In this path-breaking intellectual biography, Elise Wirtschafter, professor of history at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, takes on two misconceptions about the Russian Enlightenment and the Orthodox Church's role in it. First, as she points out, the Russian Enlightenment tends to get short shrift from European scholars because it focused more on the moral improvement of the individual than on social and political reforms. Second, eighteenth-century Russian Orthodox Churchmen were not, as they tend to be portrayed in the scholarship, opposed to the European Enlightenment. Instead, they were in many cases in the forefront of efforts to integrate European Enlightenment ideas with traditional Russian Orthodox thought. Wirtschafter's prime example and the subject of her book is Platon, metropolitan of Moscow from 1775 to 1812, and court preacher. Born Petr Grigor'evich Levshin (1737−1812), the son of a village priest, Platon was educated at the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy in Moscow and authored, among other works, a catechism for the use of the clergy, a two-volume history of the Russian Church, and around five hundred sermons. Wirtschafter presents and analyses Platon's thinking on certain key issues such as the fundamental relationship of humans to God, the difference between Christian Enlightenment and Enlightenment learning (namely, the moral dimension), the role of divine providence in human history, the meaning of free will for the individual within a universe guided by divine providence, and the role of Christian love in authority relationships. She concludes with a chapter devoted to defining the Russian Enlightenment within the context of moderate mainstream and religious Enlightenments of the time. In that respect, she sees Platon's espousal of the ‘middle way’ and moderation as being ‘well within the parameters of the pan-European religious Enlightenment’ (p. 58). The book contains two appendices: the first is a chronology of Platon's career, and the second a table of the 332 subscribers to the first nine volumes of Platon's Pouchitel'naia slova (Instructional discourses) in 1779 broken down according to social identity.