Meletij Smotryc'kyj.

In 1627 Meletij Smotryc'kyj wrote a letter from Ukraine, in the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania, addressed to Pope Urban VIII in Rome in the flattering language of an accomplished ecclesiastical courtier. "That light of the sun, which illumines this entire mass of the earth with its rays," wrote Smotryc'kyj "seems in these most lamentable times to be Your Holiness' fortunate pontificate of the Church of God, and all the more brilliant the more it is obscured by the clouds of so many heresies and schisms." (p. 119) In fact, Smotryc'kyj himself, the central subject of David Frick's very valuable study of early modern Ukrainian religious history and literary culture, was on the point of consummating with this letter his conversion from schismatic Orthodoxy to the Uniate Catholic Church; the latter was established in the Commonwealth by the Union of Brest in 1596, permitting the Ruthenian (or Ukrainian) populations to preserve the Orthodox Slavonic liturgy while recognizing the ecclesiastical authority of the Pope in Rome. In the 1620s the Commonwealth was still bedeviled (from the anti-diabolical perspective of the Catholic Counter-Reformation) by a fascinating diversity of schisms and heresies, ranging from Orthodoxy, through all the variably radical degrees of Protestantism, and including the great majority of the world's Jews. In Rome, however, the religious climate was distinctly less cloudy. The papacy of Urban VIII was a peak moment for the Counter-Reformation, and Smotryc'kyj's conversion could be considered among the several scalps that were being actively pursued worldwide by the recently created Congregation of the Propaganda Fide. In 1626 Urban celebrated the consecration of new St. Peter's Basilica after more than a century of construction, and Bernini was already at work on the towering baldacchino, eventually adorned with the Barberini bees. In 1627 the Pope commissioned (well in advance) his own triumphant tomb, to be made by Bernini for St. Peter's. Urban, who did so much to celebrate himself in Rome, on behalf of the Church of course, was surely well-disposed to receive gracious tributes from far afield, like Smotryc'kyj's letter from Ukraine. In 1627, still five years before Galileo published his dangerous Copernican Dialogue, the Pope could read about himself compared to the sun, without worrying about any astronomical considerations to complicate the courtly solar imagery.

"Behold," continued Smotryc'kyj, writing to the Pope, "situated in the most remote appendage of the sinful world, born in the schism as out of necessity, having wallowed in it for fifty years out of ignorance, extracted from the pit of miseries by the rays of Your Holiness' benefices and compassion toward the Ruthenian Church, I am moved, my feet and hands bound, to throw myself in tears at the knees of Your Holiness and to kiss Your feet most humbly." (p. 119) Here, as courtliness gave way to the emotional extravagance of religious prostration, Smotryc'kyj located himself, both geographically and culturally, a resident of Ukraine, "the most remote appendage of the sinful world," and a member of the Ruthenian Church, which was Orthodox for some and Uniate for others. In the baroque injunction - "Behold!" - he himself seemed to focus the Pope's solar rays and ecclesiastical attention on himself, his land, and his church. If Urban was to behold him prostrate, then it would have to be a long look across the map of Europe to discover him situated in context; for Smotryc'kyj did not go to Rome after his conversion to Catholicism, and could only kiss the papal feet at a considerable distance. Frick's book, in studying Smotryc'kyj, analogously focuses our historical attention on lands and populations that have been rather remote from the main concerns of early modern religious historiography. In this regard he too has (humbly) staked a claim upon ongoing scholarship, reminding us of how limited and incomplete our religious history of early modern Europe is when it focuses on France, for instance, or Germany perhaps, and presumes to pronounce upon the religious complexity of Europe.

In the Commonwealth the struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism became a three-cornered competition that included Orthodoxy as well. Frick characterizes Smotryc'kyj as a churchman who "felt most at home in a world, that comprised more than two camps," who sought to evade stark binary oppositions of religion, and to seek instead for bridges, compromises, and convergences. (p. 256) The Uniate Church was, in fact, a compromise designed to accommodate the culturally plural societies of the Commonwealth, but for Smotryc'kyj it was not compromise enough. Frick sees his ultimate acceptance of the Union not as a triumphant recognition of religious truth, but rather as reluctant resignation to his failure to find a religious way in between exclusive alternatives. Smotryc'kyj pursued his cultural career, according to Frick, in such a way as to evade and even undermine "any exclusive opposition between Greek-Slavonic and Latin-Polish culture, between Eastern and Western Churches, between Ruthenian nation and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth." (p. 249) He might profess "ignorance" in his letter to the Pope, but Smotryc'kyj was anything but ignorant about the religious alternatives on offer in the early seventeenth century. To be sure, he could hardly advertise his own studiously acquired knowledge of many religions in a letter to Rome. It was the Pope, perhaps, who knew too little about religion in the Commonwealth, and, analogously, early modern historiography may greatly benefit from an appreciation of Smotryc'kyj's tumultuous career and protean identity, formed within a religious crucible positioned on the cultural frontier of Europe.

Frick has managed to create a masterpiece of micro-history, assembling the fragmentary sources concerning Smotryc'kyj's life, placing them in their overlapping social and cultural contexts: Ukrainian, Polish, European. The sources leave many uncertainties, and Frick focuses precisely upon these uncertainties as the most interesting and revealing arenas for historical evaluation. It is possible to trace Smotryc'kyj's path across the lands of the Commonwealth, to Protestant Germany during the earlier years of his religious education, to Ottoman Constantinople, still the capital of Orthodoxy, in the later years of his religious dilemma. The fascinating difficulty of the sources lies in the fact that they are almost entirely polemical, for or against Smotryc'kyj, from the time that he emerged as a champion of Orthodoxy against Uniate Catholicism with the publication of his Threnos in 1610, to the time of his public conversion from Orthodoxy to the Union in 1628. This meant that his earlier defenders became his later denouncers, and vice-versa, and, analyzing this entanglement of partisan religious perspectives, Frick brilliantly demonstrates the difficulty of retrieving any neat account of his subject's early modern identity. "I write in reaction to the two standard historiographic traditions that have emplotted Smotryc'kyj's life either as a tragedy or a romance," comments Frick. "I have chosen to emphasize precisely the fragmentariness, the disjointedness, the inharmoniousness." (p. xv) Following this deconstructive approach through the polemical sources, Frick reveals an inverse alternative to early modern self-fashioning, for Smotryc'kyj elusively sought to preserve his religious identity from those who wanted to fashion it for him according to the fixed formulas of binary opposition. When Smotryc'kyj was Orthodox he was denounced by the Uniates as a "poisonous spider" and a "wolf," (p. 51) but when he became a Uniate, his conversion was saluted as something miraculous: "Thus behold: from Saul, Paul; from a wolf, a lamb." (p. 105) Frick prefers to consider Smotryc'kyj with reference to the work of Frances Yates, citing her pioneering historical excavation of the international ecumenical movement in the late Renaissance. Frick makes particularly interesting comparisons between the religious formulations of Smotryc'kyj and those of the heretical Dalmatian churchman, Marcantonio de Dominis. Yates followed the religious ideals of the Rosicrucians from Heidelberg to Prague; Frick argues for related ecumenical concerns extending farther east to L'viv and Vilnius. Among Frick's conclusions is the assertion that "the eastern boundary of the Western European sphere of spiritual influence extended into Ukraine by the beginning of the seventeenth century." (p. 251) In fact, the chain of cultural connections that he uncovers suggests the plausibility of a simply European sphere of related religious concerns, within which, interestingly, the ecumenical ideals of the Renaissance just barely survived in the Commonwealth, while religious warfare was already raging in the Holy Roman Empire, and the Inquisition reigned ascendant in Rome.

While pursuing Yates's thesis at an eastern remove, Frick also demonstrates an extraordinary level of erudition, worthy of Yates herself. In addition to the Polish polemical pamphlets, Frick further analyzes Smotryc'kyj's Polish literary style, and even his "sacred philology," that is, the various translations of the Bible into Polish which he cited in his religious writings; there are also cultural clues to be found in his landmark grammar of Church Slavonic, as well as revealing puns that played upon divergences of meaning between Ruthenian usage and literary Polish. The results of such erudition lead Frick to conclusions about the social and political underpinnings of Smotryc'kyj's religious equivocations. The question of religious identity, he argues, can not be answered without considering the related issue of what it meant to be Ruthenian in the early seventeenth century. Frick suggests that Smotryc'kyj's tortuous religious course, and his concern to bridge the gap between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, were aimed at establishing a religious basis for Ruthenians to define themselves as a Rus' nation. In this sense he stood at the beginning of the modern Ukrainian national dilemma, between Poland and Russia, between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Frick's work on Smotryc'kyj provides an important complement to Frank Sysyn's exemplary study of Adam Kysil, each subject illustrating different aspects and emphases of the social, political, and religious matrix of identity and allegiance in seventeenth-century Ukraine. Frick sees Smotryc'kyj's conversion to the Union as an implicitly political move, based on an evaluation of the contemporary prospects for Ruthenian national survival within the Commonwealth. Indeed Smotryc'kyj's religious dilemma is cleverly conceived in political terms as a kind of undercover operation in maintaining ties with two warring world camps. Frick sees him as "a sort of double agent," playing to and off both sides while preserving a concealed purpose and identity of his own. Borrowing the famous phrase of John Le Carre, Frick describes Smotryc'kyj, finally converting to the Union, as an agent who could at last come "in from the cold." (p. 143) The subject of Smotryc'kyj, in Frick's masterful handling, offers important new research and insightful reformulations of fundamental historiographical issues. This book makes an extremely valuable contribution to the social, cultural, and religious history of Ukraine in the Commonwealth, but also toward a more complete and complex religious history of early modern Europe.

Larry Wolff Boston College