Reformation. Counter Reformation. and. the Union of Brest

From the time of the acceptance of Christianity by the Roman Empire in the fourth century and through the subsequent spread of this faith throughout the European continent, the interrelatedness of politics and religion had been a fundamental component of the development of western civilization.

As the Roman Catholic Church’s political and economic power increased, so too grew the kind of abuses often associated with temporal power. Consequently, certain committed Roman Catholics came to realize that the religion professed by their church was little other than an ideological facade erected to preserve the solidly entrenched vested interests of the priesthood and of the ecclesiastical and secular governments allied to the church. Moral abuses were particularly discon­certing to pious laypersons, because they seemed to contradict the Christian ideals professed by the church.

The Protestant Reformation

There were several attempts to reform the Roman Catholic Church from within, led especially by certain monastic orders. But when these attempts failed to bring about substantial change, the movement for reform passed beyond the perimeters of the church into a more public arena. Among the earliest reformers was the Czech priest Jan Hus, who at the beginning of the fifteenth century criticized the Roman Catholic Church and preached a return to the true principles of Christian­ity. His successors, known as Hussites, had come to control much of Bohemia and Moravia by the end of the fifteenth century. Although Hussite ideological influ­ence was felt beyond the borders of those provinces, its long-term impact essen­tially was limited to those two regions in the heart of central Europe.

More influential was the activity of the German priest and religious reformer Martin Luther, who in 1517 posted on the doors of the cathedral in Wittenberg his famous theses protesting abuses in the Roman Catholic Church. He was followed soon after in France and Switzerland by the theologian John Calvin. Although the followers of these men, subsequently described as Lutherans and Calvinists, were divided over certain theological issues, they all had one common purpose: to protest what they considered the extensive temporal power of the Roman Catho­lic Church and to reform that organization. If reform was not possible, then they were prepared to establish new organizations that would be responsible only to God and not to the pope in Rome or to any other earthly hierarch. The source of their inspiration was the Bible, and they believed every individual had a duty to study the Bible as a source of inspiration and truth. Because they were opposed to or in protest against Rome, the followers of this movement were called Protestants, and the movement itself, originally inspired by the need for change or reform, came to be known as the Reformation.

The Reformation spread rapidly through central and western Europe, where from the beginning it was inextricably involved in politics.

The Reformation reached Poland and, notably, Lithuania during the first half of the sixteenth century. Even the Teutonic Order along the Baltic, an order founded for the purpose of promoting Roman Catholicism among the “heathens,” volun­tarily accepted the Reformation in 1525 and transformed itself into a secular state, becoming a vassal of Poland the following year. Poland’s age-old military struggle with the Teutonic state came to an end, although Prussia now became a center of Lutheranism, the influence of which radiated southward and eastward from centers like the University of Konigsberg (est. 1544). The Reformation was particularly well received among the magnates of Lithuania, including both Roman Catholic and Orthodox families such as the Radziwills, the Khodkevyches, the Volovyches, the Sapiehas, and the Vyshnevets’kyis, all of whom adopted some form of Protestantism.

Moreover, in Poland-Lithuania there was a great variety of movements from which to choose. Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Unitarianism (or Anti-Trinitarian- ism) were among the major sects, although all of them, in what became typical of Protestantism, were further divided and subdivided into numerous subgroups. The success of the Reformation was in large part due to specific contemporary conditions in Poland-Lithuania. King Zygmunt II Augustus (reigned 1548-1572) prided himself on upholding the Renaissance ideals of humanism and tolerance. Moreover, because those groups who embraced Protestantism - the magnates and some gentry - were already independent of the king, the Reformation in Poland- Lithuania did not become an excuse for political action.

In Ukrainian lands, Protestantism did not have the same kind of impact, in numbers of converts, as in Poland or even Lithuania, although a recent estimate suggests that there were as many as 400 Protestant congregations (the vast major­ity Unitarian or Socinian) in Ukrainian territory, especially in Volhynia, at various times between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Protestantism did, however, have an important indirect impact in that its existence stimulated and heightened intellectual discourse on religious issues. Its most direct impact was on education.

The great emphasis placed by the Protestants on individual reading and study of the Bible required a literate population and the wide availability of Bibles. Wherever Protestantism spread, therefore, so too did schools and printing presses, and these contributed to a rise in the cultural level of given areas. Principles of Protestant education greatly influenced intellectual centers in Ukraine such as the Ostroh Academy. In fact, many of the members of the Orthodox intellectual circle at Ostroh became either Protestants or Protestant sympathizers. Accordingly, it is no surprise that among the most significant projects undertaken at Ostroh was a translation of the Bible into Church Slavonic. Nevertheless, while there were some attempts to translate parts of the New Testament into contemporary Ukrainian (the Peresopnytsia Gospel, 1556-61), the Protestant thrust toward publication in the vernacular (the reformers Hus and Luther were also primary formulators of literary Czech and German respectively) was not followed in Ukraine. The leading Ukrainian writers of the time, Herasym Smotryts’kyi, Lavrentii Zyzanii, and Ivan Vyshens’kyi, noted primarily for their religious polemics, all used Church Slavonic.

The Counter Reformation and Orthodox Ukraine

The rapid spread of the Reformation through Europe could not go unchallenged by the Roman Catholic Church, and by the second half of the sixteenth century a reaction had begun which came to be known as the Counter Reformation. One result of the Counter Reformation was the outbreak of religious wars, in which much of Europe was devastated in the name of Roman Catholic or Protestant religious truth. The conflict continued until as late as the seventeenth century. On the intellectual front, the Counter Reformation was spearheaded by the newly founded Jesuit Order, which used Protestant techniques - education and the dis­semination of learning - in an effort to reconvert to Roman Catholicism those who had fallen into what was considered Protestant “apostasy.” The Jesuits arrived in Poland in 1564 to begin their work on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Ukrainians in Poland-Lithuania had not converted en masse to Protes­tantism, but from the Roman Catholic point of view, they too were unacceptable because they were Orthodox. And in their bid to rid Poland of Protestantism and thereby to transform Poland into the eastern bastion of Roman Catholicism, the Jesuits and their supporters in the government decided to address the “Orthodox problem” at the same time. From the Catholic perspective, the problem was the conversion of individual Orthodox adherents; from the Orthodox perspective, it was bringing together once again two separate but equal ecclesial entities, that is, church union.

The period since the division between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy had seen efforts, albeit unsuccessful, to reunify the two halves of the Christian realm.

In the atmosphere of the Counter Reformation prevailing in late sixteenth­century Poland, the idea of church union was revived once again. This time its ideological proponents were the Jesuits. Since their arrival in Poland in 1564 and in Lithuania in 1569, the Jesuit ideological thrust had been focused on education and publication. The Jesuit school system, including colleges (the first founded in Jaroslaw in 1575, and twenty-two more in Ukrainian lands before 1648), quickly became renowned. Moreover, it was not long before the sons of Orthodox and recently converted Protestant nobles who had been sent to Jesuit educational insti­tutions converted to Roman Catholicism. Jesuit brotherhoods and printing presses also turned out much polemical material directed at both Protestants and Ortho­dox. In their anti-Orthodox polemics, Jesuit writers, the most famous of whom were Piotr Skarga and Antonio Possevino, focused on the theme of church union. In the course of their ideological onslaught, the Jesuits also pushed for the univer­sal adoption of the Gregorian calendar, introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582.

This seemingly technical matter met with strong opposition from the Orthodox. They viewed the Julian calendar as integral to their traditional religious life and something not to be given up easily, if at all, especially if the change was to be implemented by force.

Nonetheless, despite the Jesuit call for church union, the actual initiative came not from the Roman Catholics, but from the Orthodox themselves. Coincidental­ly, it was at this very time in the 1580s that Orthodox patriarchs from the Ottoman Empire, traveling to Muscovy in search of financial assistance, visited the church in Ukraine, where they decided to grant wide-ranging responsibility to the Stau- ropegial Brotherhood at the Dormition Church in L’viv. In 1588-1589, Jeremiah II (reigned intermittently 1572-1595) became the first ecumenical patriarch to visit personally the Metropolitanate of Kiev. Before leaving Constantinople, he reiterated the stauropegial status to the L’viv Dormition Church Brotherhood and extended his blessings to its other activities (the school, hospice, and printing press). During his return trip from Moscow, the ecumenical patriarch stopped in Vilnius, where he defrocked twice- and thrice-married clergy, including the met­ropolitan of Kiev Onysyfor Divochka (reigned 1579-1589). Jeremiah II also rec­ognized the stauropegial status of a second monastery in L’viv, that of St Onufrius.

Jeremiah’s actions reflected a general policy of attempting to restore the authority of the ecumenical patriarchate over the Orthodox Church within the Rus’ world. As part of the process, Constantinople’s long-standing alienation, since 1458, from the Kievan metropolitans resident in Moscow was finally healed in 1589, when it recognized the autocephaly, or independence, of the Russian Orthodox Church, to be headed henceforth by its own patriarch of Moscow. Yet at the same time the ecumenical patriarch issued decrees for the governance of the Orthodox Church in Poland-Lithuania, and his action sent a clear message to Moscow’s new patriarch that the Kievan metropolitanate in Belarusan and Ukrain­ian lands was to remain under the jurisdiction of Constantinople.

Not surprisingly, the seeming high-handedness of Constantinople’s ecumenical patriarch vis-à-vis the Orthodox Church in Ukraine and his courting of the L’viv Stauropegial Brotherhood caused great dissatisfaction among certain local hier­archs, especially the bishop of L’viv, Gedeon Balaban (reigned 1569-1607). As a result, Balaban turned to the Polish Roman Catholic archbishop of L’viv, whom he begged in 1589 “to liberate [our] bishops from the slavery of the patriarchs of Constantinople.”¹

The Union of Brest

Dissatisfaction with Constantinople prompted greater interest in Rome, and as early as 1590, at a synod of the Metropolitanate of Kiev in Poland-Lithuania, Bala- ban joined three fellow Orthodox bishops in signing a letter to the Polish king Zygmunt III (reigned 1587-1632), in which they indicated their readiness to rec­ognize the supremacy of the pope and their intention to unite with the Catholic Church of Rome. The four Orthodox bishops realized that their efforts on behalf of church union would not be successful without the support of the Rus’ mag­nates. In this regard, their own ecclesiastical ranks expanded in 1593, when the magnate Adam Potii, the former secretary to the king of Poland and the holder of several governmental offices, was consecrated under the name Ipatii as Orthodox bishop of Volodymyr.

But it was Potii’s patron, the powerful magnate and palatine of Kiev Prince Kostiantyn/Vasyl’ K. Ostroz’kyi, whom the bishops needed on their side if the idea of church union was to be a success. As founder of the Ostroh Academy, Prince Ostroz’kyi had already expressed interest in the idea of church union, which he saw as a means of improving the status of the Orthodox Church in what otherwise was becoming an increasingly Roman Catholic-oriented Polish-Lithuanian state. Ostroz’kyi’s understanding of union, however, implied the participation of what he considered the “whole Ecumenical Church,” that is, the entire Roman Catholic and Orthodox world, including the ecumenical and other eastern patriarchs as well as neighboring Moldavia and Muscovy. He passed on his own plan for union to his protege, Bishop Potii, for presentation at a regional episcopal council.

It was at this critical juncture that relations between Ostroz’kyi and the pro­union Orthodox bishops broke down. Instead of promoting Ostroz’kyi’s all-encom­passing approach, Bishop Potii, together with Bishop Kyrylo Terlets’kyi of Luts’k (reigned 1585-1607), acted unilaterally and issued two letters of intent (Decem­ber 1594 and June 1595) pledging allegiance to Rome. The letters of intent were then approved by the Polish king. In response, Ostroz’kyi condemned what he called “our faithless pastors, the metropolitan and bishops, [who] through the evil and cunning work of the ever-malign devil [have become] tempted by the glories of this world, and blinded by their desire for pleasures... have forsaken our holy patriarchs and gone over to the Latin side.”² Ostroz’kyi’s criticism did have an effect, since even Bishop Balaban of L’viv, one of the earliest initiators of the move­ment, now repudiated the idea of union.

Nevertheless, the pro-union bishops, joined by metropolitan of Kiev Mykhail Rahoza (reigned 1589-1599), pressed forward, and in June 1595, during an epis­copal synod at Brest, they approved a document containing thirty-three articles that set forth their understanding of union with Rome. This document later came to be considered the “constitution” of the Kievan metropolitanate “pertaining to union with the Roman church,” and it addressed theological, liturgical, ritual, administrative, and interchurch matters. The underlying concern was that the union with Rome would not change Eastern church practices, such as use of the liturgy of St John Chrysostom, the Slavonic rite, the Julian calendar, a married clergy, and administrative autonomy.

In December 1595, Bishops Potii and Terlets’kyi took the two episcopal let­ters and the Brest articles to Rome. It is important to note that the pope neither approved nor rejected the proposed articles. Instead, on 23 December he issued a papal decree (Magnus Dominus et laudabilis) recognizing “all sacred rites and ceremonies which the Ruthenian [Rus’] bishops and clergy use” as long as they were “not opposed to the truth and doctrine of the Catholic faith.”³ Thus, what later members of the Uniate or Greek Catholic Church believed to be their his­toric rights guaranteed by the Union of Brest were nothing more than their own demands, which could be approved or rejected at the discretion of the pope and

The Views of Prince Kostiantyn Ostroz’kyi

In June 1595, just after the pro-union Orthodox hierarchs issued their second letter of intent and the thirty-three articles which outlined their understanding of church union with Rome, Prince Ostroz’kyi issued the following appeal to the people of Rus’:

In these days, through the evil and cunning work of the ever-malign devil, the chief leaders of our faith, tempted by the glories of this world and blinded by their desire for pleasures, our faithless pastors, the metropolitan and the bishops, have forsaken our holy patriarchs and gone over to the Latin side.... Changing into wolves they secretly agreed among themselves like the damned, like Judas the Betrayer of Christ with the Jews, to tear away the Orthodox Christians of this region without their knowledge and to drag them down to ruin. Because the majority of the population of this land, particu­larly the Orthodox Christians, consider me to a certain extent to be a defender of Ortho­doxy and because I have fear before God and before you, dear brethren, to take any part of the blame on my head, I inform you all together and individually that I have determined to stand firmly, in an alliance with you, against these dangerous enemies of our salvation. What can be more shameless, more unjust, than when those six or seven persons, like robbers, plot secretly and forsake our pastors-patriarchs? Without asking us they entangle us in this betrayal, us the Orthodox, like mute curs. Why obey such persons? When the salt has lost its savor it should be cast out and trampled underfoot....

source: Ivan Wlasowsky, Outline History of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Vol. I (New York and Bound Brook, N.J. 1974), p. 255.

his advisers. It is, in fact, the question of which articles in the 1595 project are “not opposed” to the Catholic faith which has remained a source of conflict between Rome and the Uniate (later, Greek Catholic and then Ukrainian Catholic) Church to the present day.

When Bishops Potii and Terlets’kyi returned from Rome, King Zygmunt III, himself an ardent supporter of church union, called upon Poland-Lithuania’s Orthodox hierarchs to convene in the city of Brest, in far southwestern Lithuania, in October 1596. All the hierarchs of the Kievan metropolitanate arrived in Brest in the fall of that year, but they did not meet together. Instead, the pro-union bish­ops and Kievan Metropolitan Rahoza - joined by three Roman Catholic bishops representing the pope, two Jesuits (including Piotr Skarga), and three senators with armed retinues representing the Polish king - met at the cathedral in Brest. The anti-union forces led by the Orthodox bishops of L’viv (Gedeon Balaban) and Przemysl (Mykhail Kopystens’kyi) -joined by a representative of the ecumeni­cal patriarch, nine archimandrites, twenty-five lower clergy, and twenty-two Rus’ Orthodox and Protestant nobles led by Prince Ostroz’kyi - gathered at the oppo­site end of Brest in the home of a Protestant nobleman. Each group criticized and excommunicated the other.

The Union of Brest

The Union of Brest was an extended process consisting of several phases. It began with a letter issued by several Orthodox bishops declaring their inten­tion to recognize the supremacy of the pope (1590). Five years later, the letter was followed by two statements signed by several Orthodox bishops express­ing their intention to pledge allegiance to the pope (2 December 1594 and 12 June 1595); a list of articles spelling out thirty-three rights, the acceptance of which the Eastern church leaders claimed as a necessary prerequisite to union (11 June 1595); and the acceptance by Pope Clement VIII of the Ruthenian (Rus’) bishops and nation into the Roman church (23 December 1595). All this culminated in a declaration signed by the Kievan metropolitan and several bishops at the pro-union synod of Brest (9 October 1596).

The declaration pronounced at Brest reasserted that only the pope, not the ecumenical patriarch, was head of the Rus’ Church, whose traditional liturgy and rites, moreover, were not to undergo any changes. The rights and privi­leges spelled out in the thirty-three articles of 11 June 1595 included the fol­lowing:

1. Since there is disagreement between the Romans and the Greeks over the proces­sion of the Holy Spirit, which greatly prejudices union for no other reason than that we mutually do not wish to understand each other, we, therefore, request that we be not compelled to any other faith but that testified to by the Gospels and the writings of the Holy Fathers of the Greek faith, that is, that the Holy Spirit does not proceed from two principles nor through a double procession but proceeds from one principle as source, from the Father through the Son.

2. The Divine Liturgy as well as all morning, evening, and nocturnal prayers shall remain unaltered according to ancient custom and tradition accepted in the Eastern Church. Namely, the Sacred Liturgy of which there are three: Basil’s, Chrysostom’s, and Epiphany’s, which is celebrated during Lent with presanctified gifts, as well as all other rites and ceremonies of our church which we have preserved hitherto; that indeed the same be preserved in Rome under the obedience of the Holy Pontiff and all these to be conducted in our language.

3. That the mystery of the most Holy Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ remain for all time unaltered and intact as it has been until now under both species of bread and wine.

6. We accept the new calendar (Gregorian) if the old calendar cannot be used, on the condition, however, that the time and manner of celebrating Easter and other feasts will be preserved and remain whole and intact as it was during the time of unity.

9. The married priesthood shall be preserved intact, except for bigamists.

10. The offices of metropolitan, bishop, and other ecclesiastical ranks shall be con­ferred only upon those of the Ruthenian or Greek nation and that would be of our faith. Our ecclesiastical canons state that offices such as that of the metropolitan, the bishops, and other similar ranks be filled by appointments made by ecclesiastical authorities rather than civil authorities.

16. Marriages between Ruthenian Catholics and Roman Catholics shall be a free affair and neither party shall be coerced to accept the rite of the other because they are members of the same church.

19. In keeping with ancient custom, archimandrites, hegumens, monks and their monasteries will be subject to the bishops in whose eparchies they reside...

21. Archimandrites, hegumens, priests, archdeacons, deacons, and other ecclesias­tics of our rite should receive and enjoy the same honor and respect enjoyed by the Roman Catholic clergy and enjoy the ancient freedoms and privileges granted by King Wladyslaw. They shall be free from all taxation as regards both their persons and ecclesiastical properties (not as it has been unjustly until now).

33. Therefore, we the undersigned desire to establish a holy union for the glory of God and peace in the Church. We consider these articles necessary to our Church and require their approval from the highest bishop and His Royal Majesty.*

Twelve of the thirty-three articles were directed to the king of Poland (includ­ing 10, 16, 21 and 33, given above); the remaining twenty to the pope (including 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 19, and 33, given above). While the pope accepted the “Ruthenian bishops and nation” into the Catholic Church, he did not accept the list of thirty-three articles the bishops put forth as a constitution. He merely admitted that he “considered and understood” their “petitions and offers.” In fact, only the articles that pertained to liturgical matters (2 and 3, given above) were accepted by Rome, since they were, in the words of the papal decree Mag­nus Dominus et laudabilis, dated 23 December 1595, “not opposed to the truth and doctrine of the Catholic faith.”

In essence, the Union of Brest, which the Uniate (later, Greek Catholic and then Ukrainian Catholic) Church claimed as the legal basis for its distinct exist­ence, became a twofold source of future conflict. Those Orthodox Rus’ who refused to join the union never acknowledged the legitimacy of the decision at Brest. For its part, the Roman Catholic Church, while acknowledging the Union of Brest, never accepted the 1595 “constitution.” The pope, after all, who is responsible only to God, does not enter into contracts with anyone. At most, he had merely “considered and understood” the “petitions and offers” of the Uniates.

*Russel P. Moroziuk, Politics of a Church Union (Chicago 1983), pp. 17-21.

The basic polemic was as follows. The Roman Catholic king supported the union and the concept that the bishops, as leaders, must decide religious ques­tions, and the people must follow. The Orthodox side countered that religious questions cannot be decided without the approval of the faithful; since the pro­union bishops apparently did not have that approval, they had acted illegally and therefore had lost their authority as bishops. With the aid of local printing presses, there developed a spirited polemic on both sides, in which the leading thinkers of the time - Piotr Skarga and Bishop Potii for the Catholic-Uniate side, and Stefan Zyzanii, Iurii Rohatynets’, and Ivan Vyshens’kyi for the Orthodox side - partici­pated.

Not surprisingly, the king accepted the decisions of the pro-union bishops. Their agreement came to be known as the Union of Brest of 1596. In a sense, the Union of Brest was the equivalent in the cultural sphere of what had been achieved in the political sphere in 1569 with the Union of Lublin. While it is true that the creation of the new Uniate Church may not have been what the Jesuits and other advocates of the Counter Reformation in Poland hoped to achieve, in the circumstances, given that outright conversion seemed an impossible goal, Uniatism appeared an acceptable compromise.

With the Polish government on its side, some Uniate hierarchs, especially Bishop Potii of Volodymyr (who for his efforts on behalf of the union was made metropolitan of Kiev in 1600), confiscated property from the now-illegal Ortho­dox Church and increased their pressure on the two remaining Orthodox bishops in the region, Balaban in L’viv and Kopystens’kyi in PrzemySl, to join the union. In Volhynia, several dozen prominent Orthodox nobles did join. The Orthodox cause was left in the hands of the brotherhoods and of magnates and gentry led by Prince Ostroz’kyi. The Orthodox nobles carried on their struggle in the local diet­ines and the Polish Diet, where they worked in alliance with the other beleaguered religious group, the Protestants. Their efforts were partially successful: in 1607 the Polish Diet granted the Orthodox Church legal status once again and agreed not to interfere in the appointment of its hierarchs. But despite such protection, many Orthodox eparchial sees remained vacant, and in general, Orthodoxy was in a much weakened position vis-à-vis the Roman Catholic and Uniate churches, both of which had the full support of the king and certain other sectors of Polish society.

Thus, within less than three decades, the Orthodox cultural revival, which had begun with such promise in the 1570s, found itself in a situation in which the institution it defended seemed on the verge of disappearing. The valiant efforts of Rus’ townspeople (through the brotherhoods) and magnates (through schools and printing presses) could not stem the overwhelming power of Polish socie­ty to attract, whether by means of its sociopolitical and secular cultural life or through the religious accommodation of the new Uniate Church. In order to sur­vive, Orthodoxy and the Rus’ culture it represented needed some more powerful protector. That protector would be found among the lower echelons of society, which by the early seventeenth century had succeeded in creating an increasingly influential military and political force - the Cossacks.