HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

VYSENS 'KYJ'S ГОЕА OF REFORM 65audience which encompassed all levels of society but to break down thenotion of a divided humanity. In this regard, Vysens'kyj's fierce condemnationof the luxurious life-style of the Rus' bishops could easily have reliedon a peculiar vision of John Chrysostom which incorporated the churchfathers' denunciation of wealth, status, neglect of the poor, and generallyacquisitive character of contemporary society. 124I have alluded to the importance of Vysens'kyj's vision of true believersas oppressed and persecuted in a world of "structure" 125 and the apostolicrole of the monks in that world. Yet equally important for him was the propheticrole of the monks. As in the case of Chrysostom, the Athonite monkseems to have endeavored to go beyond the monks and organized monasticismand advance a movement of broader and more radical reform for allChristians. Yet his focus on the "ordeal" of Rus' inevitably involved a projectioninto a future embodying an ideal state of being. In opposition to thehierarchical and sacerdotal institutions existing in the Polish-LithuanianCommonwealth, Vysens'kyj presented an eschatological vision of theChurch. In addressing his Ruthenian countrymen, the Athonite monk feltobliged to insist that the Church could no longer be linked with the terrestrialkingdom and natural order; rather, it had to offer itself as an anticipationof the immanent Kingdom of God which would come at the end of theworld. As in the past, only the monks, having separated themselves from asecularized Church and having purified themselves in the mountains, couldengage in a struggle with the Antichrist for the purification of the Church inthe face of the imminently approaching end of time. And this was becausethe monks not only were anticipating the life to be shared by all in theKingdom of God but also were seeking to approximate the pure form of lifewhich had been intended before man's fall.communitas," both defined as elements of a "deep recurring structure in Ukrainian culture andliterature" (ibid., pp. 793-94), Grabowicz's recent study has alluded to the usefulness of structuralanthropological models, such as those provided by Victor Turner in The Ritual Process.Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, 1977), in the study of pre-modem authors such asVysens'kyj who operated in periods of profound societal crisis and transformation. Some ofthese models have already been successfully employed by Grabowicz in the study of modemUkrainan literature; see his pathbreaking book, The Poet as Mythmaker: A Study of SymbolicMeaning in Taras Sevíenko (Cambridge, Mass., 1982). See fn. 125 below.124G. Florovsky, "St. John Chrysostom: The Apostle of Charity," in Aspects of Church History,Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, 4 (Belmont, 1975), pp. 79-87.125Here I have in mind the concepts of "structure" and "communitas" first formulated byTurner, that is, the contrast which "is posited between the notion of society as a differentiated,segmented system of structural positions (which may or may not be arranged in a hierarchy),and society as a homogeneous, undifferentiated whole" (Dreams, Fields, and Metaphors,[Ithaca and London, 1974], p. 237). See fh. 123 above.