Cyril Lucaris, Patriarch of Constantinople

CYRIL LUCARIS, Patriarch of Constantinople. - Born in Candia on the island of Crete, on 13 Nov. 1572, killed in Constantinople on 27 June 1638.

I. LIFE

C. had a very turbulent life. He studied in Venice and Padua; having become a monk, he changed his name from Constantine to C. When his studies were finished he went to Constantinople, at the invitation of his protector, Meletius Pigas, patriarch of Alexandria. He was already a priest in 1594. Promoted 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 power the union of the Ruthenians of Poland with Rome, decided at the Synod of Brest-Litovsk (1595). To this end he approved the political agreement concluded by Prince Ostrogski with the Protestants, in 1599, and found himself accused of Calvinism. In 1601 he left Poland, made a tour of his homeland and returned to Egypt, where Meletius Pigas died shortly afterwards (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, the brief interruption of one month (Jan.-Feb. 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 the years 1620 and 1638.

This series of depositions and reinstatements is explained by the Turkish habit of awarding the patriarchal throne to the prelate who offered the most money and by a kind of secret diplomatic battle with a religious aim, to which the ambassadors of the Catholic courts and of the Protestant courts at the Sublime Porte devoted themselves. On one side there were the French, Austrian and Venetian ambassadors; on the other the English and Dutch ambassadors. During his Alexandrian patriarchate, and even before, C., secretly deserting Greek "orthodoxy," had assimilated the Calvinist doctrines which he intended to introduce into the Greek Church, and, as early as 1629, there appeared at Geneva, under his name, through the agency of the Dutch ambassador at the Sublime Porte Cornelius van Haga, a brief confession of faith in Latin, in which the principal dogmas of Calvin were gathered together. From then on he had a current account with the English and Dutch ambassadors, who financed his candidacy at every new deposition. Against the Calvinists' candidate the Catholic ambassadors set up their own, who was, in the end, the far from commendable Cyril of Berrhoea. The latter had secretly made a profession of the Catholic faith. He had his rival strangled by the Turks on 27 June 1638 and himself suffered a similar fate the following year.

C.'s attempt to convert the Greek Church to Calvinism failed entirely. The clearest result of these struggles was to strengthen the influence of Catholic theology among the dissident Greeks and to furnish 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

C.'s principal writing is undoubtedly 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, with the original Latin text, in 1633.

The Greek original, written in his own hand, is preserved in Geneva. Most Greeks have always wanted 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, Antoine Léger, chaplain of the Dutch embassy at Constantinople.

In C.'s other published and unpublished works, especially in the four collections of homilies, which Dositheus, patriarch of Jerusalem, used at the Council of Jerusalem of 1672 to try to demonstrate that C. was not the author of the Confession published under his name, and in the apology addressed to the "orthodox" in the parish of the Virgin at Leontopolis, he expresses himself as a Greek "orthodox," rather favorable to Catholic doctrines: he clearly affirms the Immaculate Conception. There are therefore two C.'s: the Calvinist C. and the "orthodox" C., depending on whether he addresses his Calvinist friends or his compatriots, indeed the Latins.

Among his other writings are noted: 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, the virtues and the vices, still unpublished, 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, made by Maximus of Gallipoli (1st ed. in Geneva in 1638 with the original text). He sent to Charles I, king of England, the famous Codex Alexandrinus of the Bible, which is of the 5th century.

Martino Jugie