Abstract

As we begin to cover the events that immediately preceded the proclamation of the unification act of 1596, we do not think it necessary to prove how complex and responsible the case is. After all, despite the multifaceted nature of the phenomenon, which will later be called the Union of Brest, it is difficult for the researcher to abstract from its consequences, which had a significant impact on the course of the church and religious process of the last four centuries in its regional and Christian community as a whole. It is not easy to understand the religious semantics of this fateful event, which was closely connected with the complex of concepts of state and cultural content. Therefore, we emphasize the self-evident: in the systemic order, Orthodox hypodynamism, which had its worst manifestation in the cultural inferiority of local self-sufficiency, was bound to become a brake on mature church-religious transformations.