CULTURAL REVIVAL AND MORAL EDUCATION OF THE SERBS IN THE 16TH AND 17TH CENTURIES
CULTURAL REVIVAL AND MORAL EDUCATION OF THE SERBS IN THE 16TH AND 17TH CENTURIES

Summary/Abstract: Literate Serbs in the 16th and 17th centuries have held in their hands the works of ancient Greek authors with a clearly expressed ethical content. They did not only read them, but in their own writings used the sermons of Christian rhetors, who have marked the beginnings and remained at the foundations of Byzantine spiritual literature and its cultural sphere. Serb Orthodox Christianity responded to the Catholic propaganda’s aggressive emphasis on morality at the end of the 16th century with finely tuned alertness to hidden dangers, but also with the sense for adopting something from the opponent – primarily the rhetors’ way of governing the people’s conscience and their day-do-day conduct and the ethics of the family, social and business life. In urban environments, where Serb patricians arrived and matured later than what was the case in the closed circles of other wealthy merchants, especially Greeks, moral education was obtained within the process of learning the vocation: like in western Europe of that time, particularly in Protestant environments, the merchant’s skills, firmly defined by experience and obtained through years of practicing the business, was inseparable from the code of duty and norms of conduct, since these were the conditions for success as much as the working skills.

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