The Icon and the Axe

Sigismund helped further the sense of identification between non-Uniat Orthodox jmd Protestants by lumping them together as "heretical," and thus denyingjhejOrtho^oxjfte somewhat preferred status of "schismatic",, traditionally accorded in Roman Catholic teaching. Protestants and Orthodox began the search for a measure of common action against Sigismund's poUcie^at_ajneeting of leaders from both communities in Lithuania in the summer of I595.106 During the decade preceding this meeting, the Orthodox had formed at least fourteen brotherhood organizations and a large number of schools and printing shops.107 During the years that followed, Protestant communities were often forced into the protective embrace of the more established Orthodox communities as Sigismund's persecution of religious dissenters increased. At the same time, the Orthodox opponents of Catholicism adopted many of the apocalyptically anti-Catholic ideas of Protestant polemic writings and absorbed into their schools harassed but well-educated Polish Protestants as well as Slavic defectors from Jesuit academies. "

The brotherhood schools and presses of White Russia were the first broad media of instruction to appear among the Orthodox Eastern Slavs. The first two brotherhood presses-those of Vilnius and Lwow-made particularly great contributions to enlightenment. The former published the

first two Church Slavonic grammars (in 1596 and 1619), and the latter published more than thirty-three thousand copies of basic alphabet books {bukvar') between 1585 and 1722.los The school at Ostrog taught Latin as well as Greek, and sponsored the printing in 1576-80 of the first complete Slavonic bible.109 The brotherhood schools continued to multiply in the early seventeenth century, and spread to the east and south as the Orthodox communities in those regions sought to combat the spread of Catholic influence. The Kiev brotherhood played a particularly important role, setting up (while still under Polish control inj632) the first Orthodox institution of higher education ever to appear among the Eastern Slavs: the Kiev Academy.

Two leading Orthodox personalities of the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century illustrate the Protestant influence on the beleaguered Russian Orthodox community during this period. Stephan Zizanius, the White Russian author of the first Slavonic grammar in 1596, followed the Lutheran practice of inserting catechistic homilies and anti-Catholic comments into his instructional material. His Book of Cyril, a gloomy, anti-Uniat compilation of prophetic texts, incorporated many of the polemic arguments used against the Roman Church by Protestant propagandists. Just as the Kiev Academy became the model for the monastic schools and academies that began to appear in Muscovy in the late seventeenth century, so Zizanius' arguments that the reign of Antichrist was at hand became the basis for the xenophobic and apocalyptical writings of the seventeenth-century Muscovite Church.110

Even more deeply influenced by Protestantism was Cyril Lukaris, the early-seventeenth-century Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, who had served as a parish priest and teacher in the brotherhood schools of Vilnius and Lwow during the 1590's. Deeply influenced by their anti-Catholicism, he was one of the two representatives of the Orthodox hierarchy to vote against the final acceptance of the union at Brest in 1596. In the course of his subsequent career, Lukaris became a close friend of various Anglicans as well as Polish and Hungarian Calvinists, and became doctrinally a virtual Calvinist. After his elevation to the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1620, he "attached himself to the Protestant powers,"111 and was called by the Hapsburg ambassador to the Porte "the archfiend of the Catholic Church."112 Through his close links with Patriarch Philaret, Lukaris was instrumental in bringing Russia into the anti-Hapsburg coalition in the second half of jheJTJrirly Years' War.

A final link between the Orthodox and Protestant worlds that was forged by a common Slavic and anti-Catholic association may be found in the great seventeenth-century Czech writer and educator, Jan Comenius.

Though distressed at the low educational level of the Eastern Slavs, Comenius wrote, after the destruction of the Czech Protestant community in 1620, that Muscovy offered the only hope of defeating the Catholic cause in Europe.113 Subsequently, as an emigre among the Protestant communities of Poland, Comenius became interested in the Orthodox brotherhoods and was probably influenced by their curricula and pedagogical theories while drawing up his own famous theories of education and public enlightenment.114

Hardly less important than the influx of Protestant influences by way of the anti-Uniat movement in western and southern Russia was the direct // impact of Sweden, the powerful Protestant rival and northern neighbor of ^pMuscovy.