KOPYSTENSKIJ, ZACHARIJA. - The most important South Russian anti-Catholic and anti-Protestant polemicist of the seventeenth century, d. 21 March 1627. From 1624 he was archimandrite of the famous monastery of the “Pečerskaja Lavra,” near Kiev. He fought for the autonomy of his monastery and had many books printed. In 1619, against the errors of the Protestants, he published his Kniga o vere (“Book on Faith”). His principal work, however, is that against those united with the Catholic Church, in which he replies to the Defensio unionis Ecclesiarum (Vilna 1617) of the Uniate archimandrite Leone Krevza (later archbishop of Smolensk, 1625–39).
The work, composed in South Russian (1621–22), is entitled Palinodia, or book in defence of the catholic, holy, apostolic Eastern Church and of the holy patriarchs, and of Russian and Greek Christians. The work, in which he develops, with an anti-scholastic mentality, his “Eastern” conception of the unity of the Church, is divided into four parts. K. attempts to show therein that the Russian Church had never been subject to Rome, and maintains the invalidity of the Union of Brest. The work was published only by P. A. Giltebrandt in Russkaja Istoricka Biblioteka, vol. IV (1878), cols. 313–1200. Another work by K. on the unity of the Church has remained unpublished.