Chapter 9 Eastern Reformations

One of the many stereotypes of contemporary Ukraine is its image as a cleft country, divided between the Orthodox east and the Catholic west. Samuel Huntington’s best-selling book The Clash of Civilizations includes a map that shows the line between Eastern and Western Christian civilization passing right through Ukraine.

One should not be too harsh on the mapmakers. It is difficult, if not impossible, to draw a straight line in a country such as Ukraine. This is true for all cultural frontiers, but the existence of a hybrid church that combines elements of Eastern and Western Christianity further complicates the Ukrainian situation. That church was originally called Uniate, reflecting its purpose of uniting those elements. It is known today as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, with “Greek” referring to the Byzantine rite, or simply as the Ukrainian Catholic Church — by far the most successful institutional attempt to bridge one of the most ancient schisms of the Christian world. The church came into existence in the late sixteenth century, an era that saw the eastward advance of Western political and religious models and their adaptation to traditionally Orthodox lands. But resistance and growing self-assertiveness on the part of indigenous societies often accompanied that process.

The pro-Western movement began within the Rus’ Orthodox Church in the early 1590s in response to a crisis that engulfed the Kyiv metropolitanate. The church possessed large landholdings, and the nobility considered church offices excellent career choices for their sons. Such candidates often had little interest in religion but a strong attraction to ecclesiastical wealth. Thus bishops and archimandrites of leading monasteries often received appointment from the king with the help of secular benefactors of the church and without even taking monastic vows. Priests had just an elementary education, and so, often, did bishops. Even if they wanted more knowledge, there was no place to obtain it. Meanwhile, Calvinist and Catholic schools and colleges began opening their doors to the sons of Orthodox nobles. That was especially true of Jesuit schools. One of them, soon to become an academy, was established in Vilnius, near the Belarusian border, and another was founded in the town of Jarosław in Galicia.

The situation in the Kyiv metropolitanate did not differ much from the situation that had prevailed before the Reformation and the start of Catholic reform in other parts of Europe. In many ways, it was business as usual, but parts of the Orthodox elite began to perceive it as a crisis. The Catholic Church in the commonwealth was busy reinventing itself with the help of Jesuit schools and colleges, posing an implicit challenge to unreformed Orthodoxy. The publishing and educational activities of the circle around Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozky were an initial response to that challenge. No less concerned about the state of church affairs were the members of Orthodox brotherhoods — organizations of Rus’ merchants and tradesmen in major Ukrainian cities.

The Orthodox hierarchs found themselves in an impossible position. Their status in the Catholic-ruled commonwealth was secondary to that of the Catholic bishops, who were members of the senate and had direct access to the king. (Ostrozky and other princes and nobles felt that they were the true masters of the church.) The brotherhoods were in open revolt, undermining the bishop’s monopoly on teaching church dogma, and the patriarch of Constantinople, instead of helping the bishops, took the rebels under his protection (they knew how to appeal to the cash-strapped hierarch). A solution to this conundrum suddenly presented itself in the idea of union with Rome. The vision of church union shared by the Orthodox hierarchs rested on a model proposed by the joint Catholic-Orthodox Council of Florence in 1439. In the twilight years of the Byzantine Empire, both the emperor and the patriarch grew desperate to save it from Ottoman attacks. A promise of assistance came from Rome, at the price of uniting the two churches under papal authority. The Byzantine leaders agreed to that condition, which subordinated their church to Rome and replaced Orthodox dogmas with Catholic ones. In particular, they agreed with the Catholics on the all-important issue of the filioque, admission that the Holy Spirit proceeded not only from God the Father but also from God the Son, Jesus Christ. They managed, however, to maintain the institution of the married priesthood, the Greek language, and the Byzantine liturgy.

In the summer of 1595, two Orthodox bishops set off on the long journey to Rome, bringing along a letter from their fellow Orthodox hierarchs asking the pope to accept them into the Catholic Church on conditions close to those of the Union of Florence.

It seemed for a while that it was a done deal — the pope, the king, and the bishops all wanted the union. The problem was with the faithful or, more precisely, with the major stakeholders in the church. These included Prince Ostrozky and his fellow Orthodox magnates, members of the brotherhoods, and the monastic and a good part of the parish clergy. The magnates did not want to lose control of the church — in the age of the Reformation, it was a valuable political and religious asset not to be taken lightly; the brotherhoods wanted reform from below, not greater power for the bishops; some of the archimandrites, who ran the monasteries without taking monastic vows, wanted to continue managing church landholdings; and some of the monks, clergy, and rank-and-file faithful could not imagine betraying the holy Orthodox Church by abandoning the patriarch of Constantinople. It was a haphazard but powerful coalition of reformers and conservatives, true believers and opportunists that placed the plans of Rome, Warsaw, and the Orthodox hierarchs in jeopardy.

Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozky, arguably the most powerful man in Ukraine, was determined to prevent the church union. In the form suggested by the bishops, it threatened to wrest the church from his control and limit his ability to use Orthodoxy as a weapon in the struggle with royal power to keep a special place for the Ruthenian princes in commonwealth society.

Appalled, the old prince had dispatched armed servants to intercept the two bishops on their way to Rome, but they escaped unharmed. Now Ostrozky headed for Brest to take part in the church council with a small army of supporters consisting of Orthodox nobles and servants. He also had support from his Protestant allies — the Lithuanian aristocrats. One of them offered his own home as the venue for the church council, as the king had ordered the town’s Orthodox churches closed. The king’s representatives arrived in Brest with their own armed retinues. In this charged atmosphere, the pending union of churches might well descend into not just disunion but bloody battle.

The single event known in historiography as the Council of Brest never actually took place, for it split into two gatherings, Catholic and Orthodox. The Catholic council, which featured among its participants the Orthodox metropolitan and most of the bishops, proclaimed the union. The Orthodox council, with a representative of the patriarch of Constantinople presiding, included among its participants two Orthodox bishops as well as scores of archimandrites and representatives of the parish clergy. It refused to join the union and swore continuing allegiance to the patriarch of Constantinople.

Despite strong opposition to the Union of Brest, the king held fast to it. He recognized only one council of Brest — the one that had proclaimed the union — and, henceforth, acknowledged the Uniate Church as the sole legitimate Eastern Christian church in his country. Two bishops, scores of monasteries, thousands of churches, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Orthodox faithful were now considered lawbreakers. The Orthodox nobility took the fight to the local and Commonwealth Diets, claiming that the royal authorities were mounting an assault on the freedom of religion guaranteed to the nobility. Indeed they were. Back in the 1570s, immediately after the death of Sigismund Augustus, the Protestant nobles had made freedom of religion a central tenet of the “articles” to which every elected king of Poland had to swear allegiance.

Now the Protestant nobles backed their Orthodox counterparts, helping to turn the Diets into religious battlegrounds and raising the need for the “accommodation of the Rus’ nation of the Greek rite” at every Commonwealth Diet. But no substantial change took place before the death of King Sigismund III in 1632. For more than thirty years, the Orthodox Church existed without official status or recognition. As new bishops could not be appointed without royal assent, the Uniates hoped to leave the Orthodox Church without bishops after those who refused to accept the union died out. The Orthodox Church survived only by disobeying the king and the royal authorities. Instead of strengthening royal power, the Union of Brest undermined it. Like the Union of Lublin before it, the church union produced results contrary to the expectations of its authors.

Not limited to the Diets, the struggle for and against the union spilled into a much broader public arena through publications. In Ukraine and Belarus, there was an explosion of treatises, protestations, attacks, and counterattacks known today under the general rubric of “polemical literature.” Initially, both sides were ill equipped to conduct serious religious polemics and were served by their Polish supporters. Piotr Skarga, a Jesuit who had attended the council of Brest, was among those who used his pen in support of the union. Ostrozky employed the talents of one of his Protestant clients to fight back. From then on, Protestants would write under pen names, usually Greek ones, so as to stress their Orthodox credentials and the authority of their texts. Consequently, they wrote most of the earlier tracts in Polish, which they continued to use even in the later period, when local authors began to write in Ruthenian.

As time passed, both Uniates and Orthodox began to employ authors from their own milieu who could engage the other side on issues of religious policy, church history, and theology. Among the Orthodox, an author who gained special prominence was Meletii Smotrytsky, the son of one of the editors of the Ostrih Bible, Herasym Smotrytsky. A man of many talents, Meletii was also author of the first grammar of Church Slavonic, which became a standard reference on the subject for the next two centuries. Judging by the number of publications, the Orthodox were more active than the Uniates, perhaps because they lacked other channels for defending their cause as well as the support of the courts.

The Union of Brest and the rise of Cossackdom led to a southward and eastward shift of Ukraine’s two main cultural frontiers, Christian-Muslim and East-West Christian. That shift brought about a number of major changes in the economic, social, and cultural life of Ukraine. One of the most emblematic of them was the return of the city of Kyiv to the center of Ukrainian history for the first time since the Mongol invasion of the mid-thirteenth century. In the first half of the seventeenth century, that ancient city would become the center of the Orthodox Reformation — an effort on the part of Orthodox churches from Constantinople to Moscow to catch up with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe and reform themselves in the process.

The revival of Kyiv as a religious and cultural center began in the early seventeenth century as the old city became a safe haven for Orthodox intellectuals from Galicia. They found conditions there more favorable for their religious and educational work than in western Ukraine, where Warsaw put increasing pressure on the Orthodox to join the union with Rome. The key to turning Kyiv into an Orthodox center was continuing Orthodox control (despite the Union of Brest) over the Kyivan Cave Monastery — by far the richest monastic institution in Ukraine and Belarus. In 1615 the archimandrite of the monastery, Yelisei Pletenetsky, moved the printing press once managed by the Orthodox bishop of Lviv to Kyiv. From Lviv and Galicia came not only the press but also writers, proofreaders, and printers who created a new intellectual center under Pletenetsky’s guidance and protection. In the same year, an Orthodox brotherhood was founded in Kyiv and opened a school of its own, as the Lviv brotherhood had done. The school would later develop into a Western-style college, while the printing house would publish eleven books before Pletenetsky’s death in 1624. By that time, Kyiv had replaced Ostrih and Vilnius as the headquarters of Orthodox publishing activity.

Since the late sixteenth century, the region south of Kyiv had become a Cossack freehold in all but name, a fact that assisted the rise of Kyiv as the focus of religious, educational, and cultural activities opposed to Polish Catholic authority. The Cossacks contributed to the Kyivan renaissance in two major ways. First, their presence minimized the Tatar threat, making the city much more secure as a place for religious dissidents to live and work, as well as for the monks and peasants who tilled the Cave Monastery’s lands to produce the revenue needed to fund publishing and education. Second, when the Kyivan monks found themselves under growing pressure from the Polish government in Warsaw, the Cossacks provided the Orthodox refugees from Galicia with the protection they needed. In 1610, their hetman promised in writing to kill a representative of the Uniate metropolitan sent to Kyiv to convert the local Orthodox. Eight years later, the Cossacks acted on his threat and drowned the man in the Dnieper. “What other nations strive to win by means of words and discourses, the Cossacks accomplish with actions themselves,” wrote the Orthodox intellectual Meletii Smotrytsky, who was for some time an apologist for the Cossacks.

The Cossacks played a crucial role in consecrating a new Orthodox hierarchy — an all-important act that saved the church from extinction. Left without bishops because of the king’s refusal to allow any new consecrations, the church was thus bound to disappear. In the fall of 1620, Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, by far the best-known and most respected Cossack leader of the time, convinced Patriarch Theophanes of Jerusalem, who was then traveling through Ukraine, to consecrate a new hierarchy. The consecration not only gave new life to the Orthodox metropolitanate but also reestablished Kyiv as an ecclesiastical capital. It happened almost by default. The king did not recognize the new metropolitan, Yov Boretsky, and issued an order for his arrest and the detention of the rest of the new hierarchy. That made it impossible for Boretsky to live in Navahrudak, a town near Vilnius that had served as the residence of the Orthodox metropolitans since the fourteenth century. He had no choice but to reside in Kyiv, the hub of the Cossack-controlled Dnieper region. The Orthodox Church now had its own army in the Cossacks, while the Cossacks gained Orthodox ideologues and a printing press to promote their social and political agenda.

The Cossack-Orthodox alliance became especially worrisome for Warsaw in the fall of 1632, when the Muscovite army crossed the commonwealth border in an attempt to recapture Smolensk and other territory lost during the Time of Troubles. The commonwealth was caught unprepared, with few troops to defend its borders, almost as in 1620, when Sahaidachny had saved the country at the Battle of Khotyn. To make things worse, the commonwealth was preoccupied with the lengthy election of a new king, as Sigismund III had died in the spring of that year. The death of the king who had helped engineer the Union of Brest presented the commonwealth elites with both a problem and an opportunity to find new ways of dealing with the religious crisis. Instead of assuaging religious differences, the union had divided Rus’ society and turned a good part of it against the government.

The made-in-Warsaw solution to the problem was called the Accommodation of the Ruthenian Nation of Greek Worship. The Orthodox Church would receive recognition as a legal entity with rights and privileges equal to those of the Uniate Church. The deal, negotiated at the Commonwealth Diet with representatives of the Orthodox nobility and backed by the future king, Władysław IV, achieved certain political goals. In the short run, it bought Orthodox loyalty to the commonwealth and ensured Cossack participation in the Smolensk War on the side of the commonwealth forces. Recognition of the church by the royal authorities also drove a wedge between the Orthodox hierarchy and the Cossacks. The church no longer needed Cossack protection to survive and henceforth oriented itself toward Warsaw.

As the sponsors of the deal saw it, the rapprochement of the Orthodox Church with the royal authorities called for new ecclesiastical leadership. To strengthen the hand of the “peace with Warsaw” party, the Orthodox participants in the Diet elected a new metropolitan, Peter Mohyla. On entering Kyiv, Mohyla arrested his predecessor, putting him in a cellar at the Kyivan Cave Monastery. A former officer of the Polish army and archimandrite of the Cave Monastery, the new Orthodox leader knew what he was doing. As one who had been close to Smotrytsky and Boretsky, Mohyla had little use for the Cossacks or their protégés in the church. He also had the full support of the royal authorities — he was, after all, the scion of a ruling family.

Peter Mohyla was not of royal blood, but as a son of the Orthodox ruler (hospodar) of the principality of Moldavia, he was certainly a member of the commonwealth aristocracy. Mohyla’s panegyrists celebrated him as the new leader of Rus’. He took the place of princes such as Ostrozky and of Cossacks such as Sahaidachny, whom Orthodox intellectuals had glorified as heirs and continuators of the Kyivan princes Volodymyr the Great and Yaroslav the Wise. “Do you recall how famous Rus’ was before, how many patrons it had,” wrote one of the panegyrists, speaking “on behalf” of the St. Sophia Cathedral, the architectural legacy of Prince Yaroslav, now reconstructed by Mohyla. “Now there are few of them; Rus’ wants to have you.”

Mohyla took the task of restoring Rus’-era churches with utmost seriousness, rebuilding quite a few of them. “Restoration” in the mid-seventeenth century, however, meant something quite different than it does today. As the exterior of the St. Sophia Cathedral shows even now, Mohyla and his architects never tried to go back to the original Byzantine models. The new style in which they “restored” their churches came from the West and was influenced by the European baroque. The St. Sophia Cathedral as we know it today is a perfect example of the mixture of cultural styles and trends that defined the essence of Mohyla’s activities as metropolitan. Although Byzantine frescos embellish its interior, the cathedral has the exterior of a baroque church.

The westernization of the Byzantine heritage and the adaptation of the Orthodox Church to the challenges of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation were the driving forces of Mohyla’s ecclesiastical and educational innovations. As in the case of architecture, it was not merely that models were coming from the West but that they were also Catholic. The Uniates and the Orthodox were in competition, trying to emulate Catholic reform without giving away too much of their Byzantine heritage. While the Uniates could send their students to Rome and to Jesuit colleges in central and western Europe, the Orthodox did not have that luxury. Mohyla addressed the challenge by establishing the first Orthodox college in Kyiv to adapt the Jesuit college curriculum to its needs. The college, created in 1632 through a merger of the Kyiv brotherhood school with the school at the Cave Monastery, later became known as the Kyiv Mohyla Academy and is now one of the leading universities in Ukraine. As it was in the seventeenth century, the academy is the most Western-oriented university in the country.

Mohyla secured Kyiv’s role as the leading publishing center in the Orthodox lands of the commonwealth and elsewhere. The books published in Kyiv in the 1640s found readers far beyond the borders of Ukraine. One of them, the Liturgicon, was the first book to systematize Orthodox liturgical practices. Another, titled Confession of the Orthodox Faith, presented the first thorough discussion of the basics of the Orthodox faith, offering answers to 260 questions in catechism style. It was written around 1640, approved by a council of Eastern patriarchs in 1643, and published in Kyiv in 1645. Heavily influenced by Catholic models, the Confession became a response to the Protestant-oriented catechism of 1633 issued by Patriarch Cyril Lucaris of Constantinople. The Eastern patriarchs’ stamp of approval made it a standard work for the whole Orthodox world, including Muscovy.

The educational and publishing projects initiated by Mohyla had as their primary goal the reform of Kyivan Orthodoxy. An educated clergy, a clearly defined confession of faith, and standardized liturgical practices went hand in hand with the metropolitan’s efforts to increase the power of bishops in the church, strengthen ecclesiastical discipline, and improve relations with the royal authorities. All these measures responded to the challenges of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation — hallmarks of the confessionalization of religious life all over Europe. “Confessionalization” meant a number of things. In the course of the sixteenth century, all churches along the Catholic-Protestant divide were busy formulating professions of faith, educating their clergies, strengthening discipline, and standardizing liturgical practices in cooperation with the secular authorities. By the mid-seventeenth century, under the leadership of Peter Mohyla, the Orthodox had joined this general European trend.

Remarkably, Kyiv, a city scarcely noted on the map of the Orthodox world since the Mongol invasion of 1240, played the leading role in the Orthodox Reformation, not Moscow or Constantinople. A number of reasons underlay that development in addition to those outlined above. After the Time of Troubles, the patriarchs of Moscow were isolated not only from the Western but also from the Eastern Christian world, believing that there was no true religion outside the Tsardom of Muscovy. Constantinople, under the control of the Ottomans, tried to conduct reform on the Protestant model but did not get very far. In 1638, Patriarch Cyril Lucaris, who nine years earlier had published a Latin-language Orthodox profession of faith (Confessio) heavily influenced by Protestant doctrine, was strangled on orders of the sultan for allegedly instigating a Cossack attack on the Ottoman Empire. In the same year a church council in Constantinople anathematized him for his theological views. In the contest between Mohyla and Lucaris and between Catholic and Protestant models for the reform of Orthodoxy, Mohyla’s model emerged victorious. His reforms would have a profound impact on the Orthodox world for another century and a half.

The Union of Brest left the Ruthenian (Ukrainian and Belarusian) society of the commonwealth in general, and the Ukrainian elites in particular, split between two churches — a division that endures in today’s Ukraine. But the struggles over the fate of the union also left that society much more conscious of its commonalities, including history, culture, and religious tradition. For all its verbal ferocity and occasional physical violence, that struggle helped form a new pluralistic political and religious culture that allowed discussion and disagreement. Ukraine’s location on the religious boundary between Western and Eastern Christianity produced not one “frontier” church that combined elements of the two Christian traditions (a distinction often ascribed to the Uniates alone) but two. The Orthodox, too, embraced new religious and cultural trends from the West as they sought to reform themselves and adjust to conditions in the decades following the Union of Brest. In the early seventeenth century, it was even more difficult to draw a clear line between Christian East and Christian West in Ukraine than it is now.

The polemics over the Union of Brest helped awaken Rus’ society on both sides of the religious divide from a long intellectual sleep. The issues discussed by the polemicists included the baptism of Rus’, the history of the Kyiv metropolitanate, the rights of the church and of the Rus’ lands under the Lithuanian dukes and of the Orthodox under the Union of Lublin, and the royal decrees and Diet resolutions of the subsequent era. For those who could read and took part in the political, social, and religious developments of the day, the polemicists created a sense of self-identity that had not previously existed. If they were at odds on issues of religion, the polemicists all showed the highest regard for the entity that they called the Ruthenian nation (naród Ruski), in whose interest they allegedly conducted their struggles.