Lucaris, Cyril

▪ patriarch of Constantinople

Greek  Kyrillos Loukaris  

born Nov. 13, 1572, Candia, Crete, republic of Venice [now in Greece]

died June 27, 1638, aboard a ship in the Bosporus [Turkey]

      patriarch of Constantinople who strove for reforms along Protestant Calvinist lines. His efforts generated broad opposition both from his own communion and from the Jesuits.

      Lucaris pursued theological studies in Venice and Padua, and while studying further in Wittenberg and Geneva he came under the influence of Calvinism and developed a strong distaste for Roman Catholicism. In 1596 the patriarch of Alexandria, Meletios Pegas, sent Lucaris to Poland to lead the Orthodox opposition to the Union of Brest-Litovsk, which had sealed a union of the Orthodox metropolitanate of Kiev with Rome. For six years Lucaris served as rector of the Orthodox academy in Vilnius (now in Lithuania). In 1602 he was elected patriarch of Alexandria, and in 1620 he was elected patriarch of Constantinople.

      As patriarch, Lucaris sought to further his Calvinistic purposes by sending young Greek theologians to universities in Holland, Switzerland, and England. It was one of these students, Metrophanes Kritopoulos, the future patriarch of Alexandria, who discovered the Confession of Faith, which had been written by Lucaris in Latin and published in Geneva in 1629. In its 18 articles Lucaris professed virtually all the major doctrines of Calvinism; predestination, justification by faith alone, acceptance of only two sacraments (instead of seven, as taught by the Eastern Orthodox Church), rejection of icons, rejection of the infallibility of the church, and so on. In the Orthodox church the Confession started a controversy that culminated in 1672 in a convocation by Dosítheos, patriarch of Jerusalem, of a church council that repudiated all Calvinist doctrines and reformulated Orthodox teachings in a manner intended to distinguish them from both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.

      Lucaris was forced to resign five times through the interventions of French and Austrian ambassadors to the Ottoman sultan Murad IV (reigned 1623–40). His return to patriarchal office was effected on each occasion by the help of British and Dutch diplomats. He was ultimately denounced before the sultan as a traitor attempting to incite the Cossacks against the Turks, and Lucaris was condemned to death and strangled by his Ottoman guards.

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