Church union: the quandaries over acceptance of the Union of Brest (1595–96)

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Union of Brest of 1595–96 brought many of the hierarchs, clergy, and faithful of the Orthodox Kyiv Metropolitanate into the Catholic Church. Yet from the first, large segments of the church in the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth rejected the Union. This paper poses the question of why there was resistance to the Union by presenting counterfactual premises of what the chances for the Union would have been 30 years earlier and 30 years later. It suggests that care must be taken in understanding terminology on religious issues within the context of the period and in taking into account varying usages by clergy and laity. It maintains that increasing attention to Catholicism and Orthodoxy as confessions transformed the environment in which attempts to carry out the Union occurred. Before the Khmel′nyts′kyi Uprising of 1648, many of the participants of the discussions on the Union sought to maintain the unity of all Ruthenians through compromise. After the violent uprising, the formation of the Cossack Hetmanate, and the decline of tolerance in the Commonwealth, attempts at union took place in an atmosphere of heightened confessional allegiance and the more forceful intervention of political authorities in religious affairs.