NEARLY three and a half centuries have passed since a prelate of the eastern Christian church, living under the Ottoman Muslims but still wielding considerable power over his co-religionists, penned these sonorous lines in Byzantine Greek:
……That the most holy Eparchy (province) of Kyiv should be subjected to the most holy patriarchal throne of the great and God-saved city of Muscovy, by which we mean that the Metropolitan (archbishop) of Kyiv should be ordained there….Nevertheless, whenever this Metropolitan of Kyiv celebrates the sacred, holy and bloodless sacrifice (of the Eucharist) in this diocese, he should commemorate among the first the venerable name of the Ecumenical Patriarch (of Constantinople) as his source and authority, and as superior to all dioceses and eparchies everywhere…..
As we write here, the eastern Christian world is in shock as a bitter divide opens up between two poles of authority: the Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarchate, which enjoys “primacy of honour” in Orthodoxy, and the Patriarchate of Moscow, which is the largest of the 14 churches that have acknowledged one another as Orthodox. At issue is the former institution’s reassertion of authority over religious affairs in Ukraine, and its plan to bless the establishment of an independent church.
On both sides, church historians are delving deep into dusty archives as well as combing the canon law by which the ancient centres of Christendom (Antioch, Alexandra and Jerusalem, as well as Constantinople and Rome) regulated their relations in the first Christian millennium.
At the heart of the dispute is the letter of 1686 quoted above, in which the Patriarch Dionysius of Constantinople delegates authority over Kiev to the Patriarch of Moscow. As Constantinople sees things, this was a provisional measure which it had the right to reverse, as it formally just did, on October 11th. From the Muscovites’ viewpoint, their spiritual authority over Kiev is so well established by custom as to be irreversible. And this is not the first time the 1686 concession has been argued over. In 1924 the Ecumenical Patriarch blessed the establishment of an independent Polish Orthodox church, using arguments predicated on his continuing responsibility for neighbouring Ukraine. Moscow, of course, rejects those arguments.
In truth, the dispute over what exactly happened in 1686 cannot be separated from differences over what took place over the previous seven centuries.
Everybody agrees that about 1,000 years ago the eastern Slavs took their faith from Constantinople. At that time Kiev was the main centre of political and religious authority. Over subsequent centuries the centre of earthly and religious power among the eastern Slavs shifted eastwards to Moscow. From the mid-15th century there was a period when two different prelates (one based in Moscow, other further west) claimed the title of Metropolitan of Kiev. There were phases when the “western” Metropolitan lapsed (from the Orthodox viewpoint) into Catholicism.
But on certain points, the historical advisers of the Patriarch of Constantinople are adamant. In 1589, when the see of Moscow was elevated (by Constantinople) to the status of Patriarchate, its authority did not include Kiev. And throughout the early 17th century, patriarchs based in Istanbul acted vigorously to shore up a Ukrainian Orthodox authority in Kiev, resisting Papist pressure from the west and Muscovite pressure from the east. The struggle to maintain an independent Ukrainian Orthodox church continued after 1654, when Ukraine was politically yoked to Moscow. In 1685, a Kiev prelate agreed under massive pressure to be installed by Moscow, in defiance of Constantinople’s authority. The following year, Constantinople reluctantly (and provisionally, it insists) accepted that reality.
From the Moscow Patriarchate’s point of view, the 1686 letter marked the longed-for reunification of two entities (broadly, Moscow and Kiev) that naturally belonged together. It “put an end to the 200-year period of forced division in the centuries-old history of the Russian church which, despite the changing political circumstances, invariably recognised itself as a single entity.”
Constantinople (and its Ukrainian friends) remember things differently. As a document published by the Ecumenical Patriarchate puts it, there was pressure from 1654 onwards to merge the spiritual authorities of Kiev and Moscow, but “the metropolitans, bishops, clergy, nobility and all the people of Ukraine intensely rejected this integration…”
As any diplomatic historian will attest, one of the ways to probe the meaning of a disputed text is to see how it was interpreted by third parties at the time. In the case of the 1686 act, one of the best-placed observers was the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Dositheos, who took part in the preceding negotiations.
Dositheos carefully described the 1686 deal as an agreement that the see of Kiev “should be an eparchy of the Patriarch of Constantinople, in trust administered by the most holy Patriarch of Moscow…” The concession, he noted, had been made “due to the prevailing tyranny, until the day comes for divine reckoning.”