civilization and those who, like the monk Euthymius and the brothers Lihudy, maintained the "Eastern" Greek tradition.

These fears were not entirely unfounded. Men who applied themselves to Latin civilization were sometimes unable to preserve the Greek faith from contamination and to square with its principles all the ideas, more or less intimately connected with the Catholic or Protestant confessions and their sects. Thus Maxim the Greek was somewhat troubled by the ideas he learned during his residence in Italy ; Silvester Medvedyev was accused of having expressed Latin rationalistic opinions . . . Matvei Bashkin was perhaps influenced by Protestant or Calvinistic ideas . . . .

But the fundamental point of view, from which all this knowledge acquired some unity, continued to be religious. The Russian scholars of the 16th and 17th centuries were obliged to conform to the precepts of Russian Orthodoxy, as expounded in the �Profession� of Peter Mogila and the later treatises of Stephen Yavorsky and Theophan Prokopovich, though these were influenced to some extent by Catholic and Protestant ideas. Orthodoxy continued to subdue reason and to humble its independent creative power .  .