The Everyday Life of a Uniate Priest: An Interesting History of “Little People”

Liseichykau, Dzyanis (2011). The Everyday Life of a Uniate Parish Priest of the Belarusian-Lithuanian Lands, 1720-1839. Minsk: Medysont, 198 p.

Review prepared by Father Andrei Krot.

The work by Dzyanis Liseichykau, Candidate of Historical Sciences, “The Everyday Life of a Uniate Parish Priest of the Belarusian-Lithuanian Lands, 1720-1839,” was published by the Minsk publishing house Medysont in 2011 and has already received fairly broad attention in Belarusian historical scholarship. In 2013, for this study the author received the prize of the Third International Congress of Belarusian Studies for the best scholarly publication in history.

D. Liseichykau’s work is written in the genre of the history of everyday life, new for Belarusian historiography, which has been used in world historical scholarship since the 1960s. The term “history of everyday life” has no single definition: for example, French historians understood it as the history of mentalities, that is, “the most general and characteristic ideas, phobias, and sympathies” (p. 10). D. Liseichykau gives preference to the understanding of Italian and German historians, for whom the history of everyday life is the history of “little people,” and who adhere to the slogan: “From the study of state policy and the analysis of global social structures and processes, let us turn to the small life-worlds of ordinary people” (p. 11).

D. Liseichykau considers the Uniate parish clergy one of the most convenient communities for research within the concept of the history of everyday life (p. 9), since the clergy formed a fairly closed social group in which unique norms of behavior, childrearing, household management, and attitudes toward the everyday and the sacred took shape. The Uniate parish clergy was also distinguished by its familiarity with book culture, which led to the creation of numerous personal documents available for study. Moreover, it was Uniate priests who, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had the greatest influence on the mentality of the local population and served as models of behavior for their parishioners.

The first chapter of his work is devoted by D. Liseichykau to an analysis of the historiography and sources of the everyday life of Uniate priests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The historiographical analysis allowed him to identify a number of controversial and unresolved questions in the studies of other historians concerning the history of the Uniate Church and its role in the historical process. The historian highlights such problems as the influence of the secular Uniate clergy on ethnocultural and political processes in the Belarusian-Lithuanian lands; the priest’s language of everyday use; the level of his education; the state’s attitude toward the Uniate clergy; changes in its property status; and the priests’ attitude toward the preparation for and abolition of the Union. The author of the monograph notes that the use of methods for studying the history of everyday life and the expansion of the range of archival sources, above all the corpus of visitations of Uniate churches from 1754 to 1839, make it possible to provide well-grounded answers to these questions.

The second chapter of the work is devoted to family upbringing, education, and the career of the priest. The historian writes that most Uniate priests belonged to ancient clerical families whose roots reached back to the sixteenth century. At the same time, he provides examples showing that representatives of the nobility, townspeople, and peasantry also became Uniate priests. The author refutes the assertion of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian historiography that those who could not otherwise realize themselves in life became Uniate priests, and, using specific examples, demonstrates the attractiveness of the Uniate priesthood even for certain representatives of the nobility (p. 37).

As for the education of priests, the researcher refutes the claim that Uniate priests before the 1830s were a poorly educated part of society. For example, according to the archival data cited by the author, most priests of the Lithuanian-Vilnius eparchy in 1819 had completed a course of study either at a seminary or at a monastic school. At the same time, D. Liseichykau disagrees with those historians who claim that in the second half of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries the Uniate Church had an extensive system of high-quality education, showing that the educational system lacked continuity, was not extensive, and was practically accessible only to the children of well-off Uniate priests, particularly deans.

The third chapter of D. Liseichykau’s work is devoted to the condition of the priestly household. He provides very interesting descriptions of poor and wealthy presbyteries, their external and internal appearance, equipment, and the farm buildings attached to them. On the basis of documents, the author writes that the claim of pre-revolutionary Russian historians about the poor and underprovided state of Uniate priestly households corresponds to reality only in part, when their condition is compared with Roman Catholic households. Some priestly households were fairly prosperous: gardener peasants settled on them and small enterprises were built. The residences of wealthy priests can be compared with the residences of the nobility. At the same time, there were also poor priestly households, which in their external appearance and material capacities approached peasant households.

The fourth chapter of the work is entitled “Work Duties” (the title of the chapter is not entirely accurate; it would be more correct to call it “Priestly Ministry”), which the author takes to include pastoral activity, the maintenance of libraries, supervision of cemeteries, and the registration of superstitions and miracles. In this chapter, D. Liseichykau also shows how, over the period under study, society’s ideas about the image of the “good priest” changed. The author touches on the question of the official language of the Uniate Church. He writes that parish registers were kept in the Old Belarusian language, but from roughly the 1740s it began to be displaced by Polish. Commemorative synodics (a part of the parish registers in which the priest entered the names of deceased benefactors of the church who had to be commemorated during services) were kept in a mixture of Church Slavonic and Old Belarusian until the abolition of the Union.

The author connects the gradual transition of the documentation of the Uniate Church to Polish with the growing number of priests who were graduates of seminaries and monastic schools, where the language of instruction was Polish. However, as the author notes in the conclusion of the work, spoken Belarusian was for Uniate priests the language of sermons and contacts with the flock, and for priests who had not studied in seminaries or monastic schools it was also the language of everyday use, as evidenced by the language of the documents they compiled (p. 132).

The influence of Uniate priests on ethnocultural processes was not limited to the use of the Belarusian language. “Book wisdom (and with it the traditions of East Slavic culture) reached representatives of the lower estates precisely through the priest’s interpretation,” the historian writes. Various forms of the priest’s pastoral activity, including the development of the cult of miracle-working icons, encouragement of pilgrimages to holy places, organization of church feasts, and so on, had a significant influence on the cultural life of society at the time.

The final, fifth chapter of the work is devoted by D. Liseichykau to the free time of Uniate priests. In this chapter the historian describes the correspondence and diaries of Uniate priests. The historian notes that in a number of cases priests, in their notes and correspondence, demonstrated a good knowledge of the vernacular Belarusian language. In this chapter, D. Liseichykau also examines the sociopolitical activity of Uniate priests: participation in uprisings, the war of 1812, Masonic organizations, and resistance to the abolition of the Union. The author argues that the secular Uniate clergy did not take significant part either in the uprisings of 1794 and 1830-1831, or in the formation of the Polish army within Napoleon’s army, and were much less involved (in comparison with the Roman Catholic clergy) in the activity of Masonic organizations.

D. Liseichykau sees the reason for the low sociopolitical activity of the secular Uniate clergy in their family status: married parish priests first of all had to think about their families and about securing the future of their children. The rise of political activity among the Uniate clergy, as the researcher notes, was caused not so much by the abolition of the Union as by an attack on the external attributes of Uniatism: the introduction of liturgical books printed by Moscow presses, the prohibition on shaving beards, and so forth. On the latter point one may disagree with D. Liseichykau, taking into account the fact that the abolition of the Union was concealed for a long time by the higher church leadership from ordinary priests, as well as the fact that over several years after the introduction of Muscovite service books the most active part of the clergy was repressed.

In conclusion, I would like to note that the use of an innovative approach for Belarusian historical scholarship, the study of the history of everyday life, allowed D. Liseichykau not only to make interesting discoveries in historiography, but also to give a thorough answer to traditionally disputed questions in the history of the Uniate Church, including the language of the Church and the education and material status of the clergy.