Or the Ukrainian metropolitan’s European choice
History often strikes us with its contrasts. One of the sharpest is that the first half of the seventeenth century Central Europe saw the terrible Thirty Years’ War (1618- 1648), with the first stage of it being dominated by the conflict of Catholic and Protestant states. This war claimed the lives both on the battlefield and from diseases, of a third of the population of Germany, the main theater of hostilities. The horrible slaughter was launched in the name of the victory of the “true faith.”
Simultaneously in Ukraine the Orthodox hierarchy was headed by a person whose goal was to unite Christians of all denominations and to establish religious, and hence social, peace. This was Metropolitan Petro Mohyla (1596-1647), a leading figure in the religious, spiritual, educational, and, to quite a large degree, political life of Ukraine in the 1630s and 1640s.
On January 14 the Orthodox Church commemorates sanctifier Petro Mohyla, Metropolitan of Kyiv. Unfortunately, he is less known here than his famous Ukrainian contemporary Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Meanwhile, his figure shows rare integrity, the harmonious combination of strong will, the qualities of a real politician (with the indispensable ability to maneuver), and a high idealistic dream: to implement, despite the relentless interfaith enmity between the Catholics, Uniates, and Orthodox, Christ’s immortal message to love your neighbor. This is why we focus on Petro Mohyla rather than on Louis XIV, the Sun King of France, better known in Europe and the US (Time pronounced him Man of the Seventeenth Century).
The future metropolitan’s path was no bed of roses. He was born on December 21, 1596, to Simeon Mohyla, the Hospodar of Moldova and Vojvoda of Walachia, and Hungarian Princess Margaret. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many historians reproached him for aristocratic and non- Ukrainian origins (we will discuss below the not always unbiased attitude, putting it mildly, of historians toward Mohyla). But life taught Petro in his earliest years to count more on himself than on influential relatives. And this ethnic Moldavian (incidentally, Rumanian historiography still considers him “one of theirs”) did for Ukraine more than thousands of self-proclaimed “patriots.”
Hospodar Simeon Mohyla was poisoned in an October 1607 conspiracy, and his 11 year-old son Peter, the family’s third child, was sent to an Orthodox brotherhood school in Lviv: it should be borne in mind that the Mohyla family was out of favor with the new Moldavian hospodar for their pro-Polish stand. We must dwell more in detail on Mohyla’s real or imaginary loyalty to Poland.
His family was really closely tied with the aristocracy of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita): for instance, magnate Jarema Wiszniewiecki was the son of Peter’s cousin Raina Wiszniewiecka. But, as historian Vasylenko rightly noted, “His leanings toward the Polish state did not prevent Petro Mohyla from instilling in himself, since his childhood, love for Orthodoxy” (let us note, incidentally, that the primitive patterns of the seventeenth-century Rzeczpospolita’s social development portrayed in Soviet history courses — on the one hand the Catholic nobility and the Uniate traitors who supported them, and, on the other, the Orthodox Ukrainians, almost entirely the Cossacks — greatly simplify history, which is especially glaring from the example of Mohyla’s life). And although Panteleimon Kulish once called, in a polemic fervor, our hero “a Pole in an Orthodox cassock,” a thorough analysis of the historical facts proves otherwise.
The point is different: both in his teens, when he read ancient languages and theology in Lviv, and later in Europe (most likely in Holland, not in Paris, as was thought until recently), and the more so in his priesthood Mohyla saw that the Orthodox people of the Rzeczpospolita should become familiar with Europe’s cultural heritage and this could only be done through Polish culture. “We must learn so that our Rus’ is not called stupid.” This universal clear formula of the great enlightener is still relevant even three centuries years later. He was not and still is not understood by everybody: learn what, why, and how? But this seems to be the fate of all great spiritual reformers.
What really is truly striking is the pace of his church hierarchic career: he was archimandrite of the Kyiv Pecherska Lavra Monastery of the Caves at thirty and Orthodox Metropolitan of Kyiv from the age of 34 until his death at 50. Petro Mohyla went through a hard school of life: the future head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church took part, arms in hand, in the famous battles between the Polish-Cossack troops and the Turks at Cecor (1620, where Hetman Stanislaw Zolkiewski, Mohyla’s mentor and guardian, died) and Khotyn (1621, where the Ottoman Army, mainly thanks to Hetman Petro Sahaidachny’s Cossacks, was beaten to a pulp). We have very little information about Mohyla life after those events; we know that in about 1625—1626 he took his monastic vows and in August 1627, after the death of Archimandrite Zachariya Kopystentsky of the Kyiv Lavra, he succeeded to the post.
To better understand the complex and contradictory policies of Petro Mohyla as archimandrite and, from 1632, Metropolitan of Kyiv (hence his time-enduring successes in the domain of serving God and promoting Orthodox education and culture), we must take a closer look at the ecclesiastical situation in the Ukraine of the time. The conflict between the Orthodox and the Catholics and still more between the Orthodox and the Uniates (all the three confessions were represented by Ukrainians) tormented the heart and mind of the nation and led, according to Toronto’s York University Professor Orest Subtelny, to a tragic and paradoxical situation: the church hierarchy lost their believers and the believers their hierarchs. Only in 1620, after Patriarch Theophanos of Jerusalem visited Kyiv and ordained Metropolitan Yov (Job) Boretsky (incidentally, a friend and theological mentor of Mohyla’s), did the Ukrainian Orthodox flock at least find its shepherd. But this did not diminish the reciprocal hatred of Christians: the Orthodox accused the Uniates of betraying the faith and killed the Uniate Archbishop Yosyp Kuntsevych in 1622; in turn the Uniates, supported by the king and nobility of Rzeczpospolita, began to convert the Ukrainian Orthodox more actively (very often by force). This only deepened the tragic, and even in many respects fatal to Ukraine’s ecclesiastic history, schism.
Metropolitan Petro Mohyla, a convinced Orthodox but far from a fanatical enemy of Rzeczpospolita, its state and culture (unlike extremist Cossacks and Catholics, who all showed their un-Christian cruelty after his death), saw this very well. Of course, the Western church expansion should be countered, but how? By force of arms? No, the metropolitan replied resolutely. By force of the word, knowledge (not only theological but humanitarian in general), education, culture, and thus by force of the true faith. What is more, Mohyla believed, one can and should use the best examples of the Western (even Jesuit) system of education if this promotes the training of priests truly devoted to the “true” Orthodox faith.
Is there a contradiction here? Does this show the metropolitan’s cynicism? The point is that Mohyla thought that what our priests lacked not so much “enthusiasm in the faith” as true culture, knowledge of languages, patristic writings, and even biblical texts. This is why, when he achieved his old dream at last, uniting the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra school he had founded and the Kyiv Brotherhood School, thus establishing the famous Kyiv-Mohyla College (many years after his death renamed the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy), and he did his utmost to make it Eastern Europe’s finest center of culture. The institution thoroughly taught Latin and Polish (but let us note at once that Mohyla’s contemporaries wrote that church services were performed in Old Church Slavonic, while instructions and “advice” were given in the “Ruthenian,” that is, Ukrainian, language), history, logic, rhetoric, and, naturally, a package of theological subjects in a strictly Orthodox spirit. Finally, there was colossal publishing activity (examples are The Teacher’s Gospel of 1637 in Ukrainian so that “each could better perceive the path of salvation”, and a lengthy opus, The Orthodox Confession of Faith ) also gave Mohyla’s College well-deserved acclaim throughout Europe. It is no accident that Mykhailo Hrushevsky, sharing far from all of Mohyla’s views, wrote, “It is until the last Russification in the late seventeenth century, that the Kyiv Academy, together with Eastern Ukrainian society educated by the latter, lived by the legacy and in the spirit of Mohyla.”
Not always did he receive the just and honest appraisals of his contemporaries and descendants. For example, the Polonized Ukrainian nobleman Yakym Yerlych writes, as an eyewitness, about the “tough character” of Mohyla, who seized monasteries by force and whipped monks into submission; he claims the metropolitan “although living a good and sober life, was not alien to the desires and vanity of this world...” Yet Yerlych also admits that Mohyla was first of all exacting and even cruel to himself, so that he could demand the same from others. (“He lived righteously, good, soberly, excelled in good deeds, and cared for the integrity of the divine church”).
It is this “care for integrity,” which the metropolitan interpreted as the hope for peace with all Christian churches, that has been in the focus of the centuries of debates about Mohyla’s heritage. While it has been admitted now that the great Moldavian-born Ukrainian anticipated the modern ecumenical movement 300 years ago, many Soviet historians recently accused Mohyla of promoting Polish Catholic influence on the Ukrainian people. This is a vivid example of their black-and- white, winner-or-loser, friend-or-foe thinking. But Mohyla did not think that, being an Orthodox faith follower, he necessarily had to hate Catholics or Uniates. For Christ had said that there are neither Greeks nor Jews, as well as to love our enemies.
And although complaints against the metropolitan kept flying to Warsaw and even Moscow (for “treachery of Orthodoxy”), he searched for ways of reconciliation. Yet, as Ivan Krypiakevych noted, he stood for clear and specific conditions in any agreement: it had to be concluded on equal terms; all Ukrainians, Orthodox and Uniate alike, should elect one patriarch subject to no Papal confirmation, and then convene a reconciliatory congress of the Uniates and Orthodox, which would pass binding resolutions. Rome did not accept this, and there were also quite enough fanatics from the Orthodox side: it is no accident that a year after Mohyla died in 1648 Ukraine saw the outbreak of a bloody, cruel and devastating war.
Myroslav Popovych, Corresponding Member of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences and an eminent philosopher, had every reason to state that the death of Petro Mohyla held disastrous consequences for Ukraine’s further history because the metropolitan’s proposed nonviolent alternative of Orthodox defense was never carried out.
A church historian, Bishop Sylvester Hayevsky, wrote of Mohyla, “Not just a Ukrainian patriot but a giant patriot who enriched Ukrainian culture for centuries to come.” This is no exaggeration. But by far the best words about our hero were said by his follower, writer and preacher Lazar Baranovych: “The grave (mohyla in Ukrainian — Ed.) hides Mohyla from us. This pastor has sown a good field here. No one can weep enough for Mohyla: he was our beloved father and pastor.”
