From the Jesuits to the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy: Education, Teaching, and the Sources of Learning of Stefan Yavorskyi

The article reconstructs the early stage of Stefan Yavorskyi’s biography, showing how the education he received at the Jesuit colleges of the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth shaped him as an intellectual and as a professor of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Drawing on a wide range of manuscript and printed sources, the study clarifies his origins, the period of his studies in Lviv, Lublin, Vilnius, and Poznań, and the confessional barriers faced by an Orthodox student in Catholic institutions. It examines his courses in rhetoric, philosophy, and theology, outlines the sources on which he relied, and analyzes his methods of working with them. Yavorskyi’s courses, theological treatises, and sermons reveal the formative influence of Catholic learning: he drew extensively — often implicitly — on Jesuit authors. By adapting Catholic intellectual heritage to the needs of the Orthodox Church, Yavorskyi continued the tradition of Kyiv’s theologians of the 17th and first half of the 18th centuries, becoming one of its most creative representatives. The article demonstrates that, despite Kyiv’s growing political and ecclesiastical integration into the Muscovite state, the city remained part of a broader European intellectual space, maintaining its cultural plurality.