Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (43 page)

‘Voltairian’ or ‘Voltaire-thinker’ or simply the name of Voltaire became the symbolic targets of those Greeks who resisted the Enlightenment. Even some of those initially receptive to Enlightenment ideas turned against him. Voúlgaris in his younger years had praised Voltaire’s ‘surpassing reputation as a thinker’. In his fifties he was more doubtful, writing that ‘Voltaire is always Voltaire, mixing the good and the bad in his works, and combining what should be accepted and praised with what deserves rejection and blame.’ By his seventies, now a retired bishop living in a monastery, his change of heart was complete, and in 1790 he condemned Voltaire as ‘one of the great and famous names for impiety’.
¹³

In virtually every year of the 1790s and early 1800s a pamphlet or other publication appeared that attacked the Enlightenment in general and Voltaire in particular. They might simply pour scorn on Voltaire, for example an attack on a supporter of Voltaire that begins: ‘Look at this
strange miracle! Look at this monstrous novelty! Here is a little man rotten with desire to support the dogmas of Voltaire.’
¹⁴
In the use of mockery the writer was clearly no match for Voltaire himself. Other writers simply used crude invective. One characterised Voltaire, in a string of insulting compound adjectives, as a wholly impure, extreme atheist, to be spat at, thrice cursed, hated by God, lecherous and mad. Another accused Voltaire, a man of decently restrained appetites, not only of living in debauchery and being a lascivious man of violent passions, but also of promoting dissolute behaviour in others. The writer asked why people followed Voltaire, and answered ‘Because his philosophy is profitable to the indulgence of the belly and those parts under the belly.’
¹⁵

Other criticisms were more measured. The ideas of the Enlightenment were regarded, with justice, as weakening attachment to the Orthodox Church, and a phanariot in Constantinople derided in verse this tendency among the city’s sophisticated young Greeks:

Other writers accepted that followers of Voltaire were theists and not atheists, but argued that theists did not believe that God intervened in the affairs of the world, and so theism and atheism were in effect the same thing. A further objection to the Enlightenment was that it looked for proofs of faith, but faith was not a matter of proof, like geometry. Finally, one of the most powerful critics of the followers of the Enlightenment summarised his three objections to them: they were lovers of wisdom rather than lovers of Christ, they were lovers of men rather than lovers of God, and earth centred rather than heaven centred.

The author of these last comments was Athanásios Pários (1725–1813), one of the most vocal upholders of the traditional Church. Pários had been head of the school on Mt Athos after the departure of Voúlgaris, and spent the last 25 years of his life as head of the school on Chíos. He became one of the leading spokesmen for the movement known as the
kollivádhes
, which had originated on Mt Athos in 1774, during Pários’ time there. The movement began from a debate over the correct day for memorial services for the dead, at which a confection of boiled wheat and sugar (
kólliva
) was distributed – hence the movement’s name. The monks of the hermitage of St Anne decided to hold memorials for the dead on a Sunday, instead of the traditional Saturday, and the
kollivádhes
backed the old practice. Their support for tradition was soon extended into other areas such as favouring frequent participation in the communion service, strict adherence to time-honoured church rituals, and of course opposition to Enlightenment ideas. They called for a return to the beliefs of the early Church, and in 1782 published in Venice the
Philokalía
(Love of Beauty), a 1,200-page collection of the writings of 38 of the early Church fathers on the theory and practice of prayer. The
Philokalía
was one of the few Greek publications from this period to have a more lasting influence. Republished after a long interval in the 1970s, it is credited with stimulating the revival of Greek monasticism in the late twentieth century.

Pários’ first writings in the early 1790s were attacks on Kora
ḯ
s and the French Revolution. In 1798 appeared the
Christian Apology
, anonymous but almost certainly written by Pários. This was one of the first publications from the patriarchate’s newly established printing press. The Church had realised, perhaps belatedly, that they needed their own printing facility to counter the ideas disseminated by the presses of Europe. The first edition of the
Christian Apology
of 1798 concentrated on condemning the French Revolution, and later editions in 1800 and 1805 widened the attack with denunciations of the Enlightenment and a vigorous defence of traditional religion.

Pários’ most celebrated work was his
Response
, published in Trieste in 1802. Its extended title summarises Pários’ views: ‘Response to the phrenetic zeal of the philosophers who come from Europe; exposing the vanity and folly of their lamentable efforts exerted upon our Race and teaching what is the real and true philosophy. To which is added a salutary admonition to those who recklessly send their sons to Europe on business.’
¹⁷
The only element to be added is Pários’ rejection of the ancient Greek philosophers, in total opposition to Kora
ḯ
s. Pários was in a difficulty here. He could hardly condemn their ideas wholesale since the traditional Church that he championed also upheld the teaching of Aristotle, so Pários confined himself, not very convincingly, to a condemnation of their supposedly immoral lives.

As the ideological debate continued the Church began to speak with its own voice rather than through its supporters. In 1793 the patriarch Neóphitos VII published an encyclical which thundered that ‘the malign and misanthropic devil has devised in our time, as instruments of total impiety and atheism, the Voltaires.’
¹⁸
This was followed by the
Paternal Exhortation
of 1798 issued by the current patriarch Grigórios V. It was presented as a statement by Ánthimos the patriarch of Jerusalem, but Ánthimos was on his death bed and the author may well have
been Pários or even Grigórios himself. The
Paternal Exhortation
rejected Rousseau’s theory of man’s primitive state of nature, and reasserted the view that man was expelled by God from the Biblical paradise because of sin, and would be readmitted to it in the next life only after enduring the tribulations and resisting the temptations of this one. The devil, responsible for all temptations, had ‘devised another artifice and pre-eminent deception, namely the much vaunted system of liberty’, but the only true liberty was ‘to live according to divine and human laws’. Therefore the Christian flock was enjoined to ‘guard steadfastly your ancestral faith and, as followers of Jesus Christ, resolutely give your obedience to the civil government’.
¹⁹
So religious belief was explicitly linked to submission to Turkish rule.

The
Paternal Exhortation
drew a forceful reply from Kora
ḯ
s, which he entitled the
Brotherly Exhortation
, and in which he proclaimed ‘the inalienable right of the oppressed to seek every means to throw off the yoke of tyranny’. It was in 1798 that Rígas died, and in a telling contrast Kora
ḯ
s pointed out that just as the
Paternal Exhortation
was being written Rígas and his followers were being martyred: ‘Perhaps at that very moment the knife of the executioner was descending on their sacred heads, their noble Greek blood was flowing from their veins, and their spirits were rising up to join the blessed souls of all who had died for freedom.’
²⁰

In 1819 came the encyclical, by Grigórios, now patriarch again after an interval, entitled
Enlightenment as the Handmaid of Irreligion
, which attacked Enlightenment thinking as a whole. What is the point, asked the patriarch, of the young learning about ‘numbers, and algebra, and cubes and cube roots and atoms and vacuums and whirlpools and other monstrous things if, as a consequence, they are ignorant in the things of religion, injurious to the state, false patriots and unworthy of their ancestral calling’.
²¹

Two years later the first moves of the Greek rising brought even stronger patriarchal support for the established government and condemnation of those who opposed it. In early March 1821 Alexander Ipsilántis, a Greek officer in the Russian army, led a mixed force of Greeks and Russians from southern Russia into the Danubian principality of Moldavia to raise revolt against the Turks. Grigórios immediately issued an anathema against the revolt, signed by himself and 22 bishops. The anathema specifically named Ipsilántis, and was in savage terms. The powers that be were ordained by God, it declared, and whoever objected to this empire, which was vouchsafed to them by God, rebelled against God’s command. Ipsilántis and his supporters were therefore guilty of ‘a foul, impious and foolish work’, which had provoked ‘the
exasperation of our benevolent powerful empire against our compatriots and fellow subjects, hastening to bring common and general ruin on the whole nation’. All Church and secular leaders were to shun the rebels and do all they could to undermine the rebellion. As for the rebels themselves, ‘may they be excommunicated and be cursed and be not forgiven and be anathematised after death and suffer for all eternity.’
²²

It would be easy to regard Grigórios and his supporters as simply obscurantist in their opposition to Enlightenment ideas, but one should remember the circumstances of the time. The
Paternal Exhortation
denouncing liberty was issued in 1798, nine years after the storming of the Bastille and the symbolic start of the French Revolution. That revolution was seen as the child of Enlightenment thinking, and its slogan was headed by the word
Liberté
. The French Revolution was violently anti-religion and anti-Church; religion was rejected as superstition, churches were shut, all church property was taken over by the state, and priests denounced as enemies of the republic. In November 1793 the Paris Commune held the so-called Festival of the Goddess of Reason, a sort of drunken pop concert at which the people cavorted in priests’ clothes and parodied religious processions. In the light of all this, to describe the Enlightenment as the handmaid of irreligion was a pretty reasonable view.

Grigórios might also be accused of servile submission to Ottoman rule, but the doctrine of the Christian’s duty to obey authority was a very old one. St Paul made it absolutely clear in his Epistle to the Romans: ‘Let every soul be subject unto higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.’
²³
St Paul’s doctrine, of course, applied to all higher powers, not just Christian ones – there were no Christian rulers in St Paul’s day. The patriarch had gone further than St Paul in saying explicitly that Christians should obey the civil government whether it was just or not, but this doctrine too was an established one. In the sixteenth century Luther and Calvin had said the same thing and they were Church reformers, not Church diehards.

Aside from religious teaching, the patriarch had a secular reason for supporting Ottoman rule. This was the contract of 1453 between Mehmed the Conqueror and the then patriarch Yennádhios. By this contract, in essence, the Sultan guaranteed to the Greeks and other Christians freedom of religion, including education, and in return the patriarch guaranteed the good behaviour of his flock. Whether written down or not, in practice this contract, by the time of the war of independence, had been observed by Ottoman rulers for nearly four centuries. What right had the patriarch to go back now on his side of the bargain?

Furthermore, there were severe penalties for the Greeks if they broke the contract. This had been shown by the bloodily suppressed Orlov revolt of 1770. So the patriarch’s fear that a new revolt would, as he said, ‘bring common and general ruin on the whole nation’ was not just speculation. It was based on harsh and recent fact.

Grigórios could not have done more to condemn revolution and support the Turkish government, but this did not save him from Turkish retribution. On Easter Sunday 1821, only a month after the outbreak of rebellion in the Peloponnese, he was hanged on the Sultan’s orders from the hasp on the central doors of the patriarchal palace. According to the account of the British Embassy chaplain, ‘Grigórios’ person, attenuated by abstinence and emaciated by age, had not weight sufficient to cause immediate death. He continued for a long time in pain, which no friendly hand dared to abridge, and the darkness of night came on before his last convulsions were over.’
²⁴

The Ottoman authorities gave their reasons for executing Grigórios in the document of some 500 words that was attached, as was customary, to the hanging corpse. It was impossible, said the statement, to regard the patriarch as uninvolved in the revolution; to all appearances he was a secret participant in it; in fact he was the prime cause of the disturbances, bringing harm to the government and the imminent total destruction of the Greek people. Hence his execution. But no evidence was offered to substantiate the progression from ‘not uninvolved’ in the revolution to ‘secret participant’ to ‘prime cause’, nor was any ever found. The most likely interpretation is that the execution of Grigórios was a demonstration, prompted by the hawks among the Sultan’s advisers, that the government would stop at nothing to crush the Greek rebellion, even the killing of the titular head of the Greek community.