Ever since the Kievan period, literature, art, and architecture in Ukraine had been closely linked to religion. It was from Byzantium that Kievan Rus' received Christianity, and the educated elite and the cultural forms they produced were for the most part inspired by and linked to the Orthodox church. To be sure, there were some examples of secular cultural phenomena, such as the historical chronicles and the epic Lay of Ihor’s Campaign, but Rus' culture was cast largely in a religious mold during the Kievan period of Ukrainian history.
This situation remained essentially unchanged during the Lithuanian-Polish era, which lasted from the fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth century in much of Ukrainian territory. Religion and elite culture were inseparable. Moreover, following the Byzantine tradition, church and state were always closely associated. Again, this was the continuation of a trend established in the Kievan period, when another characteristic evolved as well: the fusion of religious and territorial-national identity. One was of the Rus' land because one was of the Orthodox Rus' faith, and vice versa. Political and religious developments therefore were dependent upon each other. Such interdependence was of special significance when, during the two centuries between 1349 and 1569, most Ukrainian lands progressively came under the political, social, and cultural domination of Lithuania and Poland, countries whose governing and dominant social strata were Roman Catholic. In effect, the future of the Ukrainian people depended on the fate of its Orthodox Rus' church within a basically Roman Catholic environment.
Educated Ukrainians were well aware of the crucial symbiotic relationship of politics, religion, culture, and the survival of the Rus' as a people. The first two centuries of Lithuanian-Polish rule did not bode well for the Orthodox Rus' church in Ukraine. The reason was related in large part to the complicated status of the highest dignitary in the Orthodox church, the metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus'. As one of the aftereffects of the Mongol presence beginning in the 1240s, the metropolitans tended to reside not in their seat of Kiev, but rather in the north-
The Metropolitanate of Kiev and All Rlis'
Because of the dose relationship between church and state in the Orthodox world, the status and the place of residence of the metropolitan of Kiev, the head of the Orthodox church of Rus', were to have wide-ranging political and cultural implications in the lands once part of Kievan Rus'. The metropolitan derived his canonical authority from the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, and consequently the attitude of that prelate always had to be taken into account.
In principle, the ecumenical patriarch favored a single, unified metropolitanate in Kiev. During the fourteenth century, in an effort to counter the political decline of the Byzantine Empire, the mother church in Constantinople drew closer to the South Slav and East Slav Orthodox churches, and crucial to the relationship it hoped to achieve was the maintenance of an undivided Metropolitanate of Kiev and All Rus'. The attempt was complicated by the fact that in the second half of the fourteenth century the ecclesiastical territory of the Kievan metropolitanate was divided politically among four states: Muscovy, Lithuania, Poland, and the Golden Horde. This political reality, coupled with the threat of Roman Catholic influence on the western Rus' lands and the reluctance after 1299 of Kievan metropolitans to reside in their ecclesiastical seat of Kiev, forced the ecumenical patriarch to compromise the principle of jurisdictional unity.
As early as at the beginning of the fourteenth century, Constantinople accepted the distinction between what it designated as the eparchies of Great Rus' {Megaie Rosiia) Little Rus' {Mikra Rosiia), In 1303, the latter jurisdiction became the Metropolitanate of Halych and, at the request of the Rus' rulers of Galicia, was recognized by Constantinople as consisting of six eparchies: Halych, Volodymyr-Volyns'kyi, Przemysl, Luts'k, Chetm, and Pinsk-Turail, Similarly, in 1317 the powerful Gediminas of Lithuania persuaded Constantinople to give his grand duchy its own metropolitan jurisdiction, with a seat in Navahrudak, Not surprisingly, the metropolitan of Kiev, resident in Moscow, protested against what he considered another division of his ecclesiastical territory. As a result of his protests, both the Galician and the Lithuanian metropolitanates were abolished, restored, and abolished again between 1328 and 1401.
Subsequently, the Ijithuanians continued to press not for the establishment of a separate Lithuanian metropolitanate, but for the restoration of the Kievan metropolitanate on their own territory. Accordingly, in 1415 Grand Duke Vytautas initiated the election of Lithuania’s own Kievan metropolitan (Hry-horii Tsamblak, reigned 1415-1418), but, again following pressure from the Kievan metropolitan in Moscow, this unilateral Lithuanian move was not recognized by the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople. Not until the middle of the fifteenth century was the desire of the Lithuanians to have Kievan met-Ropoliians on their own territory' fulfilled. This development was the result, however, not of Lithuanian influence on the ecumenical patriarch, but rather of Muscovy’s alienation from Constantinople. Just how did such alienation come about?
In 1439, Izydor, the metropolitan of Kiev (reigned 1436-1441) resident in Moscow, along with the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople accepted an act signed at Florence calling for the union of the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. The Florentine act so angered Muscovy’s bishops and secular rulers that Izydor was driven from the country. In 1448, Muscovy’s bishops elected their own metropolitan of Kiev without the approval of the ecumenical patriarch, a step which set the Muscovite church on a course that eventually would lead to its complete independence.
As for the rest of the Rus' church on Bclarusan and Ukrainian lands within Lithuania and Poland, it too, beginning in 1458, had its metropolitans of Kiev, who were approved by the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople and who resided in the Lithuanian town of Navahrudak. This so-called Lithuanian metropolitanate, whose hierarchs held the title Metropolitan of Kiev, Galicia, and All Rus', consisted of the following eparchies: Navahrudak, Vilnius, Pinsk-Turaii, Minsk, Hrodna, Slutsk, Volodymyr-Brest, Luts'k-Ostroh, Chelm, Przemysl, Mukachevo, Chernihiv-Briansk (until J503), and (from its restoration in 1539) Halych-L'viv,
Ern Rus' cities of Vladimir-na-Klicizma and Moscow. Finally, in 1326 Moscow became the permanent residence of the metropolitan, although during the next century a few resided for certain periods of time in Kiev.
Meanwhile, in the western Rus' (Belarusan and Ukrainian) lands that had come under Lithuanian and Polish rule in the fourteenth century, various efforts were made to create new Orthodox metropolitanates in Galicia and Lithuania or to restore the Kievan metropolitanate so that its seat would be within the borders of Lithuania. In theory, all such moves had to receive the blessing of the highest authority of the Orthodox church, the ecumenical patriarch in Constandnople. In practice, metropolitans were at times appointed without the approval of Constantinople; and the metropolitan of Kiev, resident in Moscow, remained, like the Muscovite secular authorities, staunchly opposed to any effort that would divide western Rus' lands from what he considered his own unified ecclesiastical jurisdiction. In short, the Kievan metropolitanate became an object of political rivalry between Lithuania and Muscovy. Finally, in 1458 the metropolitanate was divided in two, with metropolitans of both divisions each claiming the tide of Kiev and All Rus' but residing in Moscow and Navahrudak (Lithuania) respectively.
This meant that from the second half of the fifteenth century Ukrainian territories had no metropolitan in residence. As a result, not only was the country deprived of the political and sociocultural prestige that traditionally attended the
RELIGION AND CULTURE, 16th and 17th CENTURIES
MAP 14
International boundaries, 1570 Boundary of Ukraine, 1995
F Metropolitan see t Eparchialsee
A Important monastery CO Print shop Kiev Brotherhood
Presence of the metropolitan, but the concomitant lack of effective authority led to an almost total breakdown of ecclesiastical order. Galicia and Volhynia, in particular, were becoming increasingly susceptible to Roman Catholic pressure following the creation in 1375 of a Roman Catholic archbishopric of Halych and L'viv, which set up new dioceses to promote the Latin rite in western Ukraine. The Polish king also exercised his prerogative of designating hierarchs for vacant
Orthodox sees. More often than not, the appointments were used as instruments of political patronage and went to recently ordained powerful magnates who used their new religious posts for further political and economic self-aggrandizement. Religion seemed the last thing on the minds of these church leaders, who continued to live the style of life of the nobility (even maintaining armed retainers). Orthodox morals and religious life in general suffered accordingly.
Nor could much help be expected from neighboring Orthodox powers. As for the ultimate authority in the Orthodox world, the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople, his position and influence were directly related to the status of the Byzantine Empire. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, Byzantium itself faced imminent collapse, and by 1453 the Ottoman Turks bad captured Constantinople, putting an end to the thousand-year-old Eastern Roman Empire. Now, finding himself in an aggressive Islamic environment, the ecumenical patriarch had all he could do to preserve the existence of the Orthodox church in former Byzantine lands, let alone be seriously concerned with the fate of the church elsewhere.
Other Orthodox states were similarly powerless or unwilling to help the western Rus' church on Ukrainian lands. Orthodox Moldavia and Walachia, from which Galicia had traditionally received help, were fighting for their own survival in the face of the Ottoman advance into the Balkans, which eventually overtook them by the early sixteenth century. For their part, Muscovy’s government and its own Kievan metropolitans were not about to give help to what they considered a rival Orthodox church on Polish and Lithuanian territory. At best, Muscovy served as a place of refuge for those Rus' gentry, clergy, townspeople, and even peasants from Belarusan and Ukrainian lands who decided to escape eastward, away from the increasing Roman Catholic influence in their homelands. Finally, for those Rus' magnates and gentry who remained at home, many became convinced that it was not worth maintaining Orthodoxy if conversion to Roman Catholicism and acceptance of the Polish language and Polish customs would assure them of a favorable position in the new sociopolitical and economic order.
Deprived of the support of the state (which it had enjoyed in Kievan times), cut off from the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople, and more often than not administered by opportunistic bishops of aristocratic origin who were uninterested in religion, the Orthodox church in Ukraine was left to its own devices. One option was a withdrawal from the temporal world into the realm of spirituality. It is no coincidence, therefore, that between the late fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries several monasteries were newly founded or rebuilt, first in Galicia, then in Volhynia and central and eastern Ukraine. Among the more important monasteries functioning during this period were, in Galicia, St Onufrius (L'viv), Univ, and Skyt Maniavs'kyi; in Volhynia, Pochaiv, Zhydychyn (near Luts'k), Dubno, and Derman'; in Kiev, the older Caves Monastery, Epiphany, and St Nicholas; and in eastern Ukraine, Hustyn (near Pryluky) and Mhar (near Lubni). Icon painting and book production flourished and religious thought developed in these and other monasteries, which thus helped to preserve the spirit of Eastern Christianity.
Monasteries also functioned as places for the physical repose and spiritual refreshment of thousands of faithful who visited annually as pilgrims. Aside from their religious function, the pilgrimages to the monasteries played a role in promoting a sense of community, whereby visitors from different parts of the Orthodox Rus' world came to realize that they were part of a larger group. In that sense, monasteries functioned as pre-modern communication centers that encouraged what later would be called a national consciousness. Nevertheless, the monastic movement and the customary faith of the lower clergy and the masses were insufficient to counteract the prevailing sociopolitical environment of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The result was a continual decline in the status of Orthodoxy, which made its future survival in Ukraine questionable. Among the first elements to grasp the seriousness of the religious and cultural crisis were the Rus' townspeople and some magnates and gentry. Each group felt threatened by the decline of Orthodoxy and consequently of its own status in society, and each reacted to the situation in its own way.
The role of townspeople and magnates
The importance in society of townspeople, particularly Rus' townspeople, had declined from what it was in Kievan times. The towns played no role in Polish-Lithuanian political life; they were largely passed over by the growing Vistula grain trade; and those that governed themselves according to the Magdeburg Law thereby reinforced their isolation and laid themselves open to eventual exploitation by the politically and economically influential nobility.
The cities did become centers of intellectual ferment, however, especially during Poland’s cultural renaissance after the 1550s. Not only Polish, but also German, Jewish, and Armenian culture flourished in Ukraine’s cities. These groups had in fact come to dominate urban life, with the consequence that by the fifteenth century Orthodox Rus' townspeople felt themselves to be on both the economic and the sociocultural defensive. Faced with such a situation. Orthodox townspeople banded together in organizations known as bratstva, or brotherhoods.
There is much controversy as to the origin of the brotherhoods. Some scholars say they continued the tradition of the religious bratchiny, which were secular societies in the service of the church in the Kievan period; others argue that they evolved according to the model of the urban guilds in medieval western Europe, which developed in Ukrainian cities after the introduction of the Magdeburg Law; still others suggest they were influenced by the similar Greek brotherhood associations (adelfotes). Whatever their origin and whatever their degree of organizational cohesion - probably rather loose during the early period - brotherhoods came into existence in western Ukrainian cities, especially L'viv, during the first half of the fifteenth century.
From the very beginning, the urban brotherhoods were associated with individUal churches. In a sense, a brotherhood was a kind of business and professional association, whose primary goal apart from the social (they held banquets and fairs) was to support the Orthodox church. For instance, during the 1530s, L'viv townspeople, with the help of the influential Volhynian Rus' magnate (and general in the Lithuanian army) Prince Kostiantyn I. Ostroz'kyi, succeeded in persuading the Polish government to restore the Orthodox eparchy of Halych (abolished with its metropolitanate in the early fourteenth century) and to guarantee non-interference in Orthodox affairs by the local Roman Catholic bishop. As a result, an Orthodox bishop was appointed in 1539, and the seat of the eparchy was moved from Halych to L'viv.
But it was not until the last decades of the sixteenth century that the brotherhoods came to play a more organized and influential role. Until that time, the magnates played the leading role in the Orthodox cultural revival. Whereas it is true that following the Union of Lublin in 1569 and the incorporation of most Ukrainian lands into the Polish Kingdom many Ukrainian magnates and gentry became polonized, it is also true that a few secular leaders worked hard to promote Orthodoxy and to revive and raise the level of Rus' culture in general. In fact, it is to the Orthodox magnates that credit is due for the establishment of the first printing presses on Ukrainian territory as well as of the first advanced schools of the period.
In 1567, on the estate of Prince Hryhorii Khodkevych at Zabludow, in northeastern Podlachia, the first printing press was set up by a refugee from Muscovy, Ivan Fedorov, who is known in Ukrainian cultural history as Ivan Fedorovych. At Zabludow, Fedorovych published a collection of sermons (1569) and a book of psalms (1575). Then, in 1575, he went to Ostroh, in Volhynia, where he set up his printing press on the estate of Prince Kostiantyn/Vasyl' K. Ostroz'kyi. The Ostroz'kyi estate was at the time the leading center of the Orthodox cultural revival. A primary school was opened there in 1570, and eight years later a secondary school known as the Ostroh Academy was established. The academy became a haven for Ukrainian and foreign scholars alike and helped to train a whole generation of Ukrainian intellectual leaders. Eager to reverse the deterioration within the Orthodox church, the Ostroh Academy focused its attention on the Byzantine roots of the Orthodox tradition. Accordingly, Greek was made the language of instruction. Some Latin was also taught, but it is not known whether Church Slavonic was used. Despite the emphasis on Greek and Latin, however, the local Rns' culture was not forgotten. On the printing press, which operated at Ostrih between 1578 and 1612, were published about two dozen books, undoubtedly the most famous of which was the Ostroh Bible of 1581. This was the first complete text of the Bible in Church Slavonic, based on the Greek and translated by a group of scholars at the academy under the editorship of Herasym Smotryts'kyi.
But such ventures remained largely dependent on the good will and religious patriotism of a few individuals. In fact, the tenuousness of their achievements soon became evident when several descendants of these cultural philanthropists and Orthodox patriots became Roman Catholic. The result was that most of the Orthodox intellectual oases had disappeared by the beginning of the seventeenth century. Even the famed Ostroh Academy was transformed in 1620 into a Jesuit College by Prince Kostiantyn Ostroz'kyi’s Roman Catholic daughter. In the end, the future of Orthodoxy and Rus' culture was not to be guaranteed by the acts of a few magnates. Instead, it was to depend largely on the evolution of the urban brotherhoods.
L'viv's Stauropegial Brotherhood
The most important of these urban brotherhoods was the L'viv brotherhood, associated with the Church of the Holy Dormition (Uspens'kyi Sobor) in that city. At about the time of its formal establishment, the L'viv brotherhood received particular encouragement as a result of its interaction with visiting Orthodox prelates from the former Byzantine Empire. Since 1453, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople (who was still the de jure head of Orthodoxy in Ukrainian and Lithuanian lands) and the patriarchs of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria had found themselves within the Islamic Ottoman Empire. And whereas the Ottomans permited Orthodox Christians {Rum milleti) to practice their fatih, the Islamic government often clashed with and in some cases imprisoned church leaders. Moreover, the Orthodox church was deprived of the enormous sources of wealth (in particular, landholdings) in its possession from the days of the Byzantine Empire. Consequently, the church had to fall back on its own members for support. But a community that was no longer part of the ruling elite had decidedly limited resources. Accordingly, the Orthodox leadership turned to the only other country that might provide some help - the tsardom of Muscovy.
Beginning in the sixteenth century, several Orthodox prelates from the Ottoman Empire traveled north to Moscow, and some of them stopped in Ukraine along the way. Among them was Patriarch Joachim of Antioch (reigned 15811592), who stayed for a short while in L'viv in 1585. There, he was shocked by what he saw in the local Orthodox church, in particular the moral lapse of some of its bishops and priests (by then it was not uncommon for twice-married clergy to be ordained). He was encouraged, however, by the activity of the L'viv Dormition Church Brotherhood, and he gave it his full support. He accepted the charter of the brotherhood and even recognized its supervisory capacity with regard to the life of the clergy and the Orthodox church in general. This was an extraordinary privilege to be granted to an essentially secular organization.
Four years later, the status of the L'viv brotherhood was enhanced even further. During a return visit from Moscow in 1589, the supreme head of the Orthodox church, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople Jeremiah II, stopped in western Ukraine. Though he did not travel to L'viv, he met (in Ternopil') with the church’s local hierarchy and lay leaders and reconfirmed the privileges granted previously to the L'viv brotherhood. He also went a step further, by granting the brotherhood the right of stauropegion, whereby it was placed directly under his control and freed from any interference by the local bishop. This was an exceptional privilege for a lay organization, although one often granted to monasteries. What was unique, however, was that the patriarch also gave the L'viv
Dormition Brotherhood the authority to report on abuses within the local Orthodox church. Not unexpectedly, the granting of such a supervisory role to a lay organization did not please the local hierarchs, who felt, and righdy so, that their own authority was being undermined.
For its part, the L'viv Stauropegial Brotherhood took up the cultural and moral challenge. It quickly amended its charter, with the result that the social aspect of the organization was replaced by a focus on religious and, especially, educational activities. Now known as the Stauropegial Brotherhood, the organization constructed a new building which included a home for the poor and sick. It also bought the Fedorovych press and set up a printing shop. The brotherhood had already established a school in 1585, and soon it became the model for other such institutions throughout Ukrainian and Belarusan lands. Its curriculum included not only Greek but also Church Slavonic, and among its leading scholars was Stefan Zyzanii.
The patriarch had also given the L'viv Stauropegial Brotherhood supervisory responsibility over all brotherhoods in Ukraine. Joining the already-existing ones, several others were soon established: Przemysl, Rohatyn, and Krasnystaw in 1589, Brest and Horodok in 1591, and Lublin in 1594. At each of these brotherhoods, schools were established according to the Greco-Slavonic model of the L'viv Stauropegial Brotherhood, and in general, education became the primary function of the brotherhoods.
But whereas the brotherhoods were to play an overwhelmingly positive role in promoting education and in preserving Church Slavonic culture within a Polish-oriented Latin environment, their role as self-styled protectors of Orthodoxy would before long bring them into conflict with the hierarchy of the church. This conflict would cause an immense disruption not only in Ukrainian religious life, but in Ukrainian society as a whole. The events in Ukraine did not unfold in isolation, however, but were influenced by the most powerful movements in sixteenth-century Europe - the Reformation and Counter Reformation.
World History
