HERE'S an interesting example of how western Europe and Russia seem to be moving in different directions. And this one doesn't have anything (directly at least) to do with Ukraine or famous prisoners. From Cambridge to the Sorbonne, the great medieval universities of Europe began life as places where theology was the most important subject: institutions where the church, which virtually controlled the world of thought, could prepare clerics and build up its intellectual armoury. Over time, of course, other subjects gained in relative importance, yet the status of religious studies remained high. But in recent decades, western Europe's surviving theologically-based colleges and faculties have become an endangered species. They have inherited buildings and resources which now exceed the religious needs of a secularising region. Some have endured by focusing on more fashionable subjects, like the sociology of belief, or relations between law, ethics and society. Only a hardy handful still teach students to read texts in Greek and Hebrew and ponder their meaning.

In Russia, almost the opposite is happening. Christian theology (plus, to a lesser extent, other religious traditions) has steadily regained ground in academia during the two decades since communism fell. As of February 2008, a new law allowed theological academies to offer degrees recognised by the state. This was despite the fact that six months earlier, ten members of the Academy of Sciences, including two Nobel prize-winners, had written an open letter warning of the infiltration, as they saw it, of higher education by religion. As the signatories put it, this trend was a step backwards from a modern era where all the achievements of science were "based on a materialist view of the world." Last October, the education ministry affirmed its approval of post-graduate studies of theology.

Still, that doesn't quite mean that higher education in Russia, which is a serious business, is about to be taken over by priests. When Russian Orthodoxy's point-man on matters academic appeared this week at the Moscow State University for the Humanities, on whose advisory board he sits, he struck a defensive note, as though both secular sceptics and anti-intellectual religious zealots were baying in the background. "One quite often hears that theology is not is a science, and that the appearance of theological faculties in universities is a nonsense," said Metropolitan Hilarion (pictured), head of the church's powerful external-affairs arm. "Indeed neither theology nor philosophy is a science in the same sense as maths, physics or astronomy are," he conceded—but he went on to affirm that theology had a respectable place among the humanities.

The bishop also made a measured case for academic study of the Bible, using the full range of linguistic and historical tools. During the 20th century, when Russia was cut off from the West, scholarly knowledge of the Bible had increased, and Russian scholars should now be sifting, carefully and critically, through those findings, he said. There was also a need to prepare a new cohort of scholars who could draw on the best insights to make a new translation of the Bible into Russian.

In saying all this, the prelate was walking a careful line. Within his own church, there are plenty of people who would see academic study as an unhealthy distraction from the revelations of God which only religious hierarchs are entitled to interpret and enforce. In the pantheon of Russian saints, there are more beggars and holy fools than professors. (Similar anti-intellectual voices can be heard, of course, in evangelical Protestantism and fundamentalist Islam.) And among an older generation of academics, there is a well-founded wariness of any ideological or religious system being imposed on the world of study.

It's worth watching to see whether this new cohort of religious scholars, dreamed of by the bishop, emerges. Russia's fine tradition of scholarly enquiry survived the travails of the 20th century—prison camps, virtual starvation, war, ideological terror—by a miracle; by end of the Soviet era, just enough of it was left to pass on to another generation. Modern history suggests that a healthy culture of academic endeavour, in the humanites and every other field, can be a bulwark against totalitarianism. And history also tells us that such bulwarks are badly needed.

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