The Orthodox Sermon in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the 17th Century: Some Observations

It has traditionally been assumed that the oral preaching practice of the Orthodox Church in Poland at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries was brought to life by external and mainly Catholic influences. The present article attempts to rethink these influences and offer an explanation not in terms of “mechanical” borrowings and a succumbing of Orthodox theology to Western influences (the concept of “pseudomorphosis” articulated by G. Florovsky), but rather in terms of a creative response to the external confessional challenges of the epoch (the concept of “polymorphism” proposed by G. B. Bercoff). Examples of such a reception are the sample sermons on the church sacraments and funeral sermons included as an annex to Orthodox rituals. Published for the first time in the Vilnius edition in 1621, texts of this kind were legitimized by Metropolitan of Kiev Piotr Mogila in his Euhologion of 1646. Instructive sermons from the Polish version of the Roman Ritual, which go back to the 16th-century teachings on the church sacraments by S. Karnkowski, M. Kromer, and H. Powodowski, were used as models for these Orthodox sample sermons. Although the idea to incorporate such sample sermons in Orthodox rituals was inspired by the Polish tradition, this does not mean that the Orthodox authors also borrowed the instruction texts from the Catholic rituals. As an example of borrowings, the article analyzes the “Kazanie na pogrebe” from the Vilnius Ritual, 1621. Textual analysis of the given sermon shows its compositional and, partially, even its substantial dependence on a sermon written by a Polish Dominican, W. Laudański (1617), and also its familiarity with Augustine’s theological legacy, which was available only in Latin editions.