The Religious Crisis

Between Rome and Constantinople

The events of the last quarter of the sixteenth century in the Kyivan met­ropolitanate largely determined the course of further ecclesiastical devel­opment, playing a decisive role in the history of the Ukrainian lands.

The revival of Rome’s interest in the Kyivan church began with the onset of the Counter-Reformation.^[108] During the pontificate of Gregory XIII (1572-85), the Roman curia began to take a definite interest in the Orthodox East in general and the Ruthenian (Ukrainian-Belarusian) Church in particular. New legions of the faithful had to be recruited to strengthen the Church of Rome, which had suffered significant losses during the Reformation. A Greek Congregation was established in Rome in 1573 and a Greek College in 1579. Rome also began to develop an in­terest in previous efforts to achieve union, especially the resolutions of the Council of Ferrara and Florence (1439). New ideas concerning Rome’s mission in the East were proclaimed and propagated by the nuncio in Warsaw, Alberto Bolognetti, and the papal legate, Antonio Possevino. Working in the same vein were the Polish Jesuits posted in the eastern lands of the Commonwealth, most notably Piotr Skarga, later chaplain to the king of Poland.^[109]

The growth of Counter-Reformation tendencies in the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth had a great influence on the development of Ukrainian religious life.

The Lviv incident alarmed the royal court with the prospect of Ortho­dox-Catholic conflict within the state, and King Stefan Batory issued a new proclamation on the calendar reform in January 1584. The procla­mation explained that the introduction of the new calendar did not pro­hibit the Orthodox from celebrating their festive liturgies according to the old style, and that they were to go over to the Gregorian calendar only with the permission of the patriarch of Constantinople. The king’s action somewhat mitigated the harshness of the Orthodox-Catholic dispute over the ‘calendar issue’, but the conflict itself was a harbinger of crisis in relations between the two religious communities. As the papacy and the Catholic hierarchs close to it grew more influential within the Common­wealth, the Orthodox were forced to seek new ways of responding to the Catholic challenge.

The origins of the revolutionary developments in the Kyivan metro­politanate are usually associated with the activities of Patriarch Jeremiah II of Constantinople. He paid two visits to the Kyivan metropolitanate: first in 1588, on his way to Moscow; and then in 1589, on his way back to Constantinople.

Jeremiah’s visit to Ukraine did not differ in purpose from those of the Eastern patriarchs and their representatives who had preceded him on the territory of the Kyivan metropolitanate or those who would follow in his footsteps. Generally speaking, the object was the extraction of funds through beggary or duplicity. For an appropriate fee, the Eastern hier­archs would proclaim anathemas or issue certificates to those willing to pay for them, sowing corruption and disorder in the metropolitanate. In the second half of the sixteenth century, even after the Council of Trent (1562-3) had condemned the sale of indulgences in the Western Church, certificates of ‘absolution’ continued to be distributed in the East. Repre­sentatives of the Eastern clergy would bring them to Ukraine and sell to the highest bidder. A contemporary observer (Ipatii [Adam] Potii, later an Orthodox bishop and then a Uniate metropolitan) described one such dealer in Eastern ‘indulgences’ as follows: ‘Like a dealer of some kind dis­playing his wares and trading them in the temple, so did he sell a plenary indulgence for a taler, a middling one for a half-taler, and a small one for six groszy, as I saw with my own eyes at Brest.’^[112] The similarity between certificates of ‘absolution’ and indulgences was only too obvious, and just as the constant exactions of the Roman curia in the German lands aroused the indignation of Martin Luther, so did the incessant interfer­ence of the ‘Greeks’ call forth protest among the Orthodox of the Kyivan metropolitanate.

In the aftermath of the Union of Florence (1439) and especially after the fall of Constantinople, the hierarchical dependence of the Kyivan metropolitanate on Constantinople weakened considerably.^[113] It was mani­fested only in the patriarch’s confirmation of the new Kyivan metropol­itan, who was either elected by a sobor (Eastern church council) or appointed (nominated) by the king, depending on circumstances. This de facto independence of the metropolitanate was accepted by the sixteenth­century church hierarchs as a given, hence Jeremiah’s intervention in the internal affairs of the Kyivan metropolitanate was condemned by many bishops. The patriarch’s actions with regard to the Ruthenian Church gave an impetus to two major trends within the Orthodox hierarchy: the reform of ecclesiastical life from within, and a search, at first by a few members of the episcopate and later by a majority of bishops, for a way of breaking off relations with Constantinople and bringing the metropoli­tanate under the authority of Rome.

To be sure, Ruthenian Orthodoxy badly needed to reform itself so as to overcome the profound organizational and spiritual crisis in which it had become mired in the second half of the sixteenth century. One of the most obvious signs of that crisis was the almost unlimited control of the secu­lar authorities over church affairs. This special role of secular power, gen­erally recognized as a particular feature of the Orthodox Church, was also characteristic of the Kyivan metropolitanate in the latter half of the six­teenth century. The right of royal patronage over the church, most no­tably the right of the Polish king to nominate Orthodox bishops and archimandrites, was extended from Polish-controlled Galicia to the rest of the Ukrainian lands after the Union of Lublin (1569).

The crisis of the Orthodox Church in the Commonwealth was much deeper than that of the Catholic Church, given the second-class status of Orthodoxy in an officially Catholic state. Nor did the Orthodox have their own spiritual center on the model of Catholic Rome to set the tone on questions of clerical education and defend the interests of the church before the secular rulers of Eastern Europe. Locked in the embrace of the Muslim East, Orthodox Constantinople could not play its traditional leading role. Obliged to send its hierarchs begging to Eastern Europe, yielding alternately to the influence of Catholic Rome and Protestant Geneva, the patriarchal see could not provide the Orthodox of the Com­monwealth with the assistance they so desperately needed in the devel­opment of religious doctrine and in raising the educational level of their clergy. Toward the end of the sixteenth century the Kyivan metropol­itanate was thrown back on its own resources as it sought to cope with a growing internal crisis and ever-increasing official intolerance, as well as the threat of Catholic and Protestant expansion from the West.

One response to the crisis came from the laity and took the form of the brotherhood movement.^[115] The brotherhoods, which had their origins in the Ukrainian lands as early as the fifteenth century, became especially dynamic toward the end of the sixteenth, developing new characteristics. One of their principal tasks was to conduct an internal reform of Ortho­doxy in order to adapt it to new conditions both foreign and domestic. To that end, the brotherhood movement sought to revive the spirit of primi­tive Christianity, reforming morals and reinstating canonical principles of church life. That goal, like the very attempt to enlarge the role of the lay element within the church, came up against the opposition of the episco­pate, which was at once the product and the creator of the prevailing decadence in the life of the church. ‘If even the bishop should go against the law and begin to rule the church not according to the rules of the Holy Apostles and the Holy Fathers, inclining the faithful toward untruth and supporting lawbreakers, then let all oppose such a bishop as an enemy of the truth’, read the statute of the Dormition Brotherhood of Lviv.^[116] The brotherhood, a civic corporate body of the Middle Ages, was now employed by the Ruthenian burghers to meet the new needs of Kyivan Orthodoxy in the era of confessionalization.

Having emerged in its new guise under the influence of Orthodox and Catholic reform, the brotherhood movement was simultaneously com­mitted to resisting both the Catholic Church and the Protestant commu­nities, which were encroaching on the rights and liberties of the Orthodox burghers. Particularly urgent was the need to defend Ukrainian crafts­men and merchants from the arbitrary practices of the Catholic author­ities and oppression by the Catholic patriciate. Among the first to organize themselves in defense of their rights were the Ukrainian burghers of Lviv, who led the way in developing a new type of brotherhood movement that in time comprised not only burghers but the Ukrainian nobility and Cos- sackdom as well. As far as the practical activities of the Lviv Brotherhood were concerned, a particularly important place was reserved for the de­velopment of education and the printing of books. The brotherhood maintained a school and sponsored the publication of the first printed books in Ukraine, the 1574 editions of the Apostol (Acts and Epistles) and Primer.^[117] In both activities, the brotherhood was following in the foot­steps of both Protestant and Catholic reformers, whose goal was to raise the level of education of the populace as a whole and the clergy in particu­lar by expanding the school system. In Ukraine, as elsewhere in Europe, the introduction of printing stimulated the development of religious and political thought. By dispelling the atmosphere of spiritual, intellectual, and moral stagnation in society, this new medium of communication pro­moted the diffusion of information and helped to strengthen communal ties within Ruthenian society. The publication of the Ostrih Bible (1581) was an epochal event in the life of the whole Orthodox world. For cen­turies to come, copies of it circulated far beyond the borders of Ukraine. This publication was a response to the new demands of the Reformation, which made direct access to the Scriptures a hallmark of religious life. More immediately, the growing use of the printing press deepened the re­ligious struggle in the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands.^[118]

The first publication of Piotr Skarga’s book On the Unity of God’s Church (1577), which attacked the Ruthenian Church for its backward­ness and suggested union with Rome as a remedy, is generally considered to mark the beginning of the religious polemic. For a considerable time, this Catholic challenge remained unanswered. The publication of Herasym Smotrytsky’s The Key to the Kingdom of Heaven (1587) is generally considered the point of departure for Ukrainian, particularly Orthodox, polemical literature. The Key consisted of two parts: the first refuting the authority of the Roman popes; and the second, ‘The New Roman Calendar’, arguing against the introduction of the new (Gregorian) calendar. Smotrytsky’s work was marked by the influence of the anti-Catholic productions of his predecessors, most notably the writ­ings of Maksim Grek, which circulated in manuscript copies in Ukraine. In 1588, Vasyl Ostrozky (Surazky) published his Little Book in Ostrih. The work discussed the most hotly disputed questions of the Orthodox-Catholic dialogue: the primacy of the pope, purgatory, the question of rite, and the problem of the new calendar.^[119]

Oddly enough, the Orthodox polemics were supported and backed not by the church hierarchs but by representatives of magnate families in Ukraine and Belarus. Aside from the requisite material resources, they possessed broader intellectual horizons than the Orthodox hierarchy, al­lowing them to grasp the demands of the age. It was the Orthodox mag­nate Ryhor Khadkevich who invited Ivan Fedorov and Petr of Mstsislafi, the two refugee printers from Muscovy, to his estate and provided funds for the publication of a Didactic Gospel (1569) and Psalter with Horologion (1570). In the late 1570s another Orthodox magnate, Prince Kostiantyn (Vasyl) Ostrozky, established his well-known center of Ukrainian Orthodox learning in Ostrih.^[120]

In the course of the sixteenth century throughout Western and Central Europe religion was steadily turning into a potent weapon in the struggle of the aristocracy against the royal power’s encroachment upon its rights.^[121] In most of Europe, including the Polish and Lithuanian lands of the Commonwealth, aristocratic opposition to royal authority developed in tandem with the Reformation movement, especially with Calvinism. In the Ruthenian lands of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, magnate opposition developed mainly under the banner of Orthodoxy. If the Polish Firlejs or the Lithuanian RadziwiHs stressed their opposition to the king by manifesting their loyalty to and support for Calvinism, their counterparts in Rus' did so by ‘reanimating’ and reforming the old ‘Ruthenian faith’ in response to new developments.

The association between representatives of the Ruthenian princely families and the Orthodox Church, which had always been close, became especially prominent in the mid-sixteenth century. The drawing together of the Ukrainian secular and ecclesiastical elites was due to the change in the religious climate of the Commonwealth brought about by the arrival of Reformation ideas and the reaction to them on the part of the Catholic Church. Under these conditions, the Ruthenian elite sought to maintain complete de facto control over Orthodox Church affairs, even as the royal administration became more active in that sphere. The last decades of the sixteenth century also saw the development of regionalism in the Com­monwealth, giving pride of place to the local patria and the defense of its interests. In the case of Rus’ (the Ukrainian-Belarusian territories), the regionalism characteristic of other Commonwealth territories, such as Little Poland, was considerably enhanced by ethnocultural differences with the territories of Poland proper.^[122]

The leader of the Orthodox party in the Commonwealth, Prince Kos- tiantyn Ostrozky, was quite obviously in need of a reformed ‘Ruthenian faith’ and at one point even considered the idea of a religious union of Eastern and Western Christianity. Nevertheless, it was the Orthodox Church, even in the form in which it existed within the Commonwealth, that gave him the power sought by European aristocrats, from the Condes of France to the Radziwills of Lithuania, in Calvinism.^[123] If John Calvin was attempting, not without success, to transform Geneva into a Protest­ant Rome by means of an active printing press and a school for Calvinist preachers, Prince Ostrozky was clearly trying to turn Ostrih into an Orthodox Geneva. His plans for transferring the seat of the patriarch of Constantinople to Ostrih and establishing a potent religious and cultural center there, as attested by the founding of the Ostrih College as well as by the editing and publication of the complete text of the Bible in Church Slavonic, were evidence of Ostrozky’s efforts to turn a reformed Ortho­doxy into the political equivalent of the Calvinism professed by his Polish and Lithuanian colleagues.^[124]

Ostrozky, a man of broad political and cultural interests, was open to contact and co-operation with representatives of other Christian denom­inations. He gave repeated consideration to the need to reform Ortho­doxy, and his openness to broad contacts with representatives of other denominations gave rise to hopes in both Catholic and Protestant circles of the possibility of converting this powerful and influential magnate. One of the first attempts to bend him to the cause of union—the unifica­tion of Orthodoxy with Catholicism—was Skarga’s On the Unity of God’s Church, the first edition of which (published in 1577) was dedicated to Ostrozky. Whether because of its condescending tone or for other rea­sons, the book failed to evoke the expected response within the Orthodox milieu. Indeed, if Skarga’s introduction to the second edition is to be be­lieved, ‘the Rus’’ bought up and destroyed all copies of the first edition. It is not impossible that Kostiantyn Ostrozky himself was behind that action.^[125]

A more productive dialogue between Catholics and Orthodox began with Ostrozky’s participation in the early 1580s. Taking part on the Catholic side were Rome’s direct representatives in the Commonwealth, the Warsaw nuncio, Alberto Bolognetti, and the papal legate, Antonio Possevino. The Orthodox were represented by Ostrozky himself. According to the nuncio’s reports, the prince showed no intention of con­verting to Catholicism, but inclined rather to the idea of union between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. In conversations with Bolognetti he even in­dicated a readiness to communicate with the pope and the patriarch of Constantinople; should the latter prove disinclined toward union, Os- trozky allegedly was prepared to go forward with it on his own. Naturally, such a move on the part of Orthodoxy’s influential patron would involve the whole Kyivan metropolitanate as well.^[126]

By the early 1590s, at least two programs of church union were being propagated in the Ukrainian lands. One was represented by the well- known Commonwealth publicist and civic activist Stanislaw Orze- chowski (Stanislav Orikhovsky), half-Ukrainian by birth, and in part by the Catholic missionary Benedykt Herbest. That program advocated the unification of the two churches on the basis of equality. The authors of the other program were the papal legate, Antonio Possevino, and Piotr Skarga. Their program entailed the complete subordination of the Ortho­dox to the pope. While the first program was inspired by ecclesiastical universalism, the humanistic idea of the equality of all Christians, the sec­ond was a product of Counter-Reformation thinking applied to the East.^[127]

The last decade of the sixteenth century witnessed the emergence of new programs of church union. One of them was presented by Prince Os- trozky himself, another by Orthodox bishops who embarked on their own project of union after the visit of Patriarch Jeremiah.^[128] In 1593, Prince Os- trozky expounded his program in a letter to the recently consecrated bishop of Volodymyr, Ipatii Potii. The goal of Ostrozky’s program was the attainment of church unity, as well as the reform of the Orthodox Church through the spread of education and the printing of books. Moreover, the Orthodox and Catholics were to enjoy equality of rights, with a guarantee that the Byzantine rite would be preserved by a prohibition on defections from the Union to Catholicism. Ostrozky’s program was based on the principles of the Union of Florence and shared the universalist orienta­tion of Antonio Possevino, who hoped to incline Tsar Ivan IV toward union with Rome. Notions of regional union (that is, on the territory of the Commonwealth) advanced after Possevino’s failure in Muscovy were later supported by Skarga and later still by Orthodox hierarchs, but they did not win the old prince’s favor.^[129]

Unlike Ostrozky’s program, that of the Orthodox episcopate, which began to take shape at the Belz synod of 1590 and continued to be de­bated in 1594-5, was intended to bring about a regional union. The con­ditions for acceptance of the union put forward by the episcopate in 1590 were meant to protect its own interests and obtain equality of rights for the Orthodox with the Catholics. The bishops demanded confirmation of their former privileges, the return of estates that had once been at­tached to bishoprics, and exemption from taxes. The Orthodox were also to be admitted to state offices without restriction of any kind, marriage was to be permitted between Orthodox (who were to be united with Rome) and Catholics, and Orthodox hierarchs were to be allowed to serve the liturgy in Catholic churches. Unlike Ostrozky’s program, these conditions did not even hint at the need for ecclesiastical reform.²⁴

In time, the conditions of union advanced by the episcopate and its program underwent significant augmentation and change, especially after Ipatii Potii, one of the few intellectuals among the bishops, became involved in the process. An educated man and a talented publicist, Potii was genuinely disturbed by the condition of contemporary Orthodoxy and sought ways to reform it. As castellan of Brest and a senator of the Commonwealth, he did not don the episcopal cowl for personal gain. Quite obviously, he saw the true salvation of Kyivan Orthodoxy in union with Counter-Reformation Rome and was prepared to make personal sacrifices to that end. His interest in the union clearly developed on the basis of universalist and humanist ideals, while his differences with his former adherent and patron, Prince Ostrozky, were caused by his search for the most direct means of achieving his goal. Having taken the monas­tic tonsure, Potii had linked his personal future directly with that of the church and did not care to await the consent of the Eastern patriarchs and Moscow, as the secular prince proposed.

Potii’s polemical works written after the conclusion of the union shed light on his own motives and those of other ‘learned persons’ that led them to advocate union with Rome. As is apparent from Potii’s works, the principal motive for union was realization of the crisis of Orthodoxy and the search for a solution to it. Potii stressed the need to emancipate the church from the thrall of secular rule, condemned the indifference of the pastoral clergy, and insisted on finding ways to protect the church from the influences of Protestantism, to one of whose currents he himself had belonged in his youth. If not in form then in essence Potii’s argumenta­tion was basically consonant with that of Piotr Skarga. The major differ­ence in their treatment of the union was that even in agreeing to recognize

²⁴ Text of the 1590 declaration of union, ibid., p. 8. On the origins of the pro-union move­ment within the Orthodox hierarchy, see Vlasovs’kyi, Narys istoriι, 1: 261-3; Chodynicki, Kosciol Prawoslawny, pp. 262-73.

papal supremacy, Potii saw the union as a joining together, but by no means an amalgamation, of his church with that of Rome.^[130]

The Union of Brest

After the pontificate of Gregory XIII, known for his plans of church union, it appeared that the Roman curia had abandoned the idea, which promised no immediate results. Potii’s proposal to organize a discussion of church union with Patriarch Jeremiah and that of Crown Chancellor Jan Zamoyski to transfer the Patriarchate of Constantinople to Kyiv were rejected in the late 1580s by two representatives of the curia in the Com­monwealth, the nuncio Annibale di Capua and the papal legate Ippolito Aldobrandini, who later became pope under the name Clement VIII.^[131] Characteristically, his first papal letters concerning Ukrainian matters pertained not to church problems but to the military activities of the Ukrainian Cossacks. These letters were delivered to the Cossacks by the secret papal legate Aleksandar Komulovic (Alessandro Comuleo) in 1593. Among Komulovic’s tasks was the organization of a broad anti­Turkish coalition of East European peoples under the aegis of Rome. His mission to Eastern Europe yielded no practical results, but represented an interesting attempt on the part of the papacy to mobilize the Ukrainian Cossacks in support of the anti-Turkish struggle waged by the Austrian Habsburgs.^[132]

The first reports of a revival of interest in church union on the territory of the Kyivan metropolitanate reached Rome in late 1594. In October of that year, the Warsaw nuncio, Germanico Malaspina, notified the curia that two Orthodox bishops had presented themselves to Chancellor Zamoyski, indicating on behalf of the hierarchy that they wished to enter into union with the Holy See. Malaspina’s announcement aroused con­siderable interest within the curia, and the pope’s nephew, Cardinal Cinzio Passeri Aldobrandini, advised the nuncio to meet with the bishops. The dignitaries in question were Kyryl Terletsky and Ipatii Potii, representing most of the Orthodox hierarchy, who had entered into negotiations with the state authorities in the matter of church union. Their mission represented the culmination of secret meetings among the bishops that had begun in 1590 after the departure of Patriarch Jeremiah.^[133]

The bishops’ initiative met with a positive response from Common­wealth officials, and in the early months of 1595 preparations for the union switched into high gear, now with the participation of Nuncio Malaspina. In late 1594, ‘articles’ of union were drafted in the town of Torchyn by bishops Ipatii Potii and Kyryl Terletsky together with the Roman Catholic bishop of Lutsk, Bernard Maciejowski, one of the early Catholic supporters of church union. They were studied in February 1595 by the Catholic archbishop of Lviv, Jan Dymitr Solikowski (at the re­quest of the nuncio) and by Maciejowski (at the request of the king). As was to be expected, especially in the case of Maciejowski, their conclu­sions about the prospects of achieving union on the basis of the condi­tions proposed by the bishops were positive.^[134]

King Zygmunt III and the royal authorities in general played an im­portant role in the preparation of the bishops’ trip to Rome and tried to shield them from real and imagined attacks by the Orthodox. To be sure, the bishops’ preparations for the union encountered active opposition on the part of Orthodox lay leaders, most notably Prince Kostiantyn Os- trozky, whose conditions for union were rejected by the bishops. As one of the major conditions for acceptance of the union, Ostrozky advanced the idea of a sobor to be held before the bishops’ planned trip to Rome. The proposal was rejected by the royal court, as it aroused apprehension that the prince might make use of the sobor to agitate against the union. The royal administration’s decision was the last straw that snapped Os- trozky’s patience and drove him to take active measures against the pro­union action. From this point he headed the forces of opposition to the union, comprised mainly of the Orthodox nobility and the Orthodox burghers united in brotherhoods.

Rumors of the hierarchs’ unionist intentions that circulated among the Orthodox before 1595 were associated mainly with Bishop Kyryl Terletsky, but in January 1595, Bishop Hedeon Balaban of Lviv also openly declared his pro-union orientation by holding an eparchial sobor in support of the union in Lviv. Ipatii Potii managed, more or less successfully, to conceal his participation in the preliminary arrangements. Not until June 1595 did he send Ostrozky the ‘articles’ of union, which greatly displeased the prince, as did the entire pro-union action. In the same month, Ostrozky managed to split the ranks of the episcopate. He took it upon himself to settle the conflict between the Lviv Brotherhood and Hedeon Balaban, enlisting the latter on his side. On 1 July 1595, Balaban issued a protest against the pro­union activities of other bishops, accusing Kyryl Terletsky of promoting union with the use of blank sheets of paper signed by the bishops for other purposes. A month later, also as an evident result of Ostrozky’s influence, the bishop of Peremyshl (Przemysl), Mykhail Kopystensky, declared him­self against the union. Ostrozky’s circular letter in which he announced the intentions of the episcopate and came out resolutely in defense of Ortho­doxy was also printed and distributed at this time.^[135]

Ostrozky’s actions helped to galvanize the opponents of the union, above all the members of the brotherhood movement. Thus, in the autumn of 1595 there was talk at the royal court of the increasing influence of the Vilnius Brotherhood, which was actively opposed to the union. The royal administration was especially perturbed by Ostrozky’s missive to the Protestant convention in Torun (1595), where he proposed that the Orthodox and Protestants form a common front against the government, which had ‘violated the principles of toleration’. The prince himself de­clared his readiness to support this action with an army of 15,000-20,000.^[136]

Ipatii Potii and Kyryl Terletsky set off on their journey to Rome in Sep­tember 1595. They were expected to travel by way of Venice, but the Roman authorities were alarmed by rumors that members of the Ortho­dox community there were taking a particular interest in the trip, so it was decided to bypass Venice. The delegation arrived in Rome on 15 Novem­ber and was received by Pope Clement VIII on the same day, with a sec­ond visit on 17 November. Following the papal audience, several unofficial meetings took place with curia officials.^[137]

What was the episcopate’s program of union that Potii and Terletsky brought with them to Rome? The conditions of union signed by Metro­politan Mykhail Rohoza and most of the episcopate in June 1595³³ were intended to equalize the Orthodox in rights with the Catholics and in­crease the power of the episcopate by weakening the rights of secular patrons and substantially curbing the influence of the brotherhoods. There was virtually nothing in the articles about the improvement of the moral and educational level of the clergy or the instruction of the faithful. The program of reforming Orthodoxy from within that was advanced and embodied by the brotherhoods was almost entirely rejected by the hierarchy, which fixed its course on ecclesiastical union with Rome. The decision to break with Constantinople was taken by the bishops, who feared the reformers from the brotherhood milieu and strove to prevent their alliance with the Eastern patriarchs.

The 1595 ‘articles’ of union devoted considerable attention to improv­ing the social status of the Orthodox episcopate and increasing its au­thority within the church. The Orthodox hierarchs strove for equality of rights with the Catholic bishops, admission to the Senate, and appoint­ment to the tribunals. The bishops also demanded guarantees that their successors would be elected jointly by clerics and laymen from among people of the ‘Rus’ nation’ and the ‘Greek religion’, the term reserved in the Commonwealth for the Orthodox faith. The strengthening of episco­pal authority was also to be promoted by conditions requiring the subor­dination to bishops of monasteries and brotherhoods operating on the territory of their eparchies. In this way the episcopate sought to exploit the union as a means of curbing recalcitrant brotherhoods that relied on the rights of stauropegion granted to them by Constantinople.

Seeking to undermine the system of secular control of the church and at the same time to strengthen their administrative and judicial powers, the bishops strove to obtain the right to try priests, which was all but im­possible, as the latter were under the protection of their secular patrons. The bishops’ demand for the subordination to them of sobors and parish churches, hitherto subject to laymen, should be seen in the same context. Under the evident influence of Ostrozky’s program and Potii’s attitude toward the union, a demand was included in the ‘articles’ that bishops be allowed to open schools and seminaries and establish printshops. This was an attempt not only to keep pace with the times but also to wrest the initiative in these matters from the brotherhoods and Orthodox mag­nates. Indeed, according to the bishops, no book on any subject was to be printed without their approval. The strengthening of hierarchical author­ity corresponded to the general Counter-Reformation program of the

³³ For the text of the two copies (Latin and Polish) of the 1595 ‘articles’, see Welykyj, ed., Documenta Unionis Berestensis, pp. 61-75. For an English translation of the Polish version, see Gudziak, Crisis and Reform, app. 3, pp. 264-72.

Catholic Church, and in that respect the pro-Uniate bishops did not seek Rome’s intercession in vain.

The conditions of union with which Potii and Terletsky set out for Rome in the autumn of 1595 were based on the principles of the Union of Florence with reference to dogmatics and questions of rite. The bishops proposed to introduce the link with Rome by having the pope consecrate the metropolitan, who in turn would consecrate bishops. The hierarchs’ request to the pope that they be included in a general understanding of the Eastern churches with Rome (if it should come to that) may be seen as a reaction to Ostrozky’s idea of involving the whole Orthodox East in the union and as an indication of the universalist thinking of part of the episcopate. It is quite clear that the bishops considered themselves nat­ural constituents of the Eastern Church and saw their action as only a first step toward a future union.

The bishops’ articles were examined in Rome by the pope’s expert on the union issue, Fr Juan Saragosa, whose comments were used to formu­late the final conditions for union. These were presented in a papal con­stitution dated 23 December 1595 and proclaimed with solemn ceremony in the Hall of Constantine. The status of the Uniate Church was defined by the papal bull ‘Decet Romanum Pontificem' of 23 February 1596, and the whole question of union was to be settled definitively at a sobor: the decision to convoke it was confirmed in Rome. The bishops acknow­ledged the authority of the pope and accepted the dogmas of the Catholic Church, including its teachings on purgatory and the Catholic interpret­ation of the filioque, that is, they accepted that the Holy Spirit proceeded not only from God the Father, but also from God the Son. According to the formula of the Union of Florence, the former Orthodox retained their Byzantine rite, including (temporarily) the Julian calendar. A final deci­sion on the latter was postponed indefinitely.^[138]

There is little doubt that in Rome the two negotiating parties had dif­fering views on the nature of the church union and its prospects.^[139] It should be noted nevertheless that while these differences created prob­lems in the negotiation process and in later relations between the Roman curia and the Uniate Church, they also helped to bring about the final agreement in Rome. Points considered extremely important and non- negotiable by one side were viewed as secondary and clearly negotiable by the other. If Rome refused to yield on questions of dogma and confession, the Ruthenian bishops were more than reluctant to compromise on issues of rite. Both parties demonstrated a certain flexibility on the matter of church jurisdiction and the degree of Rome’s control over the Kyivan church. Among other things, the dissimilar approaches to the problem of church union reflected the simple fact that for the Ruthenian Church, which had not yet embarked on the process of confessionalization, the most important elements of its identity were not doctrinal teachings but the Byzantine rite, which visibly distinguished it from the dominant Catholic Church in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. By contrast, confessional differences between the Catholic West and the Orthodox East were a relatively peripheral element of its identity.

In March 1596, the bishops made their departure from the Holy See. Upon their return to the Commonwealth, Potii and Terletsky were warmly received by the king, but more than coldly by many Orthodox. The Orthodox nobility sought a discussion of the question of union at the Warsaw Diet, which took place from late March to early May of 1596. At the Diet itself, the nobles demanded the removal of Potii and Terletsky from their posts, but these efforts were unsuccessful. An anti-union mood was also prevalent in the eparchies of Potii and Terletsky, whose joint celebrations of the liturgy with Catholic hierarchs aroused particu­lar protest. But that opposition was insufficient to stop a process that was already under way with the active support of the royal administration and most of the church hierarchs, headed by the metropolitan himself.

A final decision on the matter was to be taken at the sobor. Since that was well understood by both supporters and opponents of the union, both sides made diligent preparations. The king’s proclamation convok­ing the sobor was published in June 1596, and in August Metropolitan Mykhail issued a circular letter according to which the sobor was ap­pointed for October. Brest was chosen as its venue. On the eve of the Brest sobor, a meeting of bishops was held at Bernard Maciejowski’s estate in Kamianets, at which they signed a Catholic credo. The acceptance of the union before the sobor was clearly intended to cement the unity of the episcopate and prevent any member of the hierarchy from going over to the opposition during the council sessions.^[140] In the meantime the Orthodox opposition, exploiting every legal means of exerting pressure on the government in the form of anti-union resolutions of provincial dietines, written protests, and so on, prepared for a general struggle that it expected to win. The Orthodox were able to bring representatives of two Eastern patriarchates, those of Constantinople and Alexandria, to Brest. Significantly, opponents of the union also managed to retain two members of the hierarchy, bishops Hedeon Balaban and Mykhail Kopy- stensky, in their ranks. Most monasteries also came out against the union, but the basic strength of the Orthodox remained their lay following: a number of magnates, the nobility, and the burghers who belonged to brotherhood organizations.^[141]

Both groupings were in a rather decisive mood, avenues of retreat were cut off, and the prospect of compromise and understanding seemed more than illusory. This became fully apparent at Brest, where, instead of one sobor, two were held, one Orthodox, the other Uniate.^[142] The impossibil­ity of holding a joint council of advocates and opponents of the union was evident from the contents of the king’s proclamation itself, which forbade the participation of foreigners. That was done for the express purpose of eliminating the presence of representatives of the Eastern patriarchates— the very individuals on whom the Orthodox were pinning their funda­mental hopes. The patriarchs represented canonical authority superior to that of the metropolitan, and their representatives could thus decide the fate of the council and the whole cause of union in favor of the Orthodox. The main ‘weapon’ of the union’s opponents was to be Nikephoros, the protosyncellus of the patriarch of Constantinople. Although he was not even a priest, he twice served as locum tenens of the Patriarchal See and, by decision of an Eastern patriarchal sobor, enjoyed primacy among the metropolitans. In 1595 Nikephoros was in Moldavia, whence he pro­ceeded to the Commonwealth at the invitation of Prince Kostiantyn Os- trozky. In Khotyn he was arrested by representatives of the royal administration, but later escaped from prison, apparently with the help of the prince, under whose protection he arrived in Brest. Also arriving from the East were Kyrillos I Loukaris (Cyril Lucaris), the protosyncellus of Patriarch Meletios Pigas of Alexandria, and several other eminent hier­archs. Considering that the throne of Constantinople was vacant at the time, it may be said that the Orthodox had managed to arrange the most imposing possible representation at the sobor.^[143]

Realizing that the strength of the Orthodox lay in the presence at Brest of representatives of the Eastern patriarchs, and his own in the support of the king, Metropolitan Mykhail Rohoza did not respond to invitations from the Orthodox to appear before the Orthodox sobor. The opening of the union sobor was delayed until the royal delegates had arrived. When the Orthodox sent a third (final) invitation to the metropolitan, sum­moning him to appear at the Orthodox sobor and threatening him with court proceedings there in the event of his refusal, Mykhail Rohoza, probably seeking to suppress his own inner doubts, responded as follows: ‘What is done is done; now it cannot be otherwise; whether we have done well or ill, we have given ourselves to the Western Church.’^[144] The official opening of the union sobor took place on 8 October in the Church of St Nicholas. As the royal administration had intended, the council had no other agenda than the solemn proclamation of the union. On the first day of sessions, the metropolitan and the bishops signed an official declar­ation of union. Considering that they had already signed the same docu­ment, or a similar one, in Kamianets, those taking part in the sobor must have considered the signing an element of the solemn ceremony. The public proclamation of the union took place on the following day. The sobor anathematized bishops Hedeon Balaban and Mykhail Kopysten- sky, as well as other clerics who had participated in the Orthodox sobor and failed to adhere to the union.

Having lost hope that the metropolitan and bishops would respond to their summons, the Orthodox resolved to hold a sobor of their own. All the Orthodox churches (except that of St Nicholas) in Brest were closed on official orders, hence the sobor of the opponents of the union took place in a private residence where Prince Ostrozky was staying. The sobor was divided into two circles, lay and clerical, with Protosyncellus Nikephoros presiding over the latter. The basic agenda of the sobor’s pro­ceedings became that of passing judgment on the metropolitan and the bishops who had gone over to the union. On 9 October, a resolution was adopted dismissing them from their posts. The participants in the sobor decided to appeal to the king for confirmation of their decision. In the event of refusal, the Orthodox threatened to raise the issue at the next Diet. The split was now a fait accompli. In the history of the Ruthenian Church, the sixteenth century ended with the establishment of two churches in place of one—the Orthodox, which recognized the su­premacy of Constantinople, and the Uniate, which preserved the Byzan­tine rite as it came under authority of Rome.

There are few sources available to judge the numbers of proponents and opponents of the union, their territorial distribution, social origins, and so on, circa 1596. Conclusions about participants in the Orthodox sobor at Brest can only be drawn on the basis of incomplete data. If the activity of the brotherhoods can serve to indicate the religious orientation of the Ruthenian burghers, then it is safe to conclude that the townsfolk were overwhelmingly on the side of Orthodoxy. The mass of the parish clergy supported the eparchial hierarchs, so that the priests of the Lviv and Peremyshl eparchies remained Orthodox, while priests of the other eparchies supported the union (with the sole exception of a number of parishes of the Lutsk-Ostrih eparchy that responded to the considerable influence of Prince Ostrozky in Volhynia). Most monasteries remained on the side of Orthodoxy. There were twelve monasteries represented at the Orthodox sobor, as opposed to three at the Uniate one. The greatest of them—the Kyivan Cave Monastery, headed by its archimandrite, Nykyfor Tur—came out against the union.

The monasteries’ opposition to the union was determined by several factors. There was, firstly, the traditional hostility of the hegumens and archimandrites toward local bishops, who advanced claims to monastery income. Secondly, the archimandrites of the monasteries were often mar­ried laymen like Nykyfor Tur. Union with Rome and the reordering of church life according to the demands of the Counter-Reformation repre­sented a personal threat to such people. Thirdly, the learned monks were trustees of the dogmas of the Orthodox faith, opponents of all external in­fluences and modernization (an attitude clearly apparent in the works of the best-known guardian of Orthodox purity, the monk Ivan Vyshensky), and hence vehemently opposed to the ‘corruption’ of their faith by Rome.

Also actively participating in the Orthodox sobor at Brest were repre­sentatives of the Orthodox nobility, who condemned the union rather harshly. Considering that patronage remained in effect on the territory of the Commonwealth, the role of the nobility in the continuing Ortho­dox-Catholic standoff was quite significant, as it was often the noble landlord of a town or village who decided which church would be estab­lished on his territory. The attitude of the nobility was thus decisive for the pace and extent of the union’s advance. A considerable number of delegates at the Orthodox sobor represented the Orthodox nobility of the Kingdom of Poland, that is, of the Ukrainian lands. At the same time, representation of the nobility from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (i.e. Belarus) was quite insignificant. Clearly, this cannot be explained merely by the greater influence of the Ostrozkys in Ukraine, for there were also Orthodox and Calvinist magnates in Belarus who were opposed to the union. Apparently, the Ruthenian nobility of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was losing its denominational and thus its ethnic identity much more rapidly than its counterparts in the Kingdom of Poland. Quite characteristically, all three monasteries represented at the union sobor were also located in Belarus.^[145]

The Church Divided

For the Kyivan Orthodox metropolitanate, the first two decades after the establishment of the Union of Brest may be characterized as a period of survival. As was to be expected, in the religious conflict the king took the side of the Uniates. In December 1596 a royal proclamation acknow­ledged the decisions of the Brest sobor and virtually outlawed the Ortho­dox Church that was not in union with Rome. The royal administration refused to recognize its leaders, Bishops Hedeon Balaban and Mykhail Kopystensky, or, indeed, the very existence of the church.

The royal administration had strongly supported the Union ever since the Orthodox bishops first approached the authorities concerning the union of churches in 1594. King Zygmunt III, himself a disciple of the Jesuits, was personally devoted to the cause and maintained his support for the Uniate Church until his death in 1632. Apart from the personal beliefs and sympathies of the king, royal support for the Union is to be ex­plained by the advance of Counter-Reformation tendencies within the Commonwealth and the government’s close co-operation with the revit­alized Catholic Church in its struggle with Protestant and Orthodox dis­sidents. The cultural homogenization (in ethnic terms, Polonization) of the Commonwealth’s ruling elite was fostered in the Ruthenian palat­inates by the Protestant and Catholic churches alike, and the Union was undoubtedly intended to strengthen the latter. In fact, it achieved the op­posite result, as it not only brought the Orthodox closer to the Protestants but also jeopardized the whole effort to homogenize the Common­wealth’s elite.

In the face of royal hostility, it was the Ukrainian nobles who became the main source of support for embattled Orthodoxy, and parliamentary debate in the Diet became the principal means of expressing opposition to the union. The first Diet to be held in the Commonwealth after Brest was scheduled for February 1597 in Warsaw. At the nobiliary dietines that preceded it, the Orthodox nobility resolutely protested the decisions of the Uniate council, and the brotherhoods of Vilnius and Lviv dispatched their representatives to the Diet. At the Diet itself, the Orthodox at­tempted, with some success, to obtain the support of the Protestant dele­gates, but the results were generally unfavorable to their cause. Under pressure from the royal administration, Protosyncellus Nikephoros was convicted of espionage and sent to prison, where he later died. It was only at the Diet of March 1603 that the Orthodox managed a significant achievement. In exchange for the Orthodox delegates’ support for the king’s tax proposal to fund the war in Livonia, he permitted the election of the archimandrite of the Kyivan Cave Monastery from among the Orthodox. Furthermore, he pledged himself to strive for the annulment of the papal letter according to which the monastery was to become a pos­session of the Uniate metropolitan. This was a major victory for the Orthodox camp, its essence being the royal administration’s recognition of the actual state of affairs: that ‘non-Uniate’ Orthodox with a hierarchy and monasteries of their own continued to exist outside the Uniate hier­archy’s sphere of influence.^[146]

Further progress in the legalization of the Orthodox Church was at­tained thanks to the Ukrainian nobility’s participation in the confeder­ation (rokosz) of Mikolaj Zebrzydowski, in the course of which the Orthodox formed a common front with the Protestants against the king. At the price of insignificant concessions, the royal administration man­aged to breach the alliance of the Orthodox Volhynian nobility with the Protestants. The demands of the Orthodox to liquidate the union and le­galize the Orthodox hierarchy were rejected by the king, but the Diets of 1607 and then of 1609 confirmed the right of the Orthodox to hold divine services and endow Orthodox churches and monasteries with estates. Thus the existence of two Byzantine-rite churches was formally recog­nized in the Commonwealth. To be sure, they remained unequal in sta­tus. The Uniate Church enjoyed the support of the government, and its hierarchy was recognized and replenished by the king, who had the right to nominate new bishops. The Orthodox Church, on the other hand, was on the verge of losing its hierarchy—a loss that threatened to put an end to its very existence.^[147]

Bishop Hedeon Balaban of Lviv died in 1607, as did Bishop Mykhail Kopystensky of Peremyshl in 1609. Even before Balaban’s demise, the king had nominated the bishop’s nephew, Isaia Balaban, to take his place. However, the Lviv Brotherhood firmly opposed his candidacy. It pro­posed its own candidate for the bishopric, Ostafii Tysarovsky, who gained the king’s nomination by promising to go over to the union, but in fact re­mained loyal to Orthodoxy. After the death of Mykhail Kopystensky, Tysarovsky remained the sole Orthodox hierarch. Given the virtually complete absence of a hierarchy, the role of monasteries and their archi­mandrites grew considerably within Ukrainian Orthodoxy. The monas­teries, which possessed considerable financial resources and great moral authority, became bastions of the struggle for the rights of the Orthodox Church. Consequently, the effort to preserve the Kyivan Cave Monastery for the Orthodox and the election of Ielysei Pletenetsky as its archimandrite were viewed as major events in the Uniate-Orthodox con­flict in the first decade of the seventeenth century and thus attracted the attention of the royal administration, the papal nuncio, and the Orthodox nobility, led by Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozky.^[148]

It was the appearance of a new political force in Ukraine, Zaporozhian Cossackdom, that opened a qualitatively new era in the development of Ukrainian Orthodoxy. A decisive moment in the rapprochement and polit­ical consolidation of the Orthodox elite and the Cossack leadership was reached in 1620-ι, when the military power of the Cossacks was trans­formed into political power, allowing them to take the new Orthodox hierarchy under their protection. The renewal of the hierarchy was made possible by the visit of Patriarch Theophanes of Jerusalem to Ukraine in 1620. He visited Moscow in order to collect donations for the Eastern Church and took part in the consecration of the Patriarch of Moscow, Filaret Romanov, father of the reigning Tsar Mikhail. Theophanes was empowered by the patriarch of Constantinople to resolve problems faced by any church subordinate to Constantinople, hence he could consecrate hierarchs in the Kyivan metropolitanate.

The Orthodox elite, headed by the Cossack leader, Petro Konashevych- Sahaidachny, resolved to make good use of this visit of the patriarch of Jerusalem. A Cossack detachment met the patriarch at the Muscovite border and escorted him to Kyiv, where representatives of the monastic and parish clergy put forward the idea of consecrating a new hierarchy. Just as in 1589 Patriarch Jeremiah, responding to pressure from the local populace, had attempted to put the affairs of the Kyivan metropolitanate in order, so now Patriarch Theophanes found himself obliged to under­take the same task. If in the previous instance the results had been schism and the intensification of the crisis within Orthodoxy, the actions of Theophanes fostered the consolidation of the Orthodox Church in the Kyivan metropolitanate. In the autumn of 1620, with the participation of two other Eastern hierarchs, Patriarch Theophanes of Jerusalem conse­crated the hegumen of St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, Iov Boretsky, as metropolitan of Kyiv and Halych, hieromonk Meletii Smotrytsky as archbishop of Polatsk, and a number of other bishops as heads of eparchies within the Kyivan metropolitanate. Kyiv effectively became the seat of the Orthodox metropolitan, while the Uniate metro­politan continued to reside in the Belarusian town of Navahrudak, as had the Kyivan metropolitans since the fifteenth century.^[149]

The new hierarchy was consecrated without the approval of the au­thorities and was never recognized by the king, who even issued orders to arrest the new bishops. Only because of Cossack intervention were those orders temporarily suspended. The question of the renewal of the Ortho­dox hierarchy and the political struggle associated with it revived polemics between the Orthodox and Catholics, which had all but ceased by the second decade of the seventeenth century. In the new round, the Orthodox champion was Meletii Smotrytsky, while the Uniates were rep­resented by Metropolitan Iosyf Rutsky and his successor, Antonii Seliava.^[150]

In the first decades of the seventeenth century, the Uniate Church en­countered its share of internal and external problems. In the summer of 1599, Metropolitan Mykhail Rohoza died, bringing to a close a whole era in the history of Kyivan Christianity. In place of the metropolitan, whose sympathies had been divided between Constantinople and Rome, there came the bishop of Volodymyr, Ipatii Potii, one of the principal authors of the Union of Brest and its ideological leader. As he had arrived at the idea of union not through calculation of personal gain but above all through conviction, Potii built up the Uniate Church and persecuted its oppon­ents, the outlawed Orthodox, with the energy of a neophyte. Such actions on the part of Potii, who relied on the support of the state, provoked a violent reaction among the Orthodox, resulting in an attempt on Potii’s life in Vilnius. The assessor Ivan Tupeka attacked Potii in 1609 and cut off two of his fingers (the metropolitan raised his hand to ward off a sword that was raised against him).

The policy adopted by Potii strengthened the Uniate Church only to some extent. Orthodox opposition in Vilnius was indeed broken, but the success of the church union in Ukraine generally was rather modest. The Uniates were unable to arrange for their supporters to take over the bish­oprics left vacant in Peremyshl, Lviv and Lutsk. As mentioned earlier, the Orthodox managed to retain the bishopric of Lviv, while the contest for those of Peremyshl and Lutsk went on for more than a decade. The strug­gle with opponents of the Union swallowed up all of Potii’s time and en­ergy, leaving him unable to carry out the ecclesiastical reform of which he had been one of the principal initiators during the pre-union period. Potii’s activity as metropolitan reflected one of the main contradictions of contemporary religious and social life, which also became the major con­tradiction within Potii’s character. A man of keen intelligence, he was well aware of all the flaws of pre-union Orthodoxy and wanted to remedy them by means of union with Rome. Nevertheless, he saw no means of as­serting his ‘truth’ other than violence, which was based on the support of the royal administration and gave rise to new violence.^[151]

After the death of Potii in 1613, the cause of church reform was taken up by his successor, Metropolitan Iosyf Veliamyn Rutsky. Rutsky, who served as metropolitan from 1613 to 1637, played an exceptionally im­portant role in the history of the Uniate Church. He managed to reform the church along the lines of the Counter-Reformation and to lay its or­ganizational foundations during the decades that followed. One of Rut­sky’s major undertakings was the reform of Uniate monasticism. He effectively removed the Uniate monasteries from the authority of the local bishops, subordinating them to himself and Rome. The monaster­ies were united within the Basilian Order (named after the monastic rule of St Basil) and reformed along the lines of the Catholic Counter­Reformation, with the Jesuits serving as the model for this formerly Orthodox monastic community. As part of the general reform of monastic life, and through it of the whole church, Rutsky sent young Basilian priests abroad to be educated in papal colleges in Western and Central Europe. Upon returning from their studies, they were put in charge of the emerging school system, which included elementary schools at the Basilian monasteries and a seminary. They also became prime candidates for vacant positions in the church administration and were rapidly promoted to episcopal office. Last but not least, in the course of the reform Rutsky managed to enhance the authority of the metropolitan’s office and dramatically improve discipline in the church.^[152]

By reforming the church and raising the educational level of the clergy, Rutsky managed to create a model of church union that proved extraor­dinarily attractive to Orthodox intellectuals. A significant number of leading thinkers and polemicists from the Orthodox camp, notably Meletii Smotrytsky, Kyryl Tranquillon-Stavrovetsky, and for a short time Kasiian Sakovych, went over to the union. Even so, Rutsky was unable to extend the influence of the union in any serious way. This was particularly apparent in Ukraine, where, in contrast with Belarus, the Uniates had lost most of their supporters among the magnates and nobles. Beginning in 1620, thanks to the support of the Cossacks, and then, from 1632, as a result of the compromise struck with the royal administration, the Ortho­dox steadily strengthened their position in Ukraine, where the union remained a rather marginal phenomenon. Orthodox consolidation pro­ceeded apace with the death of Metropolitan Rutsky in 1637, for his suc­cessors, Rafail Korsak (1637-40) and Antonii Seliava (1641-55), managed at best only to maintain the church at the level attained by Rutsky.^[153]

The renewal of the Orthodox hierarchy in 1620 rendered Ortho- dox-Uniate differences more acute. Efforts on the part of the new Orthodox bishops to restore and reactivate their parishes encountered opposition from the Uniate hierarchy. The confrontation was most dramatic in Belarus, where the union enjoyed considerably greater success at the time than it did in Ukraine. It was there that two eminent

representatives of seventeenth-century Ruthenian Christianity—the newly consecrated Orthodox archbishop of Polatsk, Meletii Smotrytsky, and the Uniate archbishop of Polatsk, Iosafat Kuntsevych—squared off against each other. Kuntsevych was animated not only by his own faith in the need for the union and its ultimate triumph but also by the support of the royal administration, of which he made liberal use. Smotrytsky, on the other hand, was obliged to make the best of a situation in which he himself and all his activity were outlawed. The confrontation issued in a tragic finale in Vitsebsk, where Iosafat Kuntsevych arrived in October 1623. He ordered the arrest of the last Orthodox priest in the area, who was holding clandestine religious services outside the town (by then, all the Orthodox churches of Vitsebsk had either been closed or transferred to the Uniates). The arrest triggered an outburst of indignation and des­pair among the Orthodox residents of the town. A mob of burghers broke into the building where Kuntsevych was staying, killed him, and threw his body into the Dvina. No less brutal were the royal administration’s reprisals against the burghers of Vitsebsk who had taken part in the riot. Nineteen of them were executed, and a search was undertaken for another hundred, also condemned to death. The privileges that the town had enjoyed under the Magdeburg law were revoked.^[154]

During its first half-century of existence, the Uniate Church had to de­fend itself against charges and attacks from Orthodox and Roman Catholics alike. From the Catholic side, the Uniates were subjected to equally relentless pressure. Part of the Catholic episcopate insisted on the liquidation of the union (which, contrary to expectations, increased un­rest within the state), to be followed by direct Catholic missionary activ­ity in the East. The Uniate Church itself was considered ripe for proselytizing by Catholic missionaries. The Catholic hierarchs admitted no notion of equality with their Uniate counterparts: even the suffragans (vicars of Roman Catholic bishops) considered themselves superior to the Uniate hierarchs. According to Uniate testimony, all mention of the union aroused irritation in Roman Catholic circles. Indicative of prevail­ing attitudes was the situation that arose during the Diet convoked at the beginning of 1621: on the streets of Warsaw even Catholic bishops turned away on meeting Uniates, and the papal nuncio found himself obliged to visit the bishops by night, pleading with them to support the union.^[155]

Discussions about the viability of the union were also held in the Con­gregation for the Propagation of the Faith. The nuncio was instructed to collect reports from the Catholic bishops of the Commonwealth’s eastern provinces on the situation of the Uniate Church in their eparchies. The information presented by the bishops was more than dispiriting to the Uniates. The situation in the diocese of Vilnius was comparatively favor­able, but as far as Ukraine was concerned, all the Catholic bishops de­clared themselves against the union. The bishops’ reports made quite a strong impression in Rome, but did not convince Pope Gregory XV or the leading members of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, Cardinals Ottavio Bandini and Maffeo Barberini, to abandon the union.^[156] The pope’s stand saved the union from liquidation, but his sup­port had its price. Contrary to the conditions of the Union of Brest, the Roman curia, represented by the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, assumed ever greater control not only over the nomination and consecration of new metropolitans, which was achieved through the in­troduction of the post of coadjutor (a successor to the metropolitan, effectively an appointee of Rome), but also over the nomination of bishops. Furthermore, Rome maintained control of contacts with the other half of Rus’ (i.e. the Orthodox).^[157]

Surprisingly, the death of Kuntsevych helped the Uniates to overcome the hitherto negative attitude toward the union on the part of the Commonwealth elite. The defeat at TTutora (1620) was now a thing of the past, and the victorious Battle of Khotyn (1621) gave the Commonwealth greater confidence in its confrontation with the Ottoman Empire. Hetman Sahaidachny was already dead by that time, and the Cossacks were no longer so necessary to the Commonwealth. In Warsaw, the murder of Kuntsevych helped to bring about a change of mood. The union began to be seen as vulnerable to ‘schismatic’ encroachments, and once again reso­lute partisans rose to defend it. The murder of Kuntsevych and the reprisals against the burghers of Vitsebsk also influenced the attitude of Orthodox intellectuals: the struggle of Rus' against Rus' exceeded the bounds of literary polemics, giving rise to mutual hatred and even mur­der. Meletii Smotrytsky, who apparently considered himself morally re­sponsible for the baleful developments, was very deeply affected by them. His decision to leave the Commonwealth for a time and make a visit to the Eastern patriarchs may have been inspired by the events at Vitsebsk.^[158]

The renewal of the Orthodox hierarchy and the deepening of the Orthodox-Uniate struggle led the Commonwealth authorities to seek a compromise for the accommodation of the ‘people of Rus''. The holding of a joint Orthodox-Uniate sobor was first proposed by the royal admin­istration as early as the Diet of 1623. The idea became especially popular in the entourage of Metropolitan Iosyf Rutsky and the Uniate hierarchy, which had been deprived by the restored Orthodox hierarchy of its mon­opoly on the representation of the ‘people of Rus'' before the royal ad­ministration and was now faced with growing activity on the part of the Orthodox. Some Orthodox intellectuals, including Meletii Smotrytsky, responded to the idea, and the sitting metropolitan, Iov Boretsky, was also inclined in its favor, but in general the Orthodox, who depended heavily on the support of the Cossacks, were seriously constrained in their relations with the Uniates.

At the Orthodox sobor of 1628, Meletii Smotrytsky was harshly con­demned for his allegedly non-Orthodox views. The groundswell of indig­nation against the most influential Orthodox publicist was so powerful among the Orthodox that even Iov Boretsky and other clerics, who had earlier supported Smotrytsky's efforts at ‘unification', were now obliged to distance themselves from him. An attempt by King Zygmunt III to convoke a joint Orthodox-Uniate sobor in 1629 also proved fruitless. In preparation for the joint sobor, the king had convoked two separate sobors, one for the Orthodox in Kyiv and the other for the Uniates in Volodymyr. At their sobor, the Uniates put forward compromise condi­tions of union that called for the Orthodox to recognize the supremacy of the pope while remaining under the jurisdiction of Constantinople. Met­ropolitan Rutsky also mooted the idea of a joint patriarchate. But the uni­fication council did not, in fact, take place. Under pressure from the Cossacks, the Orthodox hierarchy refused to take part.^[159]

After the death of the Orthodox metropolitan, Iov Boretsky, in 1631, Isaia Kopynsky was chosen to succeed him. Like the other hierarchs con­secrated in 1620, he remained illegitimate in the eyes of the royal admin­istration and could not even make his way to his eparchy, where ecclesiastical life went on with no episcopal authority, as it had before 1620. Meanwhile, the death of Zygmunt III in 1632 and the election of his successor, Wladyslaw IV, led to major changes in the official attitude to the Orthodox Church. Seeking support from the Orthodox delegates to the electoral Diet, Wladyslaw agreed to settle the old denominational conflict on the Ukrainian-Belarusian lands, which was seriously weaken­ing the Commonwealth and even leading some representatives of the Orthodox hierarchy consecrated in 1620 to adopt a pro-Muscovite orientation. On 1 November 1632, he signed the so-called ‘Measures for the Accommodation of Citizens of the Greek Faith’.⁵⁶

The ‘Measures’ accorded the Orthodox Church de facto state recogni­tion, giving the Orthodox the right to a metropolitan and bishops of their own and establishing conditions for the settlement of property disputes between Orthodox and Catholics. Making use of these new opportun­ities, the Orthodox delegates to the electoral Diet immediately chose a new ‘legitimate’ metropolitan and two bishops. The new metropolitan was the archimandrite of the Kyivan Cave Monastery, Petro Mohyla.⁵⁷

Zapiski istoriko-filologicheskogo Otdeleniia Imperatorskoi akademii nauk 8, no. 15 (1911): 1-26, and a documentary work by Ivan Kryp^,,iakevych, ‘Novi materiialy do istorii soboriv 1629 r.’, ZNTSh 116 (1913): 5-39.

On the idea of a Ruthenian patriarchate, see Jan Krajcar, ‘The Ruthenian Patriarchate: Some Remarks on the Project for its Establishment in the 17th Century’, OCP 30 (1964): 65-84; D. Tanczuk, ‘Quaestio patriarchatus Kioviensis tempore conaminum Unionis Ruthenorum (1582-1632)’, Analecta OSBM 1 (1949): 128-46; Mikolaj (Mykola) Andrusiak, ‘Sprawa patriar- chatu kijowskiego za Wladyslawa IV’, Prace historyczne w 30-lecie dzialalnosci profesorskiej Stanislawa Zakrewskiego (Lviv, 1934), pp. 269-85.

⁵⁶ See Hrushevs’kyi, Istoriia Ukratny-Rusy, 8, pt. 1: 139-99; Vlasovs’kyi, Narys istorii', 2: 54-60. On the religious policies of Wladyslaw IV, see Jan Dzicgielewski, O Ioleraij dla zdomi- nowanych. Polityka wyznaniowa Rzeczypospolitej w latach panowania Wladyslawa IV (Warsaw, 1986); Marian Bendza, ‘Wladyslaw IV a Kosciol Prawoslawny’, Rocznik Ieologiczny Chrzesci- janskiej Akademii Teologicznej 20, no. 2 (1978): 27-77; Henryk Wisner, Rozroznieni w wierze. Szkice z dziejowRzeczypospolitejschylkuXVIipolowy XVII wieku (Warsaw, 1982).

⁵⁷ There is a considerable literature on the life and activities of Metropolitan Petro Mohyla, although Golubev, Kievskii mitropolit Petr Mogila i ego spodvizhniki, remains the standard work. See also Arkadii Zhukovs’kyi, Petro Mohyla ipytannia iednosty tserkov (Paris, 1969; augmented edn., Kyiv, 1997); P. Mohyla: bohoslov, tserkovnyi i kuTturnyi diiach, ed. A. M. Kolodnyi and V. Klymov (Kyiv, 1997); Fenomen Petra Mohyly. Biohrafiia, diial'nist', pozytsiia, ed. Valerii Klymov (Kyiv, 1996). For publications on Mohyla in Western languages, see Ambroise Jobert, De Luther a Mohila: La Pologne dans la crise de la chretiente 1517-1648 ( = Collection historique de l’Institut d’Etudes Slaves, 21) (Paris, 1974); Georges Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, pt. 1 ( = Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, vol. 5) (Belmont, Mass., 1979); and HUS 8, nos. 1-2 (1984), special issue, The Kiev Mohyla Academy, including a review article by Frank E. Sysyn, ‘Peter Mohyla and the Kiev Academy in Recent Western Works: Divergent Views on Seventeenth-Century Ukrainian Culture’, pp. 155-87.

He applied himself energetically to his new duties, beginning with the elimination of his main rival and enemy, Isaia Kopynsky. The latter was removed bodily to Mohyla’s stronghold, the Cave Monastery, and held there until he gave up the metropolitan’s post. Eventually, Mohyla man­aged to concentrate a wealth of resources in his hands: on becoming met­ropolitan, he retained control over the Cave Monastery and took over the monasteries of St Michael and St Nicholas in Kyiv. His influence in the Kyiv Epiphany Brotherhood also increased. Having taken control of the requisite financial resources and established good relations with the royal administration and the leaders of the Orthodox nobility, Mohyla under­took the long overdue reform of Ukrainian Orthodoxy.

The reform was made necessary by the disorder of ecclesiastical life, which had been considerably aggravated by the absence of a hierarchy or its inability (even if for reasons beyond its control) to direct church af­fairs. The stimulus toward reform was the activity of the Uniate Church, reorganized according to Catholic models during the metropolitanate of Iosyf Veliamyn Rutsky. The onset of confessionalization under the guise of the reformed Catholic Church and the union, as well as the further spread of Protestant influence in Ukraine, was the challenge of the times to which the Orthodox Church of Mohyla’s day was forced to respond. It is a striking fact that none of the major Orthodox centers of the East man­aged to rise adequately to the occasion. Moscow continued its policy of self-isolation, and even Constantinople was subject to Protestant influ­ence. The challenge was taken up by the ablest Orthodox leader of the time, Metropolitan Petro Mohyla, who transformed Kyiv into a powerful intellectual and ecclesiastical center of Eastern Christianity.

Mohyla began his reform by introducing strict discipline within the church and increasing the authority of the metropolitan’s office. Estab­lishing control over the election and activities of bishops, the consecra­tion of priests, and the work of the brotherhoods were among his major undertakings as metropolitan. One of his most ambitious projects was the development of the Kyivan College (established in 1632, before his ac­cession to the metropolitan see), whose structure and curriculum were based on those of the Catholic colleges of Western and Central Europe. Mohyla was able to bring to Kyiv the best Orthodox intellectuals of the day, and with their help he set about improving ecclesiastical life. He gained control of Orthodox printing presses in Ukraine and influenced their publishing programs. He kept the printshop of the Kyivan Cave Monastery busy producing literature on Orthodox church law and liturgy, as well as didactic and polemical tracts. With Mohyla’s participa­tion, a sacramentary was published in Kyiv in 1646, dramatically improv­ing and standardizing liturgical practice. But by far the greatest achievement of Mohyla and his learned circle was the preparation of the Orthodox confession of faith, which was approved with some amend­ments by the Eastern patriarchs in 1643 and published in Kyiv in 1645.^[160] In the final analysis, Mohyla not only successfully reformed his own church, preparing it to meet the challenges of confessionalization and hold its own against Catholic and Protestant competitors, but also helped to set the whole Orthodox world on the path of confessionalization.^[161]

Mohyla’s tenure also saw a significant improvement in Orthodox- Uniate relations. The idea of a joint Orthodox-Uniate patriarchate gained currency once more in 1635, after the acceptance of the ‘Measures for the Accommodation of Citizens of the Greek Faith’. Neither side, Orthodox or Uniate, was fully satisfied with the ‘Measures’, and both sought other ways of resolving the long-drawn-out conflict. This time the initiative came from secular circles, most notably from the Volhynian palatine, Prince Aleksander Sanguszko. In October 1635, he sent the prior of the Lviv Dominican monastery, Jan Damaskin, to Rome to in­form the pope that a movement for union with the Holy See was spread­ing among the Orthodox. Damaskin was instructed to obtain Rome’s permission to hold a joint Orthodox-Uniate sobor at which questions of unification and the establishment of a joint patriarchate would be dis­cussed. Apparently, Sanguszko’s action did not proceed without the sup­port of the royal administration: without awaiting news from Rome, Wladyslaw IV issued a proclamation in September 1636 proposing a dis­cussion of the union of churches at the next Diet.

Rome, however, came out against the idea of a joint sobor. The Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith had taken the same pos­ition on the eve of the planned joint sobor of 1629. The refusal was based on the curia’s firm insistence that questions of dogma could be discussed only at ecumenical councils. Quite obviously, such questions would be touched upon at a joint sobor between Orthodox and Uniates that could only be regarded as local in scope. That gave the Roman politicians justi­fication to reject the very idea of a joint sobor. Aside from questions of dogma, Rome undoubtedly had other reasons to forbid the Uniates from taking part in joint sobors. The Eastern policy of the Counter­Reformation papacy was utterly incompatible with the establishment of a new type of patriarchate within which, Rutsky believed, the Orthodox should maintain their allegiance to Constantinople in the same measure as they acknowledged the supremacy of the pope.^[162]

In spite of the papacy’s refusal to permit a joint Orthodox-Uniate sobor, the idea of joining the two denominations together in a so-called ‘universal union’ continued to circulate within the Commonwealth. It had the support of King Wladyslaw IV, who was the source of a subse­quent initiative for the establishment of such a union. One of his closest advisers on religious affairs, Walerian (Massimiliano) Magni, arrived in Rome in 1645 on a mission from the king. Among the tasks entrusted to him was that of mending relations between the Commonwealth govern­ment and the Roman curia, which had reached a dead end during the last years of the pontificate of Pope Urban VIII. One of the specific proposals that Magni presented to the curia’s leaders was a plan of ‘universal union’, most likely drafted by Petro Mohyla and the Orthodox magnate Adam Kysil. As conceived by the authors of the plan, the union was to be a coming together of two equal churches, not the subordination of one to the other. The question of the patriarchate was not raised in the draft, which may explain why it was more favorably received in the Congrega­tion for the Propagation of the Faith than previous proposals for an Orthodox-Uniate accommodation. The congregation spoke in support of the initiative, but the curia’s decision came too late: first the death of Petro Mohyla in 1647 and then the outbreak of the Khmelnytsky revolt in 1648 rendered the convocation of such a council all but impossible.^[163] And so the Church of Rus’ remained divided.

Although the split between the two branches of the Kyivan church was never healed, the divided church managed to achieve some of the goals that it had not attained as a unit. During the first half of the seventeenth century, the Orthodox and Uniate branches of the church both under­went a much-needed ecclesiastical reform and adjusted to new circum­stances. Both were profoundly influenced by the confessionalization of religious and social life then under way in Western and East-Central Europe, managing to improve ecclesiastical discipline and introduce standard norms of belief and morals. Both churches addressed the problem of educating their clergy, and each was able to resolve it in its own way. In the 1610s and 1620s the Uniates took the lead, but by the mid-1640s the Orthodox part of the formerly united church achieved remarkable results on its own and became a leading force in the Orthodox world. The confessionalization of religious life in Ukraine and Belarus helped, on the one hand, to bring both churches closer together and was at least partly responsible for the relative success of their negotiations on the prospect of ‘universal union’ in the 1630s and 1640s. On the other hand, it helped to create a separate confessional identity in each of the churches, which divided them more than ever before and ensured further divergence in the future.

THREE