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The Church of England and the Greek Church in the Time of Charles I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Hugh Trevor-Roper
Hugh Trevor-Roper*
Affiliation:
Oriel CollegeOxford
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Extract

It is well known that the church of England, in the time of Charles I, showed a special interest in the eastern church. Archbishop Laud patronised Greek and oriental scholarship. As its chancellor, he enriched Oxford University with Greek and oriental manuscripts and made plans to print them. He projected a Greek press at Oxford and achieved one in London. He obliged the king’s printers to print three Greek texts. He also provided the learned press at Oxford with Arabic type. He then sent qualified scholars to the Ottoman empire in search of more manuscripts. Meanwhile he endowed the study of the Hebrew and Arabic tongues.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 15: Religious Motivation Biographical and Sociological Problems for the Church Historian , 1978 , pp. 213 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1978

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References

1 The main centre of Greek studies since the renaissance had been Paris. Although Henry VIII founded regius chairs at Oxford and Cambridge, the subject can hardly be said to have flourished at Oxford until the time of Sir Henry Savile, who, as warden of Merton College and provost of Eton, filled both places with Greek scholars. His famous edition of St Chrysostom, in eight folio volumes, was printed at Eton 1610-10, and the Greek type, which he had obtained from Holland, was afterwards presented by him to Oxford University and used for Laud’s publications. Till then, the university had not been equipped to print Greek texts, although it had the use of a small type, suitable for footnotes, see Carter, Harry, A History of the Oxford University Press (Oxford 1975) pp 25 Google Scholar, 30.

2 Thomas Smith spent the years 1668-71 in Constantinople as chaplain to the ambassador Sir Daniel Harvey. He wrote, in 1672 and 1676, in Latin, two works which he afterwards translated into English as Remarks on the Manners, Religion and Govern ment of the Turks, together with a Survey of the Seven Churches of Asia . . . aud An Account of the Greek Church under Cyril Lucaris with a Relation of his Sufferings and Death. In 1707 he also published Collectanea de Cyrillo Lucario. These works brought him into controversy with the formidable Oratorian biblical scholar Richard Simon. See especially Simon’s, Histoire Critique de la Créance . . . des nations du Levant (Frankfort a/M 1684)Google Scholar; La Créance [de l’Eglise Orientale sur la Transsubstantiation] (Paris 1687).

3 The latest attempt to pin him down is Hering, [Gunnar], [Ökumenisches Patriarchat und Europäische Politik 1620-1638] Wiesbaden 1968 Google Scholar); a work of vast cosmopolitan erudition and fine scholarship. But he remains unpinned, or at least flutters still.

4 Almost all the crucial documents for the religious beliefs of Cyril Lucaris have been either denounced as forgeries or deliberately ignored by historians whose interpretations they might undermine. Three such documents are (1) Cyril’s letter to pope Paul V, of 1608, offering to submit to his authority; (2) Cyril’s ‘Calvinist’ confession of March 1629; (3) Cyril’s letter to Bethlen Gabor, prince of Transylvania, of August 1629, repudiating as ‘sin’ Bethlen’s proposal to impose Calvinism on the Orthodox ‘Vlakhs’ of Transylvania. The Greek Orthodox historian, archbishop Chrysostomos Papa-dopoulos, roundly declares (1) and (2) to be forgeries. See his article on Cyril in Μεγάλη Έλληνική Έγκυκλοπαδϵια (1939) and his article Άπολογΐα Κυρΐλλου τοῦ Λουκάρεως in Νέα Σιών (Jerusalem 1905. The Greek protestant, G. A. Hadjiantoniou ignores (1) and (3), see his Κύριλλoς Λούκαρις (Athens 1954). translated as Protestant Patriarch (1961). The Jesuit G. Hoffmann regards only (1) as binding. (Griechische Patriarchen und römische Päpste, II.i. Patriarch Kyrillus Lukaris und die römische Kirche, OCP 17 (1929). Even Hering, who sees Cyril as a determined Calvinist, seems to me to ease his case by paraphrasing (1) and (3) into insignificance. The actual text, in each case, seems to me much stronger than his paraphrase.

In addition to these three fundamental documents, Papadopoulos has produced two further documents which, if genuine, must be allowed to support his case. They are (4) Cyril’s ‘Orthodox’ confession of 1629 (Κυρίλλου Λουκάρες πΐναξ όμιλιών Alexandria 1913) and (5) Cyril’s encyclical letter of 1634 repudiating the charge of Calvinism and urging theGreek Christians of Ruthenia to stand fast in their faith. I have not seen the authenticity of these documents challenged, and Papadopoulos explicitly states that (5) has never been challenged. I therefore do not understand why Hering (p 196) says that (3) is ‘the one and only document’ on which the defenders of Cyril’s orthodoxy rely.

Not only do historians differ among themselves: they also differ within themselves. Emile Legrand changed his mind so completely about Cyril after reading 130 privately owned letters which he was not allowed to publish, that he tore up the biographical notice which he had prepared for his Bib[liographie] Hel[lénique 17e siècle], 4 (1896) and printed his documents without commentary: an act of despair. Mr C. Th. Dimaras tells me that he too changed his mind completely about Cyril between the first and second editions of his ΊστορΙα της «οελληνικής λογοτεχνΐας; and he adds that the Greek scholar Manuel Gedeon, on discovering new documents, also destroyed what he had written about Cyril.

New documents continue to appear—and old to disappear. The 130 letters seen by Legrand have never been identified. Seven collections of sermons which Hoffmann, in 1940, wrote that he had seen in the Metochion of the Holy Sepulchre at Constantinople have since become invisible. A large volume of Cyril’s draft sermons and correspondence—278 letters, mostly early—emerged in 1970 from the vast treasurehouse of the Phillipps collection (MS Phillipps 7844). It is now in the Rijksuniversiteitsbibliothek, Leiden (MS BPG 122), and has been used by Dr Keetje Rozemond for her publication, Cyrille bucar. Sermons 1598-1602 (Leiden 1974). The compiler of the MS (who evidently wrote in the early eighteenth century) states that Cyril’s correspondence with the Cretan scholar Maximos Margounios, his teacher, who died in 1602, was then preserved in the rich library, in Constantinople, of Nicolas Mavrocordato, prince of Wallachia. The Mavrocordato library was dispersed in the mid-eighteenth century and many of its documents have also disappeared from view; but the correspondence of Cyril and Máximos was in the Metochion of the Holy Sepulchre (MS 463) at the end of the nineteenth century, when it was printed, from a copy, by Legrand, B/b Hel 4, ix.

5 John Jewel, A defence of the Apology for the Churche of Englande (1567).

6 For its publishing history see Theodore K. Rabb, ‘The Editions of Sir Edwin Sandys’s Relation of the State of Religion’, Huntington Library Quarterly 26 (1963).

7 Sandys, George, Relation of a Journey begun A.D. 1610 (1615) pp 89, 105 Google Scholar.

8 Grotius to Casaubon 7 January 1612. Briefwisseling van Hugo Grotius, ed Moelhuysen, P. C. (Hague 1921- ) 1, p 219 Google Scholar.

9 Venier to Bailo of Venice, cited in R. J. Roberts, ‘The Greek Press at Constantinople in 1627 and its antecedents’. Bibliographical Society 1927.

10 PRO MS SP 14/128. English version in [R. Neile], M. Ant. de Dñis Arch-bishop of Spalato, his shiftings in religion (1624) pp 85-8.

11 Cyril to Wtenbogaert 10 Cal Oct. 1613 in Praestantium ac Eruditorum Virorum Epistolae Ecclesiasticae et Theologicae, ed Limborch, Ph. (Amsterdam 1684) p 314 Google Scholar.

12 The earliest surviving letter is that of 1615 which I quote here from Bodl MS Smith 36 fol 13. (It is printed by Timotheus Themelis in Νέσ Σιών 6 1909); but the previous interchange which it presupposes carries the correspondence back to 1612, when Cyril was in Constantinople as έπιτηρτης of the patriarchate, and Sir Paul Pindar reported his struggle against the Jesuits there (MS Smith 36 fol 32).

13 See Savile’s epistle to the Reader, in S. Ioannis Chrysostomi Opera (Eton 1610) 1.

14 ‘μεγάλοΐδ γάρ πελάγεσιν, ώς είπεῖν, каі οϋρεσι μακροῑς είργούμεθα’. The learned archbishop knew his Homer. The letter is in MS Smith 36 fol 33 and is dated January 1615. Thirty one of Gabriel’s Greek MSS were brought for the Ambrosiana by cardinal Borromeo; others are now in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Turin. Some of his works were published in Greek in Venice and would be cited by Richard Simon as evidence that the Greek Church was doctrinally Roman Catholic—see his Fides Ecclesiae Orientalis (Paris 1674). On Gabriel see M. Jugie’s article in DTC 6, and the same writer’s essay in EO 16 (1913).

15 On Critopoulos see especially his ‘Confession’, published n Kimmel, E. j., Monumenta Fidei Ecclesiae Orientalis (Jena 1850)Google Scholar, and the biography by Renieres, M., Μητροφάνηΐ Κριτόπουλ oς κoὶ ol έν Άγγλlα κoὶ Γερμανία φίλοι 1617-28 (Athens 1893)Google Scholar. Further documents are in Bib Hel 5 pp 192-218. I am grateful to the Revd Colin Davey for allowing me to see his unpublished essay on Critopoulos.

16 See Simon, La Créance.

17 Abbot’s complaint against Critopoulos was outwardly over his return journey: he wanted him to return dire« by sea but Critopoulos insisted on going by land—and on trying to scrounge money for the purpose. Abbot’s letters to Roe on this subject are published in The Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe in his Embassy to the Ottoman Porte 1621-8 (1740) pp 102, 251. There may have been a deeper reason for Abbot’s resentment. Critopoulos, by the friends whom he had made in England and by the visits which he was to make in Europe, sufficiently showed his ‘Arminian’, irenist views. In England, apart from Patrick Young, the king’s librarian (who was known as ‘the Patriarch of the Greeks’, being their general patron in London), his chief friend was Meric Casaubon, the son of Isaac Casaubon, who was at Christ Church, Oxford, while Critopoulos was at Balliol. Critopoulos’ correspondence with him is in BM MS Burney 369 fols 48-64. His correspondence with Young is in Bodl MS Smith 38 and is printed in Kemke, J., Patricius Junius (Leipzig 1898) pp 124 Google Scholar seq. On his return journey, Critopoulos was entertained in Hamburg by the family of Lucas Holstenius, the Vatican librarian; stayed in Helmstedt with the reunionist George Calixtus and in Strasbourg with Grotius’ friend Matthias Bernegger; and preached general reunion at Berne and Geneva (Bib Hel 5 pp 202-8).

18 Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe, pp 36, 102.

19 Cyril’s letter to Gabor, Bethlen, in Latin, is printed in Török-Magyarkori Történelmi Emlékek 4 (Pest 1869) pp 137-40Google Scholar. Hering (pp 196-9) seems to me unreasonably to attenuate its force—and indeed to distort its meaning. He suggests that Cyril’s objections were purely political. Cyril himself is quite explicit that they are not: ‘non licet enim nobis ob terrena bona, edam si illa maxima forent, fidem nostram politicis rationibus immolare; salus enim animae praecellit salutem terrenam’.

20 Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe, p 146.

21 For Cyril’s courting of Sweden see the letters to Gustavus Adolphus printed in Monumenta Pietatis et Literaria Virorum illustrium selecta (Frankfurt a/M 1702); also [Pericles] Zerlentes, [Κυρίλλου τοῦ Λουκάρεως προς ‘Αλέξιον Όξενστίερναν έιστολαΐ] in Δελτίον της Ιστορικς; καΐ έθνολογικης έταιρΐας τής Έλλάδος 6 (Athens 1901) pp 88-93. These letters are of 1632, but the contact began earlier: the imperial ambassador stated, in 1643, that, on his arrival in Constantinople in 1629, he had found that Cyril not only favoured Calvinism and the Dutch ‘sondern selber auch Correspondenz und intelligenza hielte mit dem schwedischen König Gustavo, diesen für der Orientalisch Griechische Kirchen defensor und protector erkannte und aussruffte’. Hurmuzaki, Eudoxius, Documente priuitore la Historia Romanilor IV 1600-46 (Bucharest 1882) pp 682-91Google Scholar. Compare also Rikskanseleren Axel Oxenstjernas Shifter och Brefvexeling, 1 (Stockholm 1918) pp 200-1.

22 For Léger see Samuel Baud-Bovy, ‘Antoine Léger, pasteur aux vallées vaudoises du Piedmont et son séjour à Constantinople’ in Revue d’Histoire Suisse 24 (1944).

23 Laud himself was reticent about de Dommis, but his chaplain Peter Heylin, who expressed his views, is remarkably sympathetic to de Dominis’ intellectual position and describes his de República Ecclesiastica as a book ‘never yet answered by the papists, and perhaps unanswerable’ (Cyprianus Anglicus, 1668, p 108).

24 Laud, , Works (1847-60) 2 pp 27 Google Scholar, 29, 385.

25 BM MS Harl 825 contains Pagitt’s letters to Cyril and other Greek and Russian patriarchs, as well as to Polish and Transylvanian protestant magnates. He sent them copies of his own book, Christianographie or the Description of the Multitude and sundry sorts of Christians in the World not subject to the Pope, with their Unitie and how they agree with us in the principall points of difference between us and the Church of Rome (1635), most of which is devoted to the Greek church, and also of the Anglican prayer book in Greek, as well as Laud’s treatise. The treatise may have been Laud’s conference with Fisher as published (pseudonymously) in 1624, and explicitly praised by Pagitt in Christianographie (p 119). In his book, which is dedicated to the Arminian bishop of Ely, Francis White, Pagitt refers to Laud as ‘my honourable patron’ and cites Sir Edwin Sandys’ Relation. This places him in the ‘Arminian’, ecumenical camp, although later, at the age of seventy, he would take the covenant and support the presbyterian church as a bulwark against the sects which he catalogued in his Heresiographie (1645).

26 Briefwisseling van Hugo Grotius, 2 p 240 (Francisais Junius to Grotius, August 1622).

27 Briefwisseling van Hugo Grotius 5 pp 363-4 (Grotius to Laud), p 485 (Grotius to Axel Oxenstjcrna).

28 G. J. Vossii . . . Epistolae (1690) ep 158, Laud, Works, 6, pp 297, 299, 446. Laud’s phrase, ‘ut nunc res sünt apud nos, de ea re ne cogitandum quidem’, shows an almost panic desire to avoid a visit from Grotius. Perhaps he was remembering Marcantonio de Dommis.

29 Lady Roc was the daughter of Laud’s first patron, Sir Thomas Cave of Stanford, Northants. On her return from the east, she brought him a cat from Smyrna.

30 For Laud and Daniel Harvey see Clarendon, , Life (1760) 1 p 17 Google Scholar. Daniel Harvey also acquired MSS—presumably oriental MSS—for Laud in 1638. See Dr R. W. Hunt’s introduction to H. O. Coxe, Bodleian Library Quarto Catalogues II Laudimi Manuscripts, reprint of 1973, p xxxiii. He was the brother of the great Dr Harvey. His son, Sir Daniel, would be ambassador in Constantinople 1668.

31 The volume is now Bodleian Library MS Laud Or 258. The inscription, in Cyril’s hand, is in both Greek and Latin: ‘Cyrillus oecumenicus Patriarcha beatissimo et sapientissimo Archiepiscopo Cantuariensi Gulielmo Laud dono mittit pracsentem librum in signum charitatis fraternae’.

32 An apparently autograph MS of Cyril’s confession, in Greek and Latin, is in the Bodleian Library (MS Bodley 12). It is a presentation copy, stamped with the royal arms of Great Britain. It had belonged to Thomas Smith, who had acquired it from a London bookseller after the restoration. Presumably it had left the royal library during the interregnum.

33 Sealiger, J. J., who died in 1609, referred to these attempts: ‘Graeci non habent typographiam in Graecia . . . vetitum est quidquam excudi sub Turca . . . tant s’en faut qu’il y ait aujourd’huy des livres en Grèce que le Patriarche de Constantinople en envoye querir. Il n’y a pas long temps qu’il demandoit un Joseph’, Scaligerana (Cologne 1667) p 98 Google Scholar, sv Graeci.

34 Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe p 171.

35 Ibid pp 319. 334. 414. 442.

36 Ibid pp 459, 500, 618.

37 For the Greek press, see especially the essay by R. J. Roberts cited above, note 9.

38 Lucas Holstenius to Peiresc, cited by W. D. Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library (1890) p 73.

39 Wood, A., Athenae Oxonienses, ed Bliss, 3 p 306 Google Scholar.

40 In planning his Greek press Laud explicitly stated that it was ‘for the printing of the library manuscripts’—that is, the manuscripts which he had given, or would give, to the Bodleian Library.

41 Cyril to Axel Oxenstjerna 1/11 July 1632, quoted by Zerlentes. The Codex Alexandrinus sent to Charles I also included a series of commentaries on Job, and these were specially printed, on Laud’s orders, for the patriarch (see my Archbishop Laud, p 275). It looks as if Cyril was particularly anxious to provide the Greek church with commentaries on Job—no doubt a valuable text for a suffering church.

42 For Pococke see L. Twells, ‘The Life of Dr. Edward Pococke’ prefixed to the The Theological Works of the learned Dr. Pococke (1740); for Greaves, Thomas Smith, Vita . . . Johannis Cravii (1699) reprinted in his Vitae Quorundam Eruditissimorum et Illustrium Virorum (1707), and T. Birch, Miscellaneous Works of John Greaves (1737), preface.

43 As Greaves put it, ‘Forsan quod in Byzantio desideramus, Athos suppeditabit (Smith, Vita Gravii, 8). The valuable MSS in the monasteries of Mount Athos, and the illiteracy and indifference of their monkish custodians, had been remarked by George Sandys, Relation of a Journey, p 64. On the other hand Pierre Belon, who had visited the monasteries half a century earlier, had found that there was nothing of value there (Les observations de plusieurs singularités et choses memorables trouvées en Grèce, etc. (Paris 1553). They had, in fact, been cleaned out by Janus Lascaris for Lorenzo de Medici 1491-2. But the myth died hard, as is shown by that splendid work, Robert Curzon’s Visit to the Monasteries in the Levant (1849).

44 Greaves’s own account of his adventures and misadventures is given in two letters printed, from the drafts in the Bodleian Library (MS Savile 47 fol 45), in his Miscellaneous Works 2 pp 434-8 and again in Kemke, Patricius Junius pp 83-6. The letters were probably addressed to Peter Turner.

45 If Pococke can be seen as combining Laud’s old liberal ideals with his new collector’s mania in the east, the same can be said of another of Laud’s protégés, Samson Johnson, in the west. Johnson was a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, who was appointed, in 1634, chaplain to Sir Robert Anstruther, Charles I’s ambassador to the German Diet at Frankfurt. He obtained at least ten manuscripts for Laud to present to Oxford (see Bodl MS Laud Gr 39). He was then appointed chaplain to the queen of Bohemia at the Hague. However, Johnson proved too enthusiastic an advocate of ideas which Laud, by then, was seeking discreetly to disown—the ideas of Grotius. He published Grotius’ Defensio Fidti Catholieae at Oxford in 1636; he became a personal friend of Grotius; and in 1639 being denounced as a Socinian by the puritan preacher of the English church at the Hague and by the Dutch Calvinist, Grotius’ great enemy, Rivetus, he imprudently defended himself by stating that he had discussed his ideas with Grotius. This caused Grotius’ brother Willem to warn Grotius (then in Paris) that the cry of Socinianism was again being raised against him. Johnson was forced to. sign a recantation, but suspicion clung to him and Laud felt obUged to condemn him publicly {Briefwisseling van Hugo Grotius 5 pp 468, 515; 9 pp 303, 328). However, this seems to have been a tactical necessity only; for in 1640 we find Laud thanking Johnson for ‘two little books you sent me, especially that of Grotius’ (Bodl MS Eng Lett C 130 fol 143). Laud, by this time preferred manuscripts to ideas.

46 Grotius, H., Animadversiones in Animadversiones A. Riveli (Paris 1642) p 25 Google Scholar; Votum pro Pace Ecclesiastica (np 1642) p 57; Riveti Apologetici... discussio (Irenopoli 1645) pp 86-7. The condemnation of Cyril by the synods of Constantinople (1638) and Jassy (1642) repeated at Jerusalem (1672), effectively excluded Calvinist influences from the Greek church, and in 1701 a Scotch presbyterian could explain the reticence of the Book of Revelation on the subject of the Greek church by the assumption that it was ‘but a limb and a branch of that great apostasy and backsliding from the truth foretold in Revelation’, indistinguishable from popery, and so, ‘it may very well be comprehended under the Whoor, Beast and False Prophet’, Early Letters of Robert Wodrow 1698-1709, Scot Hist Soc (1937) pp 152-3.

47 The continuity of high-church reunionist ideas, retrospectively associated with the name of Cyril Lucaris, can be illustrated by the activities of three men.

  1. (1)

    (1) Isaac Basire was a high-churchman who, in the 1630’s, corresponded with Vossius and valued the Greek fathers only less than the bible. After the civil wars, he refused to comply with the new regime, deposited his family in London with the famous Dr Busby, and set off to convert the surprised peasantry of Greece to high Anglicanism. Among the spiritual weapons which he used, or hoped to use, was the prayer book in demotic Greek and the confession of Cyril. He returned to England, from Transylvania, in 1660 and spent the rest of his life as archdeacon of Northumberland under the congenial rule of bishop Cosin. See N. W. Darnell, Life and Correspondence of Isaac Basire (1831).

  2. (2)

    (2) After the restoration, Thomas Smith’s studies of the eastern church in general, and of Cyril Lucaris in particular, (see above n2) were envisaged by him as part of a programme of general reunion. See his Pacifick Discourse of the Causes and Remedies of the Differences about Religion which distract the Peace of Christendom (1688).

  3. (3)

    (3) Paul Rycaut, who was secretary to the ambassador, Lord Winchelsea, and to the Levant Company in Constantinople from 1660 to 1667 and consul in Smyrna from 1667 to 1677, was also a general reunionist and thought that the process could begin with a union of the church of England with the Greek and Armenian churches. As precursors, he named Cassander, Melanchthon, Bucer, James I and— Cyril Lucaris. See his Present State of the Greek and Armenian Churches (1679), written at the suggestion of Charles II.