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History of the Church of Russia

A. N. Mouravieff, tr. Blackmore, 1842

9. Joasaph I., Fourth Patriarch, A.D. 1631

Joasaph archbishop of Pskoff, was chosen and made patriarch in his room by the council of his own bishops; letters of notification were sent to all the other patriarchs, and their recognition received in return, for greater security; but the meek Joasaph could not supply the place of such a statesman as Philaret to the Church or to the country, any more than he could that of the father, whom he had lost, to Michael. By the will however of a gracious Providence it was ordained when this royal luminary set in the North, another, equally brilliant, should rise to shine in the South, the cradle of our orthodox religion.

Peter Mogila, son of the hospodar of Moldavia, having received his education in the celebrated University of Paris¹, and having distinguished himself as a soldier in the Polish armies against the infidels, renounced worldly greatness, and received the tonsure in the Pechersky monastery, under its learned Archimandrite Zacharias Kopistensky, to whom he afterwards succeeded. The first act of Peter Mogila was to establish a school in the Lavra, from whence he sent forth some chosen students into foreign countries, to complete their education; among these were the future Metropolitan Silvester Kossoff, and the learned Innocentius Gizel. The patriarch of Constantinople, Cyrill Lucar, having personal acquaintance with the merit of the archimandrite, appointed him exarch of his See; and he fully justified this choice; for he shewed himself a powerful defender of Orthodoxy in the diet of Warsaw, at the time of Vladislaff’s accession to the throne, and obtained from the new king the restoration of many convents, churches, and properties, which had been taken away from the Orthodox, together with freedom to establish seminaries and schools and printing presses, the re-establishment of the dioceses of Lvoff, Loutsk, and Peremuishla, and the formation of a new one in Mogileff, which was the only one that remained and flourished eventually, when all the other Orthodox sees had been one after another extinguished. Notwithstanding all the intrigues of the Uniates, royal letters were granted proclaiming entire freedom for the profession of the orthodox faith, and the practice of its rites. The king left to the Russian and Lithuanian nobility the right of electing their own metropolitan, subject to the confirmation of the patriarch of Constantinople: he restored to the metropolitans of Kieff the church of St. Sophia, which had been originally their cathedral; and, lastly, gave command to put a stop to all disputes about religion, and annulled the constitutions of the former diets. But these privileges were soon violated, partly during Vladislaff’s own reign, but still more so during that of his brother and successor, John Casimir, who quitted the purple of the Roman cardinalate to be invested with that of royalty.

In the mean time Job the metropolitan of Kieff died, and although Isaiah, archbishop of Smolensk, had already been designated as his successor, the Orthodox who had been present at the diet, in consideration of the services rendered by the archimandrite of the Pechersky, elected him as metropolitan, and sent to procure his confirmation to Cyrill, the patriarch of Constantinople. The ceremony of his consecration by the synod was performed in the town of Lvoff, and to the general delight of the people, Peter once more took possession of the ancient metropolitan residence of St. Sophia, retaining at the same time the office of archimandrite in the Lavra. Having restored his own cathedral church, which had been suffered to fall into ruins by the Uniates, he next turned his attention to the sacred ruins of the original Church of the Tythes of St. Vladimir, and restored one of its chapels; he found under the arches of the church, the uncorrupted head of its founder, the illuminator of Russia, and translated it to the Pecherskay Lavra, as a head and foundation to the whole Russian Church.

Peter being zealous for the promotion of learning among the clergy, united the school which he had established in the Lavra, with that of the Brotherhood in Podolia, which had been begun with the blessing of the patriarch of Jerusalem: he erected new buildings, an Inn for poor scholars, at his own expense, and a preparatory school: he established a library and a printing press; and obtained from the king the title of Spiritual Academy for the school of the Brotherhood; he took upon himself the title of Senior Brother and Patron, and immortalized his memory in the Academy, which was commonly called the Kievo-Mogilian long after his death.

Taking advantage of the short breathing-time which the orthodox religion enjoyed during the reign of Vladislaff, Peter Mogila was constantly sending forth from his printing press different works of the Holy Fathers, and books of the services of the Church, to counteract the influence of those published by the Uniates; and his larger Trebnik, or Office book, became the model for the performance of the Orthodox service. But the most important act of the metropolitan for the confirmation of his distracted flock, was the publication of the Orthodox Confession of Faith, which was written partly by himself and partly by the Archimandrite Isaiah Trophimovich, under his direction². A council of bishops was convoked in Kieff for the revision of this Catechism, which had become indispensably necessary from the agitation of men’s minds and from the subtle discourses and treatises of the jesuits, and which after being carefully corrected, and translated into modern Greek, was sent to Parthenius, patriarch of Constantinople. The appearance of such a book produced a strong impression in the East, into which the Calvinistic heresy had then penetrated. Crafty teachers of false doctrine, under the name of Cyrill Lucar, patriarch of Constantinople, had sown tares entirely contrary to the doctrines of the Orthodox Church, and giving them out as her true and authentic Confession, had caused great scandal to the unlearned. Cyrill, although he had condemned the new doctrine of Calvin, nevertheless had not stood up decidedly and openly to oppose it³, and for his neglect he was himself delivered over to an anathema by his successor, Cyrill of Berœa⁴; but the agitation still continued. By the exertions of John, hospodar of Moldavia⁵, a synod was convoked at Jassy, which once more condemned the false doctrines of Calvinism. The Metropolitan Peter Mogila, with four Russian bishops, confirmed by their subscriptions the acts of this synod. By command of Parthenius patriarch of Constantinople, his exarch, Meletius Striga, revised and finally corrected in the synod of Jassy the Orthodox Confession. From thence this book was sent for the confirmation of the Eastern patriarchs, and was returned with their letters of approval to Kieff, after the death of the great prelate Peter Mogila, who after all his labours and services rested in peace in the Lavra, and has ever since been justly esteemed one of the most shining characters in our ecclesiastical history.

The period of his episcopate, which lasted as long as did the reign of Vladislaff, although favourable to Little Russia as far as regarded the improvement of clerical learning, was yet one in which her sufferings in a civil point of view increased to the last degree. The Polish government, in spite of the benevolent views of their king, oppressed in all possible ways the unfortunate Ukraine, in order to subjugate the Cossacks of the Horde beyond the Falls, who alone, from the inaccessible islands of the Dnieper, raised a free arm to strike in defence of their fellow countrymen and brethren in the faith. Their hetmans, one after the other, rose up against the cruel voivodes, and contended with their best commanders with varying success; at one time they spread terror over the Polish provinces, destroying on all sides the Kostels⁶, for the first object of their enmity was the Roman clergy; at others, they fell themselves into the hands of the inexorable Polish leaders, and terminated their lives by the most fearful tortures. But the fate of Pavliouk, Ostranitsa, and other brave Atamans, did not terrify their valiant successors, because the same acts of injustice were continually recurring, and excited the general feeling beyond the bounds of endurance, until at length there appeared in the Ukraine a great man, who determined finally to throw off the Polish yoke, and make Little Russia subject to Russia, which professed the same religion as herself: this was the Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky. This liberation was effected during the illustrious episcopate of Silvester Kossoff, the pupil of Peter Mogila, who was elected from being bishop of Mogileff to the metropolitan see of Kieff; but by this time there had been a great change also in the political situation of the Russian empire; she had gained strength both within and without, and the helm of the state was held by different hands.

The Tsar Michael Theodorovich, ruling as he did over vast countries which had scarcely settled down into tranquillity after so long a storm, and straitened by Poland and Sweden, was unable to profit by the first proposal of Job the metropolitan of Kieff, that he should take under his high protection the whole of the Ukraine. He could do no more than dismiss with presents and flattering hopes the envoy who had been sent to him by Joseph bishop of Loutsk; but these hopes were realized in the time of his more powerful son the Tsar Alexis. Fearing a rupture with Turkey and the Crimea, which were ready to take up arms at the bidding of Poland, Michael could not even retain Azoph, which the Cossacks of the Don, who had gotten possession of that fortress, desired to hold in his name. The Council of the Provinces advised the Tsar to give up, for his own time at least, this valuable conquest; and he turned his attention rather to the means of strengthening against the incursions of the Tartars the frontiers of the Ukraine, and the capital itself, where the memory of the Polish invasion was still fresh. The illustrious liberator of his country, the Prince Pojarsky, who had continued, during all the reign of Michael, to conduct his armies, or to govern important provinces, died in the same year with the Muscovite Pontiff Joasaph, who left behind him a reputation for meekness, though he was not remarkable for any great abilities as a statesman.

Notes

In the Dictionary of the Russian Saints, (St. Petersburg 1836,) under the head of Vladimir, it is related that in 1636 Peter Mogila discovered under the ruins of the Church of the Tithes, which had been destroyed by Batius, two marble coffins, containing, according to the inscriptions found on them, the bones of Vladimir and the Greek Princess Anna. He took the head of Vladimir out of his coffin, leaving the other bones and those of the princess untouched, and disposed of it as our author relates, and closed up the tomb.
The Orthodox Confession came however, in its present shape, from the hands of Meletius Syriga, and so received the approbation of the four patriarchs. Dositheus followed it in some important points in the synod of Jerusalem in 1672. This Catechism is upon the list of books to be procured at the synodal press; and a new edition of it was published at Moscow in the year 1839. It passed without any formal or minute examination into the Church of Great Russia, but is acknowledged not to be free, any more than the eighteen articles of the Synod of Jerusalem, from a tinge of Latin scholasticism.
The Confession of Cyrill Lucar, in 18 articles, was first published by the Dutch ambassador, Cornelius Von der Haga, at the Hague, in 1629, and was reprinted afterwards with notes and additions, (Aymon says, by direction of Cyrill himself) at Geneva. The same writer also asserts that he avowed himself the author of it in presence of the French ambassador of Constantinople, who had invited him to his hotel in the hopes of inducing him to disown it.
Cyrill Lucar was put to death by the Turks in 1628, and his successor, Cyrill of Berœa, assembled a synod at Constantinople in the same year, which anathematized him as a heretic, and seemed to make no doubt of the Confession being really his. Cyrill of Berœa himself was afterwards deposed and anathematized; and among the charges on which he was deposed, besides extortion and embezzlement of the money of the Church, there was also one of having taken part in procuring the death of Cyrill Lucar, by preferring a false accusation against him to the Turks. The patriarch of Antioch, Macarius, then on his way to Wallachia, Moldavia, and Muscovy, joined in anathematizing Cyrill of Berœa.
The synod of Jassy, held under Parthenius patriarch of Constantinople, spoke of the 18 articles of the Confession which it condemned, and the author of which, with all holding similar opinions, it anathematized, only as attributed to Cyrill Lucar. In this synod the Orthodox Confession drawn up under the direction of Peter Mogila, in Little Russia, and revised and altered by Meletius Syriga at Constantinople, was examined and approved. This was afterwards referred to, and followed in some respects, by the synod held under Dositheus patriarch of Jerusalem in 1672, which condemned for the last time the Confession of Cyrill Lucar, and put forth a contrary Confession, also in 18 articles, of its own; while it stated at length reasons of considerable weight for supposing that the Confession condemned had not really been written by Cyrill Lucar at all, but was a forgery passed off under his name by the Calvinists.
“Kostels,” i. e. Latin Churches, from whence the title “Castellans” for their priests.