The monograph is dedicated to the intellectual biography of the Ecumenical Patriarch Cyril Lucaris (1572 – 1638). The book focuses on two underexplored aspects: the identities of the Ecumenical Patriarch and the unionist church projects in which he was either a witness or an active participant. Cyril Lucaris was a subject of the Venetian Republic. His formative years coincided with his studies in the intellectual center of the Republic, the University of Padua. Consequently, Lucaris’s spiritual development and his subsequent activities were closely tied to the international European milieu shaped by the university’s alumni. The educational platform of this Catholic university — marked by tolerance toward representatives of other confessions (Orthodox and Protestant) and the exclusion of Jesuits from teaching — created the initial model for the future Patriarch’s ecumenical views and his “anti-Jesuit program”. The Venetian republican ideal became the foundation of his religious and political identities. This meant that the essence of Cyril Lucaris’s “political theology” included ideas deemed “heretical” for an Orthodox hierarch: a vision of the Christian Church as an ideal republic and a version of Calvinist belief as a symbol of faith. Furthermore, in his geopolitical “unionist” projects and relocations, the Patriarch was oriented toward the “republican international” — an imagined community within the so-called “Pax Venetiorum,” encompassing the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the United Provinces (Netherlands), and the British Commonwealth. Within this “Venetian” geopolitical space, Cyril Lucaris sought to integrate the Zaporozhian Host as a “maritime republic”. Finally, as a “republican Patriarch,” Cyril Lucaris entered history as the Orthodox hierarch most frequently elected to this ecclesiastical “office”, participating in numerous elections — losing and regaining his status multiple times.
Vashchenko V., Werner V. Cyril Lucaris and the “Orbis Venetorum”: projects of Orthodox-Protestant unions late 16th – early 17th centuries.
