www.byzcath.org Forums News & Events Church News An American Ukrainian in Paris

Elaine Pagels published one.

Your point?

(ad hominem. Ah, I see).

I take it you've been to Harvard?

No, but the wife has. ABD in Russian to go with her MS in Slavic Linguistics from Georgetown University SLL.

When Jeremiah crossed the border between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Muscovy [sic], he entered into a state that in many respects was radically different from the one he had just left. One important contrast concerned the relationship between the ecclesiastical and secular realms. A Church-state separation had never developed in Muscovy [sic]as it has in Western Christiandom. At a time when religious questions were revolutionizing societies and policies in Europe, Muscovite [sic] ecclesiastical developments were for the most part guided by the authority of the tsar and his boyars. The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century ascendancy of Moscow was crowned by the assumption of the imperial title tstar', the Slavic form of caesar) by Grand Prince Ivan IV in 1547. According to the Byzantine [sic] imperial model emulated by Muscovy [sic], the Church was intimately tied and placed under the stewardship of the ruler. as in Byzantium [sic], so too in Muscovy [sic], the Church played a central role in imperial image-building, thereby enhancing the ruler's supremacy even in ecclesiastical matters. Following Byzantine [sic] tradition, the Church anointed the new tsar and the metropolitan expressed the imperial ideas that made the tsar the protector of Orthodoxy. Thus through the words of the metropolitan, the Church itself entrusted its fate to the political authority.

...As for the 16th century, it was the period of Cuius regio eius religio: "Whose realm, his religion"; i.e., the country takes on the faith of its ruler. In this case, the King of Poland was Roman Catholic, so the legal precedent would be the suppression of any other faith within his borders, or the subjugation of dissident faiths by law. This was, in fact, the case of the Orthodox who found themselves inside the ever-shifting borders of the Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania. The Orthodox Church had no legal standing; it was subject to heavy taxation; its priests did not enjoy the same legal rights and protections as Catholic priests; and, ultimately, the Orthodox Church existed in Poland only by the sufferance of the Polish throne.

So, the objective of the Kyivan bishops who negotiated the Treaty was to bring their Church under the protecting umbrella of Polish law. Similar protection under the King of Hungary was sought fifty years later by a group of Carpatho-Rusyn Orthodox presbyters through Union of Uzhorod, and, in 1701, by some Romanian Orthodox presbyters through the Union of Alba Julia. All wanted the same thing--the kind of legal status and protection that could only be claimed in Catholic countries by the Catholic Church.

And what is your problem? Both quotes are absolutely correct.

If there is a contradiction, I don't see it. And if there is an error in either, I don't see it, either. Gudziak writes of the situation in the Russian state, where the Tsar was seen as both head of state, and God's vice-gerent on earth, though, under Ivan IV, it quickly went beyond anything seen in Byzantium, with the State actually subordinating the Church, a process that came to completion under Piotr Veliky, who abolished the Patriarchate and made the Church into a branch of the Russian civil service. Within the Tsar's realm, the Tsar's views on religion prevailed.

I wrote of the general situation pertaining throughout Europe, where, though in theory the Church and the State were separate entities (in some places more separate than others), in practice the religion of the ruler could be imposed on all the people. That was the basis of the wars of religion, and the formula of settlement made explicit in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). If your king was Catholic, YOU were Catholic; if your king was Protestant, YOU were Protestant. And, if your king was Orthodox, YOU were Orthodox. And pluralism in religion was either the result of active dissent or of a protected status negotiated between a religious minority and the throne.