Crisis and reform: The Kievan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the genesis of the Union of Brest

From its establishment, the Kievan ecclesiastical province belonged to the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. In this thesis an examination of the history of the relationship between the Metropolitanate of Kiev and the Patriarchate of Constantinople serves as background for understanding how in the 1590s it became possible for the Ruthenian hierarchy to turn away from Constantinopolitan obedience.;The institutional decline of the Patriarchate of Constantinople under Ottoman rule and organizational crisis in the Kievan Metropolitanate reduced the sixteenth-century relations between the two Churches to a formal minimum. However, in the 1570s and 1580s a movement of spiritual, ecclesiastical, and cultural renewal centered around print shops, the Ostrih circle, and church-related confraternities and schools led Ruthenian activists to rediscover the central role of the Greek legacy in their religious and cultural identity.;Unable to generate revival in their own lands, in the 1580s Eastern patriarchs began supporting reform in the Kievan Church. Greek involvement in Ruthenian affairs culminated in the sojourn of Constantinopolitan Patriarch Jeremiah in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1589. Returning from Moscow, where he had been forced to elevate the metropolitan to patriarchal dignity, Jeremiah conducted a series of reforms which contributed to the revitalization of the Ruthenian Church but also provoked the resentment of Ruthenian bishops.;Western religious upheavals and reforms offered the Ruthenian hierarchy models for renewing their Church. The West proposed the very notion of fundamental change, further legitimized in the Ruthenian context by patriarchal ordinances that countered traditional premises of Orthodox ecclesiastical order. Hoping to foster the revival of the Kievan Church, the patriarch undermined some of its central institutions.;Threatened by Protestant and Catholic movements and internal crisis in their own Church, and disoriented by the conflicting directives from the traditional point of reference, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, Ruthenian bishops did what other Christian leaders had done in the sixteenth century--they opted for change. The decision of the majority of the Ruthenian bishops to reject Constantinopolitan authority through the Union of Brest can be viewed as another example of early modern repudiations of received assumptions.