Cyril and his brother Methodius

Cyril Lucaris was born in Gandhya, Crete, on November 13, 1572, when Crete was part of the Republic of Venice. As a young man, Lucaris traveled throughout Europe, studying theology in Venice, Padua, Wittenberg, and Geneva, which were under the influence of the Reformation. He was inspired by the demands of the Reformation represented by John Calvin and developed a strong antipathy to the Roman Catholic Church.

Lucaris traveled to Poland in 1596, when the Orthodox Church led by the Greek Patriarch of Alexandria, Meltius Perkas, opposed the merger of Kiev and the Church of Brest, which was in communion with the Roman Church. For six years he served as a professor at the Orthodox College in Vilnius (present-day Lithuania).

As the Ottoman Empire suppressed the communion and conversion of the Roman Catholic Jesuit mission to the Orthodox Church, there was a lack of universities teaching the Orthodox faith and Greek. The Roman Catholic Church's colleges and Orthodox priests provided some help to make up for the shortcomings. Lucaris's first act was to establish the Athoniada school, a seminary on Mount Athos. He also sponsored Maxime of Gallipoli to translate the modern Greek translation of the Bible.

Lucaris' goal was to reform the Orthodox Church by adopting the Reformed faith, and to this end he sent many young Greek theologians to study at universities in Switzerland, northern Holland, and England. In 1629, he published his famous Confession of the Christian Eastern Faith, which was a theology that synthesized Orthodox creeds with moderate Calvinism.