This book sets out to answer the question of why Eastern Church writers showed no interest in analytical reasoning - the so-called "intellectual silence" of Rus' culture - while Western Church writers, by the time of the Scholastics, routinely incorporated analytical reasoning into their defences of the faith. Donald Ostrowski suggests that Western, post-Enlightenment- trained, analytical scholars often miss the point, not because of an inability to comprehend cultural ideas which seem abstract and ineffable, but because the agenda is different.