The strange career of Paisios Ligarides.

The mid-seventeenth century was notorious for its turmoil and instability. Both England and the Netherlands experienced violent revolutions; and Central Europe was the scene of the vicious and ruinous Thirty Years, War. When the Peace of Westphalia brought it to an end in 1648 there were revolts in France, Spain and Ukraine, and in cities as far apart as Naples and Moscow. Nor were these the last of the troubles. Wars broke out between England and Holland; France and Austria; Poland, Russia and Sweden; and all the while the 200-year struggle between the Ottoman Turks who controlled the Balkans and their Christian neighbours to the north continued, brutalising the frontier populations from Croatia and Bosnia in the West to the Cossack country in the East.

The turmoil, which often reflected political and dynastic rivalries, was fed by an unfavourable economic climate and consequent social distress. But it found expression, above all, in religious differences.

In Central Europe proponents of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation fought each other to a standstill. Islam and Christendom confronted each other to the south. And a third ancient religious division, between Catholic and Orthodox Christian, generated as much hatred and strife as between Catholics and Protestants or between Christians and Muslims.

This particular split, or schism, had originated in the ninth century when Pope Nicholas I had objected to the ordination of Photius as Patriarch of Constantinople, and culminated in 1054 when the representative of Pope Leo IX and the Patriarch Cerularius had excommunicated each other in the Basilica of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople. The crisis was exacerbated by the mayhem wrought by the Catholic knights (known as `Latins' to their enemies) in Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade.

An attempt to heal the split at the Councils of Florence and of Ferrara in 1439 had failed. Rome subsequently tried to win back the Eastern Orthodox, accepting those who followed the Orthodox rites and liturgy provided they recognised the pope's supremacy. The resultant `Uniat' Church, formalised by the Union of Brest of 1569, had won comparatively few adherents outside the Polish Ukraine apart from a few Greeks. Most Orthodox Christians of the eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans, together with the Russians, continued to snarl at the `Latins' of the Catholic West, while Catholics fortified the antemurale christianitatis, their protective wall against what they regarded as the barbarous Orient, and tried to push it eastwards.

The scars of these seventeenth-century battlelines are visible to this day. They fed the Cold War, and they continue to feed the traditional suspicions between Poles and Russians and the current hatreds between Serbs, Croats and Muslims. Yet earlier in the seventeenth century there were still hopes of healing the divide, of overcoming the deep suspicions between Orthodox and Catholic, and bringing the two churches into spiritual union again.

Perhaps the most remarkable representative of these hopes was the controversial and enigmatic Paisios (alias Pantaleone) Ligarides, member of the Basilian Order, Orthodox Metropolitan of Gaza in Palestine, agent of the papacy's central missionary organisation, the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda Fide), and ecclesiastical adviser to the Tsar of Russia - a man, subsequently reviled as a double agent in Constantinople, Rome and Moscow, whose career also reflects an astonishing change in the religious and intellectual climate of Europe.

Whether Ligarides was born in the year 1609 or 1610 is not quite certain though information concerning the rest of his life is plentiful. He was born and educated on the island of Schio off the coast of modern Turkey. Schio was part of the Ottoman empire but it had belonged to Genoa until 1573; and though most of the islanders were Greeks who followed the Orthodox rites and liturgy, their church was Uniat, accepting the authority of the pope. Ligarides therefore shared the ambiguous spiritual allegiance of his fellow islanders.

Schio was also singular in the quality of education available. A famous school had been founded by the humanist Lestarchus Hermodorus in the sixteenth century; and it had been taken over by the Jesuits by the time Ligarides was born. Ligarides proved himself an apt student and when he was thirteen (the Orthodox coming of age), the Bishop of Schio, Marco Giustiniani, recommended him to the Gregorian College of St Athanasius in Rome, which catered particularly for Uniats, but also accepted Orthodox boys, no doubt in the hope of converting them.

Young Ligarides' progress at the college was brilliant, and his doctoral examination in 1636 was attended by many cardinals. According to an eye witness:

He distinguished himself on this occasion with his acuity, wide reading and rich understanding ... Questions [were] put to him in Greek [as well as Latin] and the disputant answered them quickly and fully, arousing general astonishment.

He stayed on as a teacher at the college, specialising in rhetoric.

Ligarides made useful friends among what might be termed the Schiotan mafia in Rome. They included men who were to be helpful to him subsequently: his confidante, Leo Allatius, who was to become papal librarian and earn an impressive reputation as a humanist scholar; and Horatio Giustiniani, the current Vatican librarian, and who was to be promoted cardinal in 1645.

Allatius rated his friend's abilities and integrity very highly indeed:

The man is keenly intelligent, holds fast to principle, is learned, especially in ecclesiastical matters, an eloquent and elegant presenter, excelling in the vernacular language of the Greeks, on paper as well as orally, and writes verse and prose worthy of the Muse ... if need be, he would sacrifice his very life and blood for the Catholic religion.

Ligarides' teachers included Pietro Arkudio who had worked in Poland trying to win more `schismatic' Orthodox to the Uniat Church, and in 1600 had even visited Moscow under cover of a Polish embassy to congratulate Boris Godunov on his accession. In 1639 Ligarides was ordained a priest by Rafael Korsak, Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Uniat Church. Two years later he was entered on the payroll of the Propaganda Fide and sent to minister to his fellow Greeks as Apostolic Missionary to Constantinople.

Ligarides was fired by the mission of bringing `schismatics' over to Rome. He was also well-equipped for it: knowledgeable about the Orthodox world, Slavonic as well as Greek; and, as an associate of Jesuits, was well aware of the power of learning to win over members of elites, both religious and secular, to the Catholic faith. Whether in Constantinople, Palestine, Romania or Russia, he was always to insinuate himself into the confidence of princes and hierarchs. He was never to show much interest in the smaller fry. What excited him was the prospect of landing the biggest fish. This was, after all, the great game of his time.

Arriving in Constantinople in 1642 he found the Orthodox Church there divided and riddled with Protestant influences. There had been at least a dozen Patriarchs in twenty years; and the most prominent among them, the Calvinist-inclined Cyril Lucaris, had, died (strangled for treason on the order of Sultan Murad IV) as recently as 1638. Lucaris' Calvinist confession had since been condemned by no fewer than three Councils of the Orthodox Church, but the `Calvinist' Party remained a force to be reckoned with.

Even so Ligarides immediately fell on his feet. The current Patriarch of Constantinople, Parthenios I, was an anti-Calvinist, but he and his followers lacked the theological expertise to rebut the heretics. He therefore looked to Rome, the centre of anti-Calvinism, for support, and was already in correspondence with the Propaganda Fide. He needed someone like Ligarides, who was able, learned and skilful in dispute, and so readily granted him a license to preach, officiate and confess. This certified Ligarides as an Orthodox cleric of good standing, allowing him to operate freely. Furthermore the Patriarch promised to ordain him a bishop, and meanwhile invited him to give a sermon before a great crowd at Galata, the Greek quarter of Constantinople on the first Sunday of Advent. It was there that the trouble started.

Followers of Corydalo, a former bishop who had been expelled from his diocese for holding Calvinist views, shouted Ligarides down as a Papist. The Patriarch Parthenios was in too weak a position to sustain Ligarides against the opposition. His diocese was heavily in debt, and he administered his divided flock only on sufference of the Ottoman sultan. Ligarides' license was revoked until he made a declaration of faith.

This placed him in an impossible position. He could not fulfil his mission without preaching, yet, as he reported, `I am not allowed to preach ... unless I make profession as a schismatic [Orthodox]' - and this he refused to do. Yet the Patriarch accorded him an honoured place at his court and afforded him opportunities to dispute with those who held contrary views. it was an uphill task - not simply a matter of winning over Orthodox Christians, but of combating the Protestantism that had invaded the Eastern Church.

I find such great alienation among the Greek bishops [Ligarides reported to Francesco Ingoli, Secretary of the Propaganda] that the mere shadow of Latinism [Catholicism] rouses them to the attack ... Their seminarists talk more of Calvin and Luther [than of the Holy Fathers of the Church] ... They no longer propound controversy but heresy.

However, he still entertained hopes of being ordained a bishop, and saw opportunities not only to exploit the political divisions of the Orthodox Church but the corruption of its bishops, so many of whom were open to offers:

I say in truth that if the Holy Congregation spent five thousand scudi a year it would have the Greek Church in its hand ...

By February 1645, however, the Protestant faction was in the ascendancy again and there was a new Patriarch, Parthenios II, who was on good terms with the Dutch Resident at the Porte. Ligarides was soon excommunicated as a Papist and illegitimate priest. His mission in jeopardy, Ligarides applied to Rome for permission to officiate in the Orthodox, rather than the Catholic rite. The request was denied. He was ordered to celebrate the Latin rite only, care for his followers as best he could without inviting trouble, and await better times.

This was unwelcome news. Ligarides was soon contemplating moving north into the Romanian lands - perhaps into the service of Basil the Wolf, Prince of Moldavia. Basil was protector and financial supporter of the Constantinople Patriarchate, well regarded by the Greek community, but also an ally of Catholic Poland and thought to be well-disposed towards Catholics in general. In the event, however, Ligarides asked Rome for permission to enter the service of the Metropolitan Stefan of Targoviste, capital of the neighbouring Principality of Wallachia (southern Romania). Thanks to the intercession of Cardinal Giustiniani, the Propaganda authorised him to take up the appointment.

By the end of 1646 he was in Targoviste, in the foothills of the southern Carpathians, where he continued to report to the Propaganda, and to demand payments from them. The requests became more desperate, and insinuating. On March 23rd, 1648, he wrote recalling the case of the Prodigal Son:

How many mercenaries, courtesans of different nations are fed by the common Mother, the Holy Congregation [the Propaganda Fide]? Yet I alone languish from hunger, like a starving orphan ... despised and abandoned. I do not speak of the Greek Church but of my dear suckler, Holy Rome. Perhaps you think that I speak out of [personal] interest? Call God in witness that this is my least thought ... I want it to show the world that all those who, like poor Ligarides, want to defend the Latin [Catholic cause] should be considered no less priests because they are abandoned ... This bad reputation, this infamy distresses me ...

The Propaganda took the line that, since he was receiving an income from another source, he had no claim on them. But he continued to bombard Rome with reproaches.

In what way have I offended the holy Catholic church? On account of which demerits am I mortified? Has the truth of my writings impugned? What errors of mine have been proclaimed from which pulpit in which city?

His conscience was clear, he continued, yet, though an alumnus of twenty years, he seemed to be forgotten. Or perhaps this treatment was meant to test him? He had been in the field now for nearly seven years (the length, it seems, of the preaching license he had been accorded by the papacy):

I confess that I find myself in a labyrinth, unable to find the way out, unless Your Illustrious Lordships, like the wise Ariadne, provide the thread.

On July 26th, 1649, he applied yet again, this time intimating that if he were not paid, Rome might lose `a faithful person'. How could he live in a `land of schismatics' at the expense of `an anathematised Patriarch'? This time the Propaganda decided to pay him four years' salary arrears; 240 scudi.

Ligarides was certainly active in Wallachia. He taught the sons of a senior minister, Constantin Cantacuzene, and several other prominent members of the elite, logic and rhetoric in both Greek and Latin. He also helped prepare for publication the first Romanian edition of the book of canon law, the Nomocanon, was active as a polemist, worked on a book about magic, and kept up with the fast-changing situation in east Eastern Europe.

But the turning-point in his career came, not in Romania, but in Palestine. He had ingratiated himself with Patriarch Paisios of Jerusalem who was passing through Targoviste on his way back from Moscow. Paisios offered him the preferment he so badly needed to pursue his mission to the Eastern Church effectively, so he followed him to Jerusalem. There, on September 14th, 1652, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, having read a declaration of faith attesting his adhesion to the four Eastern Orthodox Patriarchs, and prostrating himself before a picture of an eagle, he was inducted Metropolitan of Gaza. At last, with the rank of an archbishop, he carried the clout in the Orthodox world that he needed.

However, many took this move to signal his defection from Rome. He vigorously denied this. He called on the local Franciscan community to assure them of his continuing attachment to the papacy, handed out copies of what he claimed to be his oath; insisted that the Franciscans who had watched his ordination and been scandalised by it, had misunderstood the significance of the Orthodox rites they had seen. Furthermore later the same month in a letter to the Propaganda claiming arrears of pay Ligarides actually signed himself Archbishop of Gaza. It seemed as if, for him, the schism did not exist.

He did not stay long in Palestine and probably never visited Gaza. The diocese was heavily in debt, and in any case he had other aims in view. He returned to Wallachia, visiting Schio en route. There, in April 1654, angry that his integrity as a Catholic was being called into question, he sent a bitter letter to his friend Allatius:

I rejoice [he wrote ironically] that Catholics are now given out in Rome to be heretics, are excluded from missions and considered enemies and as the offspring of serpents, while obvious heretics who consort with the Lutherans and with the Calvinists of Hungary get a salary of twelve scudi a month from the Holy Congregation of the Propaganda. They have done very well, and have deserved even more. They receive safe-conducts; we get eternal exile ...

The Patriarch of Jerusalem (whom I persuaded to write) is good and Catholic - so why should I need to make a profession against the Catholics? Who would believe it? Besides only one saturnine person said he did, and they believe him as if he were the herald of truth ...

The claim that the Patriarch was Catholic was by no means incredible. The intellectual climate of the late Renaissance had encouraged a questioning of religious allegiances. Lutherans and Calvinists, even Anabaptists, had made many recruits. A Catholic Bishop from Dalmatia had become Dean of Windsor, and several seventeenth-century Patriarchs of Constantinople had acknowledged the authority of Rome. Why not a Patriarch of Jerusalem? But now with the spirit of the Counter-Reformation ascendant, Rome was adopting a harder line. The Propaganda expressed doubt if the Patriarch of Jerusalem would consecrate a Catholic as bishop.

Ligarides continued to bombard them with assurances, pleas and justifications, and in 1655 signed another letter to the Propaganda, as Archbishop of Gaza, asking to be reinstated on the payroll. The Propaganda replied dryly that it had no use for a Metropolitan of Gaza, and that though Ligarides travelled a great deal he did not seem to be very active as a missionary. Ligarides retorted that his eparchy was in debt and that he had to raise money. But he had been busy on other fronts as well.

Aside from teaching, and finishing his learned treatise on magic, The Book of Prophecies, he had written at least four tracts in an attempt to stem the Protestant tide in neighbouring Transylania, where there were no fewer than four reformed academies as well as an Antitrinitarian school. But a letter in support of Ligarides addressed to the Propaganda in 1658 by the Catholic Archbishop of Sofia (whose diocese included Wallachia) suggests he was engaged in other work too. It refers to Ligarides' concern for the union of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and intimates that this had not been mentioned earlier for reasons of security.

But the Franciscans of Jerusalem persisted in their denunciations and eventually the Propaganda let it be known that they would like to see Ligarides in Rome. In the winter of 1661-62, however, he travelled in the opposite direction, to Moscow.

This was no sudden flit. We now know that he had been considering such a move for some time and that when the moment came he was well-prepared for it. Thanks, to the good offices of Arsenius Sukhanov, an Anatolian Greek, Ligarides had received an invitation to go there in 1657 from the Patriarch Nikon of Moscow, who needed someone of his learning to help in the task of bringing the Slavonic Orthodox Church books and liturgy into line with those of the Greek Orthodox. He had not accepted, being more interested in cultivating the Tsar, Alexis (the father of Peter the Great). Indeed, having dedicated his treatise on magic to him, he had already established direct relations with Alexis. This is evident from a letter he addressed to the Tsar from Bucharest of October 1657, which, though published in Russia in 1884, seems to have escaped historians' attention.

In it Ligarides twice refers to himself as the Tsar's rhetor or orator; he also explains that reasons of security dictate that he write in Greek rather than Latin. The letter suggests there had been previous communication between them and arrangements as to the mode in which the correspondence was to be conducted. Furthermore, despite phraseology of the kind one would expect of a churchman, its concerns are secular. Ligarides presses the Tsar to go to the aid of the Ukranian Cossacks by campaigning against the Turks. He also suggests that it might be wise to come to an agreement with the Catholic Poles; there could be no truck, after all, with Calvinist Transylvania.

The background circumstances make this even more suggestive. The year their leader, Bogdan Khmelnytsky, died the Ukranian Cossacks had invaded Poland again together with `Calvinist' Transylvanian forces. That same year, 1657, the army of Protestant Sweden laid seige to Czestochowa, last refuge of the Polish court - and the Propaganda made another payment to Ligarides. These conjunctures prompt the speculation that Ligarides may have been party to a scheme, inspired by Rome, to relieve the pressure on Catholic Poland. Certainly the Ukrainian Cossacks came to an accommodation with the Polish government at Hadiach that autumn.

Furthermore the Metropolitan of Kiev died that year, and it was over the appointment of his successor that, in July 1658, the Tsar fell out with Patriarch Nikoh of Moscow. Ligarides did not meet the Tsar until April 1662, but he was soon at work, advising him how to depose the Patriarch and preparing the case against him. This did not imply any burning of boats as fir as Rome was concerned. Ligarides wrote to the Propaganda through the papal nunziatura in Warsaw in 1662, even though Musas covy was still in a state of war with Poland, insisting that he had `always been, and ... [was] now more than ever devoted to the apostolic Throne'. The papal nuncio in Warsaw reported in 1673 that Ligarides had done much to correct the many `abuses' in the Russian Church, especially those that impeded union with Rome.

Ligarides' original aims evidently remained unchanged. He was still concerned to heal the schism between the Catholic and Orthodox worlds, which he himself straddled. His activity over decades points to this, so does his perennial interest in the writings of Photius who gave his name to the ninth-century schism. But though, in the later 1660s in Moscow, as personal adviser to the Tsar, he might appear to be, at last, in a strategic position of influence, he seems to have realised that the cause was hopeless. Others might believe that the most powerful secular ruler of the Orthodox world might be won over to Rome if a Romanov was elected the next king of Poland, but by now Ligarides had sufficient political nous, and enough knowledge of Russians, to realise that this was not possible.

It may not have been by chance that, soon afterwards, he should have tried to sell a manuscript associated with the representative figure of the original schism, the Homilies of Photius, to the Dutch humanist Nicholas Heinsus (who had been sent to Moscow on a mission for the Court of Sweden). Ligarides claimed he had already received a substantial offer for it from another party, though there is no evidence of this. Nor is it known how he had gained possession of so important a text. But his attempt to sell it was a metaphorical admission of the failure of his mission. He died in 1678 in Kieve, a disappointed man, having been defrocked by the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, reviled as a Latinist by Russian traditionalists, and disowned by Rome.

What conclusions can be drawn from this sad story? First, that Ligarides was an independent agent, difficult for the Propaganda to control, but faithful to his original conception of his mission even when disowned by Rome. No less an authority than Cardinal Abani, who inquired into the case towards the end of the century, believed that though Ligarides had fallen under suspicion he had deserved better treatment. If he strayed at all it was through excess of zeal and ambition.

Secondly, the ease with which both Catholic and Protestant doctrines penetrated the worlds of Eastern Orthodoxy in his time is a measure of the very weak state of learning in the Orthodox world. Lucaris and his followers had been influenced by Geneva, yet their Greek Orthodox opponents seem to have been unable to answer them without calling on Rome and the likes of Ligarides. Similarly the Romanian princes needed him as an educator, and the Russian court for his expertise in canon law and his argumentative abilities.

Finally and most significantly, Ligarides' career reflects a transformation in the ideological life of Europe. When he was a youth a tolerant atmosphere of the late Renaissance still prevailed, not least in Rome, as it did in Poland and in the Habsburg empire of Rudolph II. This helps explains why Ligarides found so little difficulty, morally or practically, in straddling the Catholic and Orthodox worlds. The Protestant threat to them both only made their union seem the more urgent to him (and not only to him but to many Orthodox hierachs).

Unfortunately for Ligarides, however, the moral climate changed. By the 1650s the Counter-Reformation was triumphant, and a mood of intolerance had displaced the old tolerance - among the Greeks and in Russia as well as in the Latin West. He himself understood that the values and conditions of the world he had known had changed. As he had written in his Book of Prophecies, in that unfortunate time of war and conflict, churchmen were suddenly at odds with one another and people could no longer digest their spiritual food, As in the 1990s, fundamentalism had become the fashion. Impatient and ingenious, Ligarides had found a way out of one difficult position after another - only to find himself in an inescapable trap formed by hedges of growing intolerance.

FOR FURTHER READING:

The amount of writing on Ligarides is huge but almost all of it is foreign languages. The only biography in English, H. Hionides, Paisios Ligarides (New York, 1972) is not always reliable, but contains interesting excerpts from Ligarides' Book of Prophecies. For the broader context see Philip Longworth, The Making of Eastern Europe, (Macmillan, 1994) Chapter 7; Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity (Cambridge, 1968); for the origins of the Uniat Church, O. Halecki, From Florence to Brest (Rome, 1958); for Ligarides' activities in Russia, Philip Longworth, Alexis: Tsar of All the Russias (Secker, 1984).

Philip Longworth is Professor of History at McGill University and author of "The Making of Eastern Europe (Macmillan, 1994).

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Title Annotation:	post-Reformation ecumenism advocate
Author:	Longworth, Philip
Publication:	History Today
Article Type:	Biography
Date:	Jun 1, 1995
Words:	4221
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