4. Cyril Lukaris and the Synod of Jerusalem, 1672.
The great event of Orthodox Church history in the 17th century is the affair of Cyril Lukaris († 1638), some time Œcumenical Patriarch. He was a Protestantizer who formed a party of Calvinists in his Church, and his opinions were afterwards condemned by four synods. Constantine Lukaris (Λούκαρις, he took the name of Cyril when he became a monk) was born in Crete in 1572. He studied at Venice and Padua, then went to Alexandria, where he was ordained priest, made archimandrite of a monastery and an officer of the Patriarch's court. Meletios Pegas, the Patriarch (p. 247), sent Lukaris to Poland to comfort the Polish Protestants against Popery, and to see if they could be made Orthodox. It was during this journey that he became very friendly with Lutherans, and especially Calvinists, and began to adopt their ideas; he gradually wandered towards the West and is said to have been at both Wittenberg and Geneva. He also had relations with English Protestants. In 1603 Pegas died and Lukaris was made Patriarch of Alexandria. He now quite openly speaks of his conversion to the ideas of the Reformation: "Since it pleased the merciful God to enlighten me and to show me my errors, I began to seriously consider what I ought to do. And what did I do? For three years, having constantly prayed to the Holy Ghost, I read the books of certain Evangelical Doctors, which I had got by the kindness of my friends, but which our East had never yet seen nor even heard of, because of the bishops' censures; and I compared the teaching of the Reformed Church with that of the Greeks and Latins."[1] He corresponded with many Protestants abroad, among others with George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury (1610–1633), Hugo Grotius,
- ↑ Letter to Mark Anthony de Dominis, quoted by Ph. Meyer, Lukaris, in the Realenzyklopädie (1902), xi. p. 686.
(cf. infra, pp. 275, &c.). "It would be well," says Brailsford, after a hideous account of torture in monasteries (on lunatics), "if the excellent Anglican Churchmen who are trying to promote a union with the Eastern Church would use their influence to reform such abuses as this, instead of perpetuating by their ludicrous flatteries the complacency which explains them" (Macedonia, p. 68).
