Orthodox Reform in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

Abstract

Are you, the Ruthenian, not suffering from infantile reasoning, you who used to be a pious Christian…but having lived with the Poles you became childlike and divided, abandoned Christ and split into the Papist, the Evangelical, the Anabaptist, and the observer of the Sabbath?"1 Thus the monk Ivan Vishenskii (c. 1550-1620), a self-appointed guardian of his nation's ancestral faith, chided his Orthodox compatriots and fellow-believers, writing from the spiritual heights of Mount Athos. Contrary to the prevalent opinion in contemporary historiography that the Eastern Orthodox Church remained unaffected by the spread of Protestantism,2 Vishenskii's diatribe highlights both the fears of Orthodox religious activists and the realities of the confessional situation in Poland-Lithuania at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. To the historian of religious change in Europe in its evangelical forms, such as the German, Swiss, or English Reformations, the truth of the statement that "the Orthodox churches have not experienced a Reformation" seems incontrovertible.3 Indeed, in no area of Europe, where the population was exclusively or predominantly Eastern Orthodox in the early modern period, did Protestantism become a religion of the elites or of the masses. This was not always for lack of trying on the part of secular rulers who at times adopted new religious teaching and wished to impose it on their subjects.4 Yet those scholars whose expertise extends to Catholic revival in the 16th and 17th centuries