The members of the bureaucracy that governed the State were expected to have thorough humanistic education, and both the noble and middle classes were highly educated. While the transmission to the West of the major part of the Greek literature had to await the Renaissance, the twelfth-century western scholars were translating works of philosophy and science from Greek into Latin. These manuscripts played a vital part in the earlier development of Western European learning. The scholars fled carrying with them their manuscripts to the University towns of Italy. Italy yielded itself with rapture with the spirit of humanism, and from Italy, the torch of learning was borne in France, from France to England. Paris and Oxford began to rival Bologna, Pisa and Florence, and all Western Europe was bated in the light of the new learning.
The new learning gave to England men like Grocyn (1446-1519), Linacre (1460-1524), John Colet (1446-1519), Erasmus, as a temporary Englishman, Sir Thomas Moore (b. 1478), Sir Walter Raleigh (b. 1552), Sir Philip Sydney (b. 1554), Spenser (b. 1552), Francis Bacon (b. 1651), Marlowe and Shakespeare (both b. 1564). Also there is the great Elizabethan dramatist of France, Ronsard (b. 1524), Montagne (b. 1533) and Rabelais (d. 1553). To Italy Machiavelli (b. 1469), Bandello (b. 1480), Tasso (b. 1544) and Ariosto (b. 1474). Germany during the same period could claim Juhan Reuchlin, and Ulrich von Hutten, Malenchton and Martin Luther. Portugal had Camoens and Spain Calderon and Cervantes.
In the fourteenth century, the influence of the hesychast (gr. isihia - silence), which has as its main expression the Jesus Prayer , the unceasing prayer of the heart, went across linguistic, national and political boundaries, and was able to establish a new sense of Orthodox unity and thus limited the impact of the Western influence. The Byzantine hesycahsts were traditional suporters in East of the dogmatic and cannonic riguour before the imperial politics.
What is the hesychast movement? In the last years of Andronicos III's reign, a small but influential group of Mount Athos, were perfecting a method of prayer and meditation, which enabled them to see the divine light with mortal eyes, or to become illumined by the aura of Transfiguration. They were known as the hesychasts, the men that leave alone in peace with God. The meditation is not a goal in itself. The goal is to attain the vision of the divine light through which he might attain union, however momentary, with God and become himself deified.
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