CIRILLO LUKARIS, patriarch of CONSTANTINOPLE. — Born in Candia on the island of Crete on 13 November 1572; killed in Constantinople on 27 June 1638.
I. LIFE
C. led a very turbulent life. He studied in Venice and Padua; having become a monk, he changed his name from Constantine to that of C. After completing his studies, he went to Constantinople at the invitation of his protector, Meletius Pigas, patriarch of Alexandria. He was already a priest in 1594. Promoted to patriarchal syncellus of Alexandria in 1595, he was sent to Poland the following year; he became rector of the Academy of Vilna in 1596 and, in agreement with Prince Constantine of Ostrog, fought with all his might against the union of the Ruthenians of Poland with Rome, decided at the Synod of Brest-Litovsk (1595). For this purpose, in 1599 he approved the political agreement concluded by Prince Ostrogski with the Protestants, and found himself accused of Calvinism. In 1601 he left Poland, traveled through his homeland, and returned to Egypt, where Meletius Pigas died shortly afterward (1602). He was immediately designated to succeed him, although he was barely thirty years old: the age required by the canons.He remained patriarch of Alexandria until 1620. There was, however, a brief interruption of one month (January–February 1612), during which he occupied the ecumenical see of Constantinople, at the time of the deposition of Neophytus II. This was his first Constantinopolitan patriarchate, followed by six others between 1620 and 1638.
This succession of depositions and reinstatements is explained by the Turkish practice of awarding the patriarchal throne to the prelate who offered the most money, and by a kind of secret diplomatic struggle for religious purposes, in which the ambassadors of the Catholic and Protestant courts at the Sublime Porte engaged. On one side were the French, Austrian, and Venetian ambassadors; on the other, the English and Dutch ambassadors. During his Alexandrian patriarchate, and even earlier, C., secretly abandoning Greek “Orthodoxy,” had assimilated Calvinist doctrines, which he intended to introduce into the Greek Church; and as early as 1629, in Geneva, there appeared under his name, through the efforts of the Dutch ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Cornelius van Haga, a brief confession of faith in Latin, in which the principal dogmas of Calvin were assembled. From then on, he maintained an open account with the English and Dutch ambassadors, who financed his candidacy at each new deposition. The Catholic ambassadors opposed the Calvinists’ candidate with their own, who was eventually the most uncommendable Cyril of Berrhea. The latter had secretly issued a profession of Catholic faith. He had his rival strangled by the Turks on 27 June 1638 and suffered a similar fate himself the following year.
C.’s attempt to convert the Greek Church to Calvinism failed completely. The clearest result of these struggles was to strengthen the influence of Catholic theology among the dissident Greeks and to provide our theologians with new weapons for combating the heresies of the Protestants, which several Eastern councils condemned after C.’s disappearance.
II. WORKS AND DOCTRINES
The principal writing of C. is without doubt his Confession of Faith, in 18 articles, composed by him in Latin and first printed in 1629, then translated by him into Greek (1631) and published in Geneva, together with the original Latin text, in 1633.The Greek original, written in his own hand, is preserved in Geneva. Most Greeks have always wished to deny that this document was the work of C. But he himself declares his Calvinist doctrine, especially in the letter written in 1634 to his friend, Antonio Léger, chaplain of the Dutch embassy in Constantinople.
In C.’s other published and unpublished works, especially in the four collections of homilies which Dositeo, patriarch of Jerusalem, used at the Council of Jerusalem of 1672 in an attempt to demonstrate that C. was not the author of the Confession published under his name, and in the apologia addressed to the “Orthodox” in the parish of the Virgin at Leontopoli, he expresses himself as a Greek “Orthodox,” rather favorably disposed toward Catholic doctrines: he clearly affirms the Immaculate Conception. There are therefore two C.: the Calvinist C. and the “Orthodox” C., according as he addresses his Calvinist friends or his compatriots, indeed the Latins.
Among his other writings may be mentioned: a pamphlet Against the Jews, published at Constantinople in 1627; Dialogue against the Jesuits of Galata, edited by Papadopoulos-Kérameus (St Petersburg 1891, pp. 220–30); Treatises on Penance, the Incarnation, virtues and vices, still unpublished; and the four Collections of homilies mentioned above, all unpublished except for the passages cited by the Synod of Jerusalem of 1672. C. gave his approval to the first translation of the New Testament into vernacular Greek, produced by Massimo di Gallipoli (1st ed. in Geneva in 1638 with the
original text). He sent to Carlo I, king of England, the famous Codex Alexandrinus of the Bible, which dates from the 5th century.