Ivan Vyshenskyi

Ivan Wyschenskyj (Ukrainian: Іван Вишенський, scientific transliteration: Ivan Vyšens'kyj, Russian: Иван Вишенский; * 1550 in Sudowa Wyschnja far from Lviv, † after 1620 on Mount Athos ) was a Ruthenian monk and scholar. He is considered one of the most important representatives of the Orthodox polemical literature.

Life

Little is known about the life Wyschenskyjs. What is certain is that he spent his youth in a certain time in Lutsk, being suspected that he worked as a secretary to a Ukrainian princes there. In the last quarter of the 16th century he went to Mount Athos, which was the center of Orthodox monasticism at the time. He remained there, only interrupted by a stay in Ukraine 1604-1606, until his death.

Services

Wyschenskyj was a defender of orthodoxy and an opponent of Catholicism and the Uniate faith. He reached through missives from Athos in the confessional conflicts that had led to the 1596 Union of Brest and thus the emergence of the Uniate Church, and argued in favor of the orthodoxy. In particular, with the Jesuit Piotr Skarga, a supporter of the Union, he delivered himself violent clashes that took place in a very polemical form. The language in which Wyschenskyj wrote, was not - as generally common among Slavic-Orthodox scholars - Church Slavonic, but Ruthenian. Together with Ivan Uschewytsch and Meletij Smotryzkyj he may be considered one of the most important scholars who used this language.