We’re now in the 17th century as we continue our reflection on Orthodox Church organization and structure through history, and we know that in the 17th century—this was a century that had great impact on the Orthodox Church, especially in the area of education and understanding sacraments and priesthood during this particular period. There are two personalities here that we’d like to just take a look at today and what was going on in the different places, and we’ll deal with Constantinople first and then deal with Ukraine.

Now in Constantinople in the 17th century, that century was pretty much dominated by the affairs of the Patriarch Kyrillos Lukaris, or Cyril Lukaris, who is notorious in Church history for being a patriarch of Constantinople who presented a totally Protestant, rather, more strictly speaking, Calvinistic, exactly Calvinistic understanding of the Christian faith. In fact, it is said that Lukaris’s understanding was completely and totally Calvinistic, and this impacted the Church during that particular century in Constantinople.

During this time there is more and more power given to the Phanar in the former Byzantine Roman Empire, for example, in this century, the 17th century. Bulgaria, Serbia were finally completely and totally dominated by the Phanar, and they were appointing the bishops there also, which didn’t take place until about then. But right now it turns out that in the Ottoman Empire, virtually the whole empire is simply ruled by Constantinople. And what their policies would be, as we mentioned also, depended on which Western influence was winning. And certainly we can say that in the 17th century the Western influence that won completely in Constantinople was that of Cyril Lukaris, and then the reaction to Lukaris’s activity as a patriarch who was a completely and totally Calvinistic teacher.

Lukaris was born in Crete in 1572. He died in 1638, and his history and legacy carried on through that particular century when the Church had to deal with what he had done and what he had taught. Lukaris studied in the West—in Venice, in Padua, in Wittenberg, and in Geneva. For six years after those studies, he was the rector of the Orthodox Academy in Lithuania, in Vilnius, for six years. But in 1602, Lukaris was elected patriarch of Alexandria. Of course, he never was in Alexandria; he was living in Constantinople by that time. And in 1620, he himself was elected the patriarch of Constantinople, and he was in that position five different times! He resigned five times under pressures, and then he returned five times. And basically his patriarchate was supported by British and Dutch diplomats in the Phanar at that particular time.

Now, Lukaris was an out-and-out Calvinist. He published a confession of faith in 1629, where you had all the major doctrines of Calvinism simply affirmed. For example, he denied the seven sacraments: “There are two sacraments.” He taught justification by faith, sola scriptura. He was in opposition to icons, although he himself was the patriarch of Constantinople.

He also was involved in a lot of political events, and ultimately his death came at the hands of the Turks, who considered him a kind of a traitor to the Ottoman Empire, and he was strangled to death and then thrown into the sea. Some people said he died at sea, but it seems more that he was killed and thrown into the sea. And some of his disciples recovered his body which was thrown into the Bosphorus, and they brought him back to Constantinople, but he was refused a Church funeral because of his actual teachings.

But this led also to a tremendous influence of Protestantism in those areas that were under the control of Constantinople. For example, we know that in 1643, after Lukaris had actually died, there was a union of Orthodox with Rome in Ushkarod, in the Carpathian Mountains. And the claim was that the priests of that area appealed to the Latin bishop of Hungary, Edgar, asking for asylum within the Roman Catholic Church, because they wanted to keep the traditional Orthodox Catholic faith, and they couldn’t do it within the patriarchate because the Protestantism was being taught in various different places and had won the day theologically. So what you have here is a very typical happening for that particular time.

In 1629, this confession of faith was published. However, it was absolutely condemned in 1691 by a convocation held in Jerusalem—in Constantinople, led by Dositheos, Patriarch of Jerusalem, where Lukaris was formally condemned as a heretical teacher. So in that time you had a tremendous domination of the Phanar and the patriarchate of Constantinople by Protestantism, simply by the Protestant doctrines and the Protestant teachings. How that impacts on Church organization and structure: these patriarchs and so on were considered the heads of the Church and leaders of the people without any doubt, but they had to deal with the Ottoman government, which would play off different people for different reasons in order to get more money, and that’s the reason why, for five different occasions, this Kyrillos Lukaris was resigned and re-elected, resigned and re-elected, all during that absolutely chaotic period. So you have that influence, and he sent people to study in Protestant schools and so on, and the influence remained there at that particular time.

Now, what was happening in Ukraine at that time was also—had major impact on the Orthodox faith and the Orthodox tradition, much more lasting than Lukaris’s. Lukaris was kind of an anomaly. I mean, it was just something that happened, and he himself never really took over. But the Church under the Ottomans and the patriarchate of Constantinople still were controlled by the political events in that part of the world and had to deal with things. Nevertheless, those patriarchs from that time that were living mostly in Constantinople were still influential within the Church about what was happening.

Now, in Ukraine, the 17th century was dominated by the personality of Petro or Peter Mohyla, Petro Mohyla, Peter Mogila, who became the metropolitan of Kyiv in 1632 and the founder of the Kyivan Theological Academy. Violently anti-Roman Catholic and -Western, as far as papacy and union was concerned, but totally adopting the Roman Catholic system of theology and of teaching, Scholastic system with even the doctrines. It’s almost as if Orthodoxy at that time became a version of Roman Catholicism theologically without being in union with Rome, in fact being violently opposed to union with Rome.

But this Peter Mogila was from a very prominent Moldavian boyar family, born in 1596. Because of political reasons, his family had to flee to Poland, and this boy was raised there, and he studied in Poland, and then he went to the West and studied in Holland and in Paris. And it was the Paris influence that seems to be the greatest on him, not the Dutch. But in 1625, Mogila became a monk at the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, the Kyivan Caves Monastery in Kyiv; was tonsured a monk in 1627, and then he became the metropolitan of Kyiv in 1632, when he then founded the Kyivan Theological Academy. And this was an attempt on the part in the Church in the Ukraine to come to terms with the history of what was happening.

Now, Peter Mogila wrote many things, and [what would] probably be the most—which had the greatest impact on Orthodoxy was his edition of the Euchologion, the Trebnik, the priest’s prayer book, that was filled with Latin explanations of the sacraments of the Church. Peter accepted completely the seven sacraments, whereas Lukaris only accepted the two. One wonders how Lukaris understood himself as patriarch of Constantinople if that were not a sacrament of the Church: probably just because he was a leader, a leader of the people without much sacramental understanding of that.

But here in Kyiv with Peter Mogila—who was, by the way, canonized a saint in the Ukrainian Church today and is celebrated in Romania, [Ukraine], Poland, not so much in Great Russia at all, who were very suspicious of him and were kind of contrary to his views of things; nevertheless, they completely adopted them, and we’ll see that up until—practically until modern times. The theology in the Russian Orthodox Church, even in the Moscow regions and so on, was greatly impacted by Latin, Roman Catholic, Scholastic methods and even explanations of things that were put in catechism.

Now, this Peter Mogila, he was working to revive Orthodoxy in that part of the world—Kyiv and Wallachia and those areas, especially after the Union of the Orthodox in Brest, the Union of Brest in 1596, the year that he was born. So he’s considered to be a reformer of the Orthodox faith in the Orthodox Church, and actually the shaper of theological education, as I said, practically down to the present day.

The other main document of Peter Mogila was the Orthodox confession of the catholic, apostolic, and Eastern Church. It was published a year before he died, in 1645, and it was affirmed by a council in Romania, in Iași, or in Iassi, and it was also confirmed by the four patriarchs of Orthodoxy under the Turks, namely, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, this Orthodox confession of faith and the catechism in 1642. In 1672, you had the council in Jerusalem, and they basically affirmed the Mogilan teachings and the Mogilan confession as the standard Orthodox catechism. And it was the catechism, as well as the understanding of the rituals of the Church in Orthodoxy after that period became basically almost a repetition of how these things were understood in the Roman Catholic Church. And the intellectual, so to speak, theologically, throughout Russia in the 17th century, will come from this Kyivan system of education.

Now the education was very Scholastic, as I mentioned, in the Western models. Both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism at that time had very Scholastic teachings, system of understanding things. It introduced into the academy in Kyiv, actually instruction was even given in the Latin language, and Latin was a very prominent theological language in the Orthodox seminaries in Slavic lands, including Great Russia, really just through the 19th century we can say that that was the case.

So here you had the understanding of the priesthood given in a basically Roman Catholic way, which would be that the holy orders is one of the seven sacraments of the Church. It was instituted by Jesus himself at the Last Supper, for example, he told the apostles to celebrate the Mystical Supper in his memory. “Take, eat, this is my body. Drink of this, this is my blood.” And at that time—and then the apostles handed down that authority to the bishops who came after them in the apostolic succession. So you had the understanding that somehow holy orders was instituted by Jesus himself in choosing the Twelve and then making them the leaders over the Church, and at the same time giving them the exclusive right over the sacraments, having the authority and the power, and the power also of binding and loosing sins in the sacrament of confession. That was done.

In fact, in the Euchologion, the prayer for absolving people in confession, following that priest’s service book done by Mogila, was simply the Latin prayer. The prayer of absolution was actually a Latin absolutionary prayer, which said that the priest, by the power given unto him, does forgive and absolve the sins of the servant. It was considered again a kind of a power of the keys and a power of absolving that was given to the apostles and, through them, to the bishops that was not had by other members of the Church.

And then the fullness of the priesthood was in the episcopate, and then the bishops were the ones who then had the power, the authority, to ordain the priests and to send the priests to act in their name. And at that time, it became kind of common even to see the bishops understanding themselves as representatives of the—the priests, rather, seeing themselves as a representative of their bishop. I think that historically, up until this point, there was the teaching that when a bishop assigned an auxiliary bishop or a presbyter to head a eucharistic community, his task there sacramentally, so to speak, his ministry, was to be the presence of Christ himself in that particular community, leading it, and not a representative of the bishop as such. But after this point it became very clear that priests, in all the churches that had the priesthood sacrament, were considered to be simply replacing the bishop there who could not be there physically and therefore the bishop’s presence was guaranteed there by the ordained auxiliary bishop or presbyter.

And this teaching, of course, created a very kind of clerical understanding of episcopalian priesthood that remained in the Orthodox Church very powerfully, just down to the present day, where basically the episcopate priesthood was described as having this authority from Jesus Christ through the apostles, through this apostolic succession, and then they had the governance of the Church. So this was how ordinations were understood.

And in these explanations of sacraments, even the system of explaining them by the words that kind of made the sacrament. What made the Eucharist the Eucharist? Well, it was “This is my body; this is my blood,” pronounced by the bishop or his vicar, his representative within the Church. The point being here that a kind of conciliar understanding of Church, which was in the earliest Church and even in through the Byzantine Empire and the earliest periods, was radically changed.

Now we saw, of course, that this was already beginning somehow in Constantinople much earlier, where the patriarch of Constantinople considered himself practically as the only bishop in the Church and everybody else was representing him, and the other patriarchs that were in communion with Orthodoxy were in communion with him, namely, the patriarch of Constantinople. So we saw how this actually lived itself out.

But Peter’s teaching, Mogila, was pretty much adopted throughout the Orthodox Church and certainly in the Orthodox catechisms. Now, Peter’s standard Orthodox catechism was translated into Russian, it was translated into other languages, and then it was ultimately translated into English. And it became a kind of a standard Orthodox catechism, very much like that of Peter Canisius and the Jesuits at that time, where these were the kind of teachings that were understood.

So you had a pretty much kind of a—what Fr. Georges Florovsky and his book, The Ways of Russian Theology, he said you had a total pseudo-morphosis of Orthodox Church life—liturgical life, sacramental life, doctrinal life, teaching. And by “pseudo-morphosis,” he meant that the rites and the rituals of the earliest time remained in the Church. They remained, but they were given this new explanation in a way that made a kind of a big clash between how these sacraments were explained in the catechisms and the ritual that was actually undertaken. And that was the same with baptism; it was the same also with the understanding of the holy Eucharist. For example, Mogila taught clearly transubstantiation of the elements in the most Latin way of understanding it, and his explanation of how the sacraments work in the Divine Liturgy was simply following, as I said already several times, the Roman Catholic pattern.

So we see these kind of two basic streams: a pro-Latin one, a pro-Roman Catholic one, so to speak, where Orthodoxy became practically Roman Catholicism without the pope and without the filioque and without “-asms” or things like that or celibacy of clergy, but when it came to doctrinal teachings and understanding of sacraments, this was very much put on the Orthodox catechisms.

In fact, when I was a teacher at St. Vladimir’s Seminary, a stamp was made as a kind of a joke—actually, I think it was by my friend, Fr. Paul Lazor—called the Mogilan Mark. The Mogilan Mark. And whenever you had these definitions of baptism as “washing away the guilt of the original sin,” which you cannot really justify when you look at the actual ritual of baptism; or defining the seven sacraments in the way that that was done—all this entered into the Orthodox Church and was just simply accepted. It’s almost like Orthodoxy became Roman Catholicism without the pope and without the filioque in the Creed, but other than that it had everything and understood everything in the ways of Scholastic Latin system of theology. And even into Great Russia in the seminaries in the 18th, 19th century, the teaching that they started there was done in Latin; it was done in Latin.

However, there was also from this century a great influence of Protestantism throughout Orthodoxy. And even in Russia, where we will see with Peter the Great, it’s a very interesting thing that in Russia in the next century you will have an explanation of theologies and sacraments and so on in the Latin mode, but then you will have a Church structure patterned after the Dutch Reformed Church that was put in by Peter the Great in a Westernizing way that kind of took over the Church in Great Russia in the northern parts, the Moscow-dominated area.

So this is what we can begin to see here happening in the 17th century, which had tremendous impact on Orthodoxy subsequently, without a doubt. So for today, we will leave that, because I would like to deal with Russia in the 17th century, which was dominated by the problem of the Nikonian reform of the liturgy and the schism in the Russian Church with the Old Believers. And we will discuss that next time. What was going on in Great Russia in the 17th century while these other things were happening in Constantinople and in Kyiv. Let’s leave that for today, and for Ancient Faith Radio, this is Fr. Thomas Hopko.