LE SYMPOSIUM INTERNATIONAL LE LIVRE. LA ROUMANIE. L ...

chrysanthos notaras the Patriarch of Jerusalem... 391
perspective, we can understand with ease how the spirit of modernity –
carrying a pragmatic Science and a capitalist approach of the industrial
production and commerce, and not only philosophers’ intellectual
prejudices regarding religion – entered the realm of the orthodox Church.
Within the Catholic Church as well, the Jesuits proved a remarkable ability
to distinct between the religious biases of the Illuminism and the opening
created by its new, positive approach in Sciences. the protestants as well,
drove by the new spirit, encouraged the private initiative, intellectual and
entrepreneurial, in all domains.
the philosophy and vision of the enlightenment, rooted in the midst of
the western civilization, extended over the eastern part of the continent and
the Balkans, opening a period of deep political and cultural change. openminded
individuals, trained in Western universities, many of whom were
dedicated orthodox clergymen, brought back home the new perspective
over the world. In the Danube principalities (part of the future romania)
the policy of the ruling princes and the ever increasing contacts with
Central and Western europe created a channel for spiritual reorientation,
which, later, transformed Walachia and Moldavia into the most important
center of the enlightenment in South-eastern europe. 2 A consistent
number of remarkable young individuals from the principalities, and from
the Christian regions of the ottoman empire (i.e. Greece and lebanon),
studied in the West, mostly in Italy and France, renowned centers of the
Illuminism, absorbing the new philosophical and political ideas, reading
books and learning new manners and new perspectives on life and society.
naturally, due to a very different cultural background, inherited from
the old Byzantium, the process of modernization in this seemingly resilient
to change part of europe took a different path from that of the rest of the
continent. Consequently, the modernity, nevertheless present, produced a
specific way of reasoning; that, in one of the history’s intriguing feedbacks,
proved to be very fruitful for the West: many eastern-european thinkers,
literates and scientists, streamed to the western world, supplying Sciences
with a constant flow of knowledge and original vision, in a sort of exogamic
liaison.
paradoxically, if the enlightened science in general represented, in the
West, the expression of laic emancipation from the hard ideology of the
Church, in the east the situation is reversed: the Church, as the traditional
administrator of the knowledge about the world in its entirety, played the
role of the main promoter of the new ideas. that is because the schools
pended directly to the orthodox Church, who was entirely responsible for
2 p. M. KItroMIlIDeS 2005: 41.