LUKARIS, CYRIL

LUKARIS, CYRIL, Patriarch of Constantinople (1572–1638). One of the most interesting and tragic figures in the history of the Greek Church since 1453, and on several different occasions Ecumenical Patriarch (q.v.) and Patriarch of Alexandria, Cyril reflects the chaotic and corrupt atmosphere surrounding the higher clergy during the Ottoman Empire (q.v.). A man of singular intellectual abilities and remarkable character, his career followed the usual trajectory of a gifted churchman in the Ottoman era. He was educated in Italy, which at that time meant a temporary conversion to Roman Catholicism (q.v.). He worked teaching and translating in the “Greek school” of the notable “Ostrog Circle,” which was famous for its translation of the Bible into Church Slavic.

Cyril as a young deacon became embittered with the papacy (q.v.) due to his participation at the Council of Brest-Litovsk in 1596, which created the Uniate Church (q.v.) of the then Polish-Lithuanian state. It was also in Poland that he was likely to have first come into serious contact with Calvinist thought, due to the alliance between Orthodox and other religious dissenters in a country whose king, Sigismund III, was deeply impressed by the militancy of the Counter-Reformation. The contact was continued and deepened through the Dutch Embassy at Constantinople, and it culminated in a Confession of Faith published by Patriarch Cyril in Geneva in 1629.

The Confession (here, a statement of religious belief) clearly set forth Calvinist theology, including the denial of free will, the doctrine of predestination, the limiting of the sacraments (q.v.) to two, and a negative view of icons (q.v.). The resulting scandal contributed to intrigues against Cyril and resulted in his murder in 1638. More positively, the Confession drew responses from both Metropolitan Peter Mogila in Kiev in 1640 and from Dositheus (qq.v.), Patriarch of Jerusalem. Mogila’s own Confession was approved, with some editing, at the Synod of Jassy in 1642. Dositheus also wrote his own Confession, refuting Cyril point by point, which was approved by the Synod of Bethlehem in 1672. In early and recent literature on Cyril the question has been repeatedly raised whether he really believed the content of the Confession, since it does not comport with his sermons and other writings. The position has been advanced that he wrote the Confession primarily to muster Western military support against Rome and/or the Turks.