Confessional “Fronts”, Lines of “Cultural Fracture”, and “Long Memory”

The review was prepared within the framework of the joint “Book Review” project of the Political Sphere Institute and the Center for European Studies in Minsk.

Barbara Skinner (2009). The Western Front of the Eastern Church. Uniate-Orthodox Conflict in 18th-Century Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, XVI+295 pp.

Review prepared by Aliaksandr Paharely.

Back in 2009, Barbara Skinner’s monograph The Western Front of the Eastern Church. Uniate-Orthodox Conflict in 18th-Century Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia was published. The eight chapters of the book cover a very broad range of interrelated problems: Uniate and Orthodox parish life, the social and educational characteristics of priests, the politicization of the Uniate-Orthodox conflict in the eighteenth century, violence on confessional grounds in the context of the First Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the events that preceded it, the fate of the Uniates of the Belarusian lands after the First Partition, and more.

Skinner considers the emergence of the Union in the context of the confessionalization of post-Reformation Europe and the need to modernize the Orthodox Church of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This latter concern united both the future initiators of the Union and their determined opponents. Confessionalization, according to Skinner, meant the use of instruments borrowed from the new Protestant branches of Western Christianity, such as defining doctrines and practices of faith through the textual fixation of a confession or through a church council and the creation of well-articulated catechisms for the purpose of religious instruction.

The ancestors of modern Belarusians and Ukrainians appear in her work as “Ruthenians”.

The author’s main conclusions reflect her conviction that the eighteenth century is a rather poorly studied period compared with the turbulent seventeenth century and the policy of complete destruction of the Union in the nineteenth century. According to her, processes of reform and transformation affected the Orthodox Church, since the reforms of Kyiv Metropolitan Mohyla were entirely in the spirit of confessionalization and were to a significant extent Westernizing; these same processes also stood behind the emergence of the Uniate Church.

The researcher further notes that the confrontation of political orientations in the context of eighteenth-century events became a catalyst for the formation of separate identities: Ruthenian Uniate and Orthodox. Also, according to her, by examining the nature of the Uniate and Orthodox Churches and their differences, the book sheds light on a central factor of Ruthenian identity, which influenced it over the centuries.

It is also impossible to understand the nature of the escalation of the Uniate-Orthodox conflict without taking into account the development of Russian imperial identity and ideology. The latter left no place for other Christian confessions for the “all-Russian” people except Orthodoxy. Within this logic, the process of “return” to Orthodoxy was its distinctive cultural and ideological instrument.

Speaking of ideology, a concept that is itself a minefield for researchers, it should also be noted that it was the Orthodox clergy from Left-Bank Ukraine that possessed a “long memory” after the religious war of the mid-seventeenth century in the Ukrainian lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and it was they who supplied Catherine II’s imperial government with concepts of “cultural unification” that served as a justification for the conversion of Uniates and for the subsequent, second and third, partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as well as with the necessary personnel.

Barbara Skinner assesses the conversion campaign launched by Catherine II, which resulted in a series of bloody uprisings and clashes, not as a political action characteristic of the age of Enlightenment and enlightened modernity (Van Der Veer, 1996), but as a manifestation of the mentality of religious war and confessional conflict characteristic of earlier centuries in other parts of Europe (Marx, 2003).

Neither problems with the unification and correction of liturgical literature nor the late development of Uniate book printing in any way argue against the fact that in the eighteenth century the Uniate Church took shape as a full-fledged confession with its own moral theology. Skinner analyzes this latter aspect in detail and reveals the specificity of the social values that formed the foundations of the social doctrines of the Uniate and Orthodox Churches in their connection with the dominant intellectual climate and ideology.

She devotes considerable space to explaining the social teaching of the Russian Orthodox Church, which, according to the American researcher, encouraged devotion to the tsar, in comparison with an orientation toward legal norms and contractual relations in the case of the Uniate Church (Skinner, 2007).

At the same time, it is quite problematic to claim that Uniate priests transmitted values directly from manuals of moral theology, while masses of peasant believers passively and literally absorbed such ideas. Skinner does not give proper attention to problematizing this aspect, although this direction has long been developed within the same “new cultural history” (Hunt, 1989; Kotliarchuk, 2001).

According to the American researcher, it was in the eighteenth century that Uniate jurisdiction expanded to its maximum extent after the traumatic and turbulent second half of the seventeenth century, which had put the very survival of the confession across much of the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth into question. The politicization of confessional belonging in the context of Russian imperial policy, and the sense within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of being a country surrounded by “infidels”, led to an intensification of the confrontation between the Orthodox and Uniate Churches.

The author effectively argues that more intense violence against believers and their resistance occurred where the traditions of the Union had managed to put down deep roots. The literature has long contained differing views on how the strength of religious feeling influences violent actions and the creation of the “image of the enemy” (De Vries, 2002).

At the same time, it is impossible to draw a precise dividing line between those territories where the Union was perceived as an integral part of one’s own identity and those where it had become established relatively recently. The nature of believers’ reactions to conversion attempts often, though not always, according to Skinner, points to the existence of distinctive lines of “cultural fracture”. In the Belarusian lands, the territory of the Second Partition proved to be more attached to the Union than that of the First.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, there could be no question of confessional mobility or voluntary choice of faith. In the 1760s-1790s, a change of confession that contradicted state interests, whether those of the Russian authorities or of the authorities of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, was regarded not merely as apostasy but as treason.

It is impossible to cover all the problems connected with the history of relations between Uniatism and Orthodoxy, and impossible to reveal them all at once, but the book deserves a very high assessment. Skinner pays particular attention to certain problems which, in her view, are and will remain relevant, for example the comparative study of Uniate and Orthodox parishes along the borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russia.

Also interesting are the problems of whether the entry of Roman Catholics into the Basilian order served as one of the channels for preserving Ruthenian identity, as well as the more careful study of the interior decoration of Uniate parish churches, which in itself was a kind of “Bible of the illiterate” (Gurevich, 1989; Senyk, 2006: 201-234).

In her view, more attention should also be given to the decrees on the return to the Union of peasants who had previously been transferred to Orthodoxy at the end of the eighteenth century. No less important are studies at the local level of the very process of converting Uniates to Orthodoxy during and after the Second Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and of the reverse process of later returning to the Union. All this is possible only with due regard for the limitations imposed by the sources and by the theoretical and methodological apparatus of researchers.

The scholar from Indiana University transliterated personal and geographical names in the book as they are reflected in the sources, so that they would not differ too sharply from modern names. For example, Navahrudak is rendered in the book as Novohrodok. Still, the presence of certain unfortunate distortions, such as “Druissa” in the Polotsk diocese, is disconcerting, since it is unclear whether the reference is to Druia or Drysa. This indicates the author’s somewhat lesser familiarity with the historical geography of the Belarusian-Lithuanian lands compared with the Ukrainian ones, and a certain lack of critical distance toward the sources.

Skinner considers it inappropriate to limit the study of the history of the Uniate Church to contemporary national frameworks and borders, since this narrows the researcher’s possibilities and hinders the formation of a complex, multidimensional understanding of the history of the confession.

Barbara Skinner is convinced that the influence of the church union on the culture and identity of Ukrainians and Belarusians must not be underestimated. These influences are not reduced solely to Western Ukraine, where a long period was required for the Church’s transformation into a national institution, and such an outcome was far from predetermined in advance. Confessional fractures shifted farther west over time, but they still make themselves felt today in the opposition of identities and political aspirations that have local, national, regional, and European dimensions.