Four Hundred Years: Union of Brest (1596-1996). A Critical Re-evaluation ed. by Bert Groen and Wil van den Bercken

Abstract

Four Hundred Years.' Union of Brest (1596-1996). A Critical Re-evaluation. Edited by Bert Groen and Wil van den Bercken. [Eastern Christian Studies, Volume 1.] (Leuven: Peeters. 1998. Pp. x, 269. BEF 1850 paperback.) This volume, containing nearly all the papers presented at an international congress held at Hernen Castle in the Netherlands in March, 1996, is the first in a series inaugurated by the Institute of Eastern Christian Studies at Nijmegen. The symposium marked the four hundredth anniversary of the Union of Brest, by which the Orthodox Metropolitanate of Kiev, whose Ruthenian jurisdiction roughly encompassed today's Belarus and Ukraine, joined with the Roman Church. Evidently, the two sides had different ecclesiological conceptions and expectations, and the resulting conflict between Orthodox and Uniates (today's Greek-Catholics) continues. Half of the dozen articles in this volume, constituting approximately twothirds of the material, are historical. Sophia Senyk's sensitive, balanced evaluation of the Union makes several often overlooked points, such as the fact that Rome never could (or did) formally approve the much-cited Articles of Union, since it viewed them as purported conditions precedent and therefore unacceptable. She also contends that, contrary to a widespread view, Brest was not a union of Churches, but merely a union of individuals with the Roman Church. In an elegantly written essay, Borys Gudziak details the various synods and documents leading up to the union of 1595-1596, carefully exploring the different views and motives of the Roman, Greek, and Ruthenian hierarchs. Francis J. Thomson's erudite and meticulously documented study of Meletius Smotritsky untangles the skeins of the life and works of this seventeenth-century Ruthenian churchman and polemicist. He shows how the struggles to reunite the Kievan metropolitanate in the turbulent wake of the Brest Union foundered, in no small part due to Ottoman pressure and the ruinous role of the Cossacks. Cultural context is provided by William R. Veder's concise philological comment on the Catholic and Slavic Orthodox intellectual traditions as seen in the polemics between Lev Krevza and Zacharija Kopystens'kyj, and by Arno Langeler's essay on Starec Aartemij, a sixteenth-century Muscovite defender of Orthodoxy. Springing forward three centuries, Alexey Yudin outlines the history of the Russian pro-Union movement in the first decades of the twentieth century initiated by Metropolitan Andrei (Sheptyts'kyi). …