The Religious Situation in the Ukrainian Lands during the Ukrainian Liberation War of 1648-1657

Abstract

The conclusion of the Union of Brest 1596 provoked an ideological split in the East Slavic society of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which manifested itself in a real crisis of the old identity systems. For the first time, two denominational and church groups of society appeared at the same time, which chose the priority right to call themselves the “Russian people”. The “struggle for Russianness” that unfolded at that time was important not only in a general cultural sense, but also in a specific legal sense – it is a struggle for the rights approved by royal privileges for the Russian and Kyiv Metropolies, a struggle for legal status in the state. The question of who exactly the country's legislation understands as “Russian people” or “people of the Greek faith” turned out to be fundamental. Who owns the old Russian rights – Ruthenian Uniates, who owns the whole of Russian history, and who has turned out to be a new force that destroys the past unity. Already in the first two dozen years after the conclusion of the union, the Uniates were able to create a fundamentally new concept of the church history of the Kyiv Metropolis, which was based on the statement that the Eastern Church was only occasionally inclined to schism, but its unity with Rome was constantly renewed. The need to defend one's faith and the traditions of one's ancestors inevitably made the religious and cultural self-determination of the Orthodox population relevant, and caused the need to distance oneself from the faith of the Roman Catholic Ruthenian Uniates. The process of religious differentiation was accompanied by the development of religious self-consciousness in close connection with ethnic consciousness. The split of the previously united mass of Ukrainians into Orthodox and Uniates led to the fact that the Uniates began to be considered by the Orthodox as those who betrayed the faith of their ancestors and were equated with Catholics. From the point of view of identification, they became “Other”. The confrontation started by the Union of Brest continued during the national liberation revolution of 1648-1657.