(Cambridge Concise Histories) Jerzy Lukowski, Hubert Zawadzki - A Concise History of Poland-Cambridge University Press (2006)

Integration had mixed success in the Ukraine. Pride in the traditions of Kievan Rus’ could not always accommodate itself within the framework of the Rzeczpospolita. If rhe native nobility of these sparsely populated marches wished to get on, polonization and the adoption of ‘Latin’ faiths, Catholicism above all, offered the means. The great, practical, intellectual difficulty for those who wished to stay true to the Orthodox religion lay in its lack of any dynamic cultural centre on the lines of Catholic Rome or Calvinist Geneva. The Moscow patriarchate was adamantly opposed to any form of intellectual enquiry; the ‘modernizing’ reforms of the patriarch Nikon in the 1650s created a huge schism within the Church which persisted at least until the October Revolution. In the towns and monastic schools of the Polish Ukraine, it is true that a broader-based intellectual revival took off in response to increasing pressures from reformed Catholicism and Protestantism, but it did so just as the Orthodox social elite were going over to the Roman faith. Prince Konstanty Ostrogski founded an Orthodox academy in his town of Ostrih/Ostrog in 1576, reacting to the establishment, two years previously, of the first Jesuit college in the Ukraine at Jarosiaw. Giving the lie to the charges of Poland’s most celebrated Jesuit preacher, Piotr Skarga, of Orthodox ignorance and backwardness, the Academy taught a humanist, liberal arts curriculum, with instruction in Old Church Slavonic, Latin and Greek. In 1581, it brought out the first scholarly edition of the Orthodox Bible. While it existed, it was a magnet for townsmen, nobles and Cossacks who were nor ready to lose their cultural identity to the forces of latinity. Its weakness, reflecting the weaknesses of non-Catholic faiths in general in the Polish-Lithuanian state, was its total dependence on a great patron. Ostrogski, a grand aristocrat with a reputation for indolence, took no steps to secure its future through a royal charter or formal Sejm approval. By 1600, he had largely lost interest in his own creation. He had no son, and all his three daughters were married to Roman Catholics. After his death, his Catholic heirs shut the Academy down in 1608. It had been the one Orthodox establishment which could begin to compete with Jesuit colleges and Protestant gymnasia. No Orthodox nobles of comparable stature remained to take up the torch.

The decision, in 1 596, by a majority of the Orthodox bishops at Brest, in Lithuania, to unite with Rome was prompted by more than Catholic pressure or fear of the increasingly hostile patriarchate of Constantinople or the new patriarchate of Moscow. To some, at least, of the ‘Uniate’ bishops, the only means of restoring spirituality and intellectual credibility to the Orthodox religious tradition, even, indeed, of the preservation of a distinct cultural identity, lay in borrowing from the Latin West. The Uniates kept their own liturgy and even their married parish clergy - but an obdurate Latin episcopate prevented their bishops from taking up the senatorial seats promised them. Orthodox clergy aspiring to higher education found that, of necessity, they were obliged to attend Catholic colleges, even that of St Athanasius in Rome, pretending to be Uniates, before reverting to their original faith.

Even the initially ardent defender of Orthodoxy, Meletii Smotritskii, came to throw in the towel and embrace Uniate Catholicism in 1627. This trahison des clercs among many of their spiritual leaders was not matched among townsmen and petty nobles for whom Orthodoxy represented a vital link with the glories of their Kievan Rus’ ethnic. This might have been less significant, had not the Commonwealth’s Rusini accounted for almost half its population; the many lesser nobles among them resented their de facto subordinate position on the szlachta spectrum. Among them and among the rank-and-file clergy the Union provoked enormous hostility. In 1620, the patriarch of Jerusalem, returning from a visit to Moscow, surreptitiously consecrated a number of Orthodox bishops. Sigismund III tactfully turned a blind eye and in 1632, Wladyslaw IV officially acknowledged their reinstatement. Yet the mere presence of the Uniate church with its often heavy-handed proselytizing kept religious frictions in the expansive eastern marches on the boil.