As it was in the Beginning: The Writing of Imagined Histories of Continuity and the Reshaping of Ruthenian Eastern Christian Communities, 1544-1772.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the Catholicization of the Orthodox Ruthenian peoples, or Eastern Slavs of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The Commonwealth was arguably the most pluralistic and religiously tolerant European state into the latter half of the sixteenth century. This dissertation begins as that tolerance waned in the years following the Council of Trent (1563). Buttressed by the royal support of the Catholic Polish Crown, the missionaries of the post-Tridentine Catholic Church launched an evangelizing campaign into the Commonwealth’s eastern borderlands. While Protestant minorities either converted to Catholicism or faced political marginalization, the Orthodox Ruthenian hierarchs negotiated a confessional union with Rome in 1596. Under the terms of the Union of Brest, Roman Catholic theology and Ruthenian Eastern Christian traditions, such as married clergy and communion in both species, were merged into a new ecclesiastical entity: the Ruthenian Greek-rite (Uniate) Catholic Church. I argue that imagined histories asserting a continuous Ruthenian past with papal Rome underpinned the Orthodox acceptance of confessional union and legitimated the ensuing project of Greek-rite Catholic confessionalization of their flocks. I track the invented continuities legitimating this confessional project through the bishoprics of Przemyśl and L’viv locating its contours in the reorganization of the Ruthenian clerical corps, visual culture, liturgies, devotions and practices of affective spirituality. Using manuscript and archival materials surfacing since the fall of Communism in Old Church Slavonic, Ruthenian, Polish, Italian, Latin and Ukrainian, this study finds that the imagined constructions of the past became foundational to the emergence of Ruthenian Greek-rite Catholicism and Ruthenian Greek-rite Catholic communities of faith.