by David Brewer
The visitors’ impressions of the Athenians were widely variable. De la Guilletière, dismissive as usual, remarked on ‘the dullness and muddiness of the Genius of the Modern Greeks’, and the Marquis de Nointel scorned them as ‘surrounded in ruins and ignorance’. But a more usual view, as expressed by George Wheler, was that ‘their bad Fortune hath not been able to take from them what they have by Nature; that is, much Subtlety, or Wit.’11 Athens had one of only three public schools – as opposed to church seminaries – in the Ottoman domains, the other two being at Sinop on the Black Sea and at Constantinople. The Athenians had a representative committee of eight, like those in Thessalonika and elsewhere, and the committee successfully pursued Greek grievances at Constantinople.
Athenian subtlety and wit could become ridiculous, according to de la Guilletière. He claimed to have listened to a long harangue by an educated monk declaring that all the world’s achievements were in fact Greek. According to this monk Turkish successes were due to the Greeks because the janissaries recruited through the devshirme were Greek (well, some of them). Even the Sultans were Greeks because the father of Osman, the first of the line, was a Byzantine prince. Somewhat paradoxically, the monk also blamed western Europe for not uniting to defeat those same Greek-descended Turks.
The visitors discovered a sharp intellect in the Athenians partly because that was what they expected to find. St Paul had said that the Athenians ‘spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing’, and surely, the visitors thought, the descendants of Plato and Aristotle must be clever. But it was the monuments and remains of antiquity that dominated the travellers’ perceptions, above all the Akropolis, which to this day remains both an architectural wonder and a powerful icon. When in 1834 Athens became the capital of independent Greece the Akropolis became the symbol both of the city and of the new state, a role for which it was uniquely appropriate. It was a Greek building as opposed to the Italian architecture of the previous capital, Navplion. It was visible for miles around. Most importantly, it was a summary in stone of Greek history, built by the genius of ancient Greece, converted from a pagan temple to an Orthodox church by the Byzantines, to a Catholic cathedral by the Franks and to a mosque by the Turks. It had been wrecked in 1687 by a Venetian cannon shot, and later despoiled by Elgin and others. In short, the Parthenon was a continuing memorial to both the achievements and the vicissitudes of Greece throughout the centuries.
10
The Greek Church
For anyone brought up in the Anglican tradition of the Church of England, the Greek Orthodox Church is at first sight quite familiar. There is a similar hierarchy of archbishops, bishops, senior clergy and parish priests. As in England, great churches are found in Greek towns, and village churches dot the Greek countryside, though the architecture and decorations of the churches of the two faiths are interestingly different. Both Anglicans and Orthodox attach great importance to their services for baptism, marriage and funerals, and both celebrate Christmas and Easter in splendid and often colourful ceremonies. Both Churches have originally separated from the Roman Catholic Church, which they continue to view with wariness if not antipathy, although the immediate causes of the original split – the filioque phrase for the Greeks, Anne Boleyn for the English – could hardly have been more dissimilar.
Beneath the similarities, however, there are major differences. In Greek Orthodox services the congregation plays little active part, aside from a few responses such as to the priest’s ‘Chrístos anésti’ (‘Christ is risen’) at Easter. There is no recitation or chanting of psalms, no cheerful or even boisterous singing of hymns as in an Anglican service. The priest alone conducts the Greek service, and for the members of the congregation the important thing is their presence, pious for some and perhaps social for others, rather than their overt participation. Moreover the sermon, such a central part of many Anglican services, is less important in a Greek church, and this points to another difference: the Greek Church puts relatively less emphasis on moral guidance and instruction, on sin, guilt and redemption, or on good works and social justice.
This derives from the Orthodox tradition, dating from Byzantine times, of the true purpose of religion: communion with God. The tradition stems from the monks, clerics and mystics of the early Church, and is based on prayer. One of the earliest of the Church fathers, Evagrius of Pontus, laid down in the late fourth century what not to do when praying: do not try to visualise God, either within you or outside you. ‘Do not think’, he wrote, ‘of the divinity in you when you pray nor let your intellect have the impression of any form. You must go as immaterial into the immaterial, and you will understand.’1
The most common metaphor for true communion with God was through the experience of Light, not earthly light but Divine Light. Another fourth-century monk and later bishop, St Gregory of Nazianzus, wrote of being carried by heavenly contemplation into the secret darkness of the heavenly tabernacle to be blinded by the Light of the Trinity. The metaphor was challenged in the fourteenth century by the theologian Barlaam of Calabria, who wrote: ‘I must confess that I do not know what this Light is. I only know that it does not exist.’ He was answered by his contemporary Gregory Palamas, who saw God’s grace as necessary for experiencing this Light. ‘He who participates in this grace’, he wrote, ‘becomes himself to some extent the Light. He is united to the Light and by that Light he is made fully aware of all that remains invisible to those who have not this grace. The pure in heart see God Who, being Light, dwells in them and reveals Himself to those that love Him.’2 If prayer is to lead to this experience it must be one that is as simple and undistracting as possible, exemplified by the prayer dating from the earliest church and known as the Jesus Prayer. This consisted simply of the words ‘Kyrie eleison’ (‘Lord have mercy on us’), or the single words ‘God’, ‘Lord’ or ‘Jesus’ constantly repeated.
In view of these differences it is not surprising that there can be a gulf of incomprehension between the Church of England, young (less than 500 years old) and much concerned with behaviour, and the Orthodox Church with its much longer history and ultimately based on contemplation.
However, there is another Orthodox tradition that seems to run directly counter to this, and can also surprise Anglicans. This is the involvement of the Greek clergy in politics, not in this case political issues, such as campaigns against injustice or poverty, but political office. In the chaotic Greek conditions at the end of 1944 Archbishop Dhamaskinós became for fifteen months the Regent of Greece as a result of a hurriedly summoned conference in Athens, chaired by Churchill, in an unheated room lit only by hurricane lamps. This was in spite of Churchill’s earlier expression of the traditional Anglican distrust of the clergy in politics, calling Dhamaskinós ‘a pestilent priest, a survival from the Middle Ages’. Some years later, when Cyprus became independent in 1959, it was another archbishop, Makários, who was elected as first president of the new republic.
This political tradition too goes back to Byzantine times, when there was a debate, lasting throughout the Byzantine centuries and ultimately inconclusive, about the relative positions of the Emperor and the patriarch. The ideal was unruffled harmony between them: at the end of the ninth century the Emperor Leo VI, in a statement drafted by the patriarch, maintained that ‘the state, like man, is formed of members, and the most important are the Emperor and the patriarch. The peace and happiness of the empire depends on their accord.’3 But who took precedence if the accord broke down? One of the early church fathers, St John Christóstomos, had maintained that ‘the domain of royal power is one thing and the domain of priestly power another; and the latter prevails over the former.’4 But there were occasions when the Emperor replaced the patriarch, though the appointment of the patriarch was officially in the hands of the Holy Synod, and other occasions when the patriarch excommunicated the Emperor. Though the debate was never conclusively resolved it was accepted that the patriarch had a crucial political role
as well as a general spiritual one.
As we have seen in Chapter 3, the patriarch’s political function continued after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. In some ways it was extended. The patriarch was now responsible to the Ottoman authorities for the good behaviour of his flock and for ensuring that they paid their taxes to the state. These patriarchal powers and responsibilities were not limited to the Greek members of his church. They extended in principle to all the Orthodox churches that then or later were part of the Ottoman Empire: the patriarchates of Alexandria, Jerusalem and Antioch and the Slav Orthodox Churches within the empire, and outside it even the Russian, albeit nominally. Patriarchal rather than Turkish courts were to deal with all cases where only the Orthodox were involved, an adaptation of the Byzantine system of episcopal courts for cases involving clergy. The church was also responsible for education. But there was no longer any question of patriarch and secular ruler being equal, let alone of the patriarch being pre-eminent. The patriarch was a servant of the state of which the Sultan was the head.
During the centuries of Ottoman rule the Orthodox Church had three principal functions. It was specifically given the responsibility for education. It took upon itself the task of preserving the Greek language unchanged. And it was assigned the role, perhaps more retrospectively than at the time, of maintaining Greek identity, or – to avoid that elastic and disputed term – the Greeks’ sense of what it meant to be Greek.
The purpose of medieval Greek education was not to provide vocational training in the skills of different trades, and still less to give pupils an understanding of the wider world. It was designed to prepare a few for the priesthood, and the many simply to be able to follow the church services. Education might be free from interference by the Ottoman rulers, but it was constrained by the limitations that the Church itself imposed. Thus for higher education there was only the Patriarchal Academy in Constantinople to train the clergy, and it concentrated naturally enough on Church doctrine. Other academies may have been set up later in large cities such as Thessalonika, but we know little of them and they seem to have been short lived.
Otherwise there was only teaching in the villages, and it is an enduring myth that these classes had to be held in secret. Greeks of today still remember the children’s rhyme beginning ‘Phengaráki mou lambró’:
Little moon, so bright and cool,
Light me on my way to school,
Where to study I am free,
And God’s word is taught to me.
Why, the mystified child would ask, should it be the moon which lights the way to school, and the child would be told that because of Turkish oppression children had to creep from their homes at night to learn their language and religion secretly from the local papás.
Unlike most myths, this one has a known origin. In 1888 Nikólaos Gízis exhibited a painting, still widely reproduced, entitled ‘A Greek School in the Time of Slavery (Dhoulía)’. It showed a priest in a candle-lit church crypt teaching a surrounding group of children, a composition of dominant adult and obedient youngsters that Gízis often used. Some ten years later Iánnis Polémis published a poem based on this picture, and gave his poem the title ‘The Secret School’.5 The poem has a stirring conclusion. From Christ’s image in the dome of the church, it proclaims, and from the immortal works of ancient Greece, and out of the enforced silence of slavery’s noose around the neck,
A deep and resonant psalm is heard, as from another world,
And each one trembles as the priest, in strong prophetic voice,
Cries ‘Do not live in the shadows, do not let darkness win,
For freedom like the morning star will bring the end of night.’
That the school had to be secret is no more than implied in the text of the poem and ‘Secret School’ is explicit only in the title. It seems that it was the wish to believe that schools had to be secret, as further proof of Turkish tyranny, rather than any evidence for them, which prompted generations of Greeks to accept the story. The myth has been an enduring one: until a few years ago secret schools featured in history lessons for primary- and secondary-school pupils, and only when they reached university were they taught that secret schools had never existed. The reality was much more mundane: village classes were held at night because the children, and probably often the papás too, were working in the fields all day.
Reports of the state of education in Greece, from Greeks and foreigners alike, were universally gloomy. It was hardly flourishing to start with. Yennádhios himself wrote, ‘The state of education is pitiable,’ and lamented that priests were few in number, and that even those were unfit and uneducated.6 A century after the fall of Constantinople Martin Crusius wrote: ‘In all Greece studies nowhere flourish. They have no public academies or professors, except for the most trivial schools in which the boys are taught to read the Horologion, the Octoëchon, the Psalter, and other books which are used in the liturgy. But amongst the priests and monks those who really understand these books are very few indeed.’7 Crusius received a letter from an official of the patriarchate estimating the total number of Greek students: ten in Constantinople, four in Chíos, twenty in the Peloponnese, and barely fifty in all the Greek communities put together.
It was Italy, and in particular Venice and Padua (part of the Venetian Empire from 1406) that kept Greek education alive. In the decades after the fall of Constantinople, as most of Greece came under Ottoman rule, Venice became a magnet for Greek students, mainly of course from Venetian Crete and Cyprus. In 1500 Venice established a new academy for humanist studies, to teach exclusively in Greek, and a third of the scholars were Greeks. Cardinal Vissaríon (Bessarion), a fifteenth-century Orthodox bishop who converted to Catholicism, left his library of some 800 Greek books to the Venetian state. Manutius and others in Venice printed books in Greek. In Padua the university, founded in 1222, was famous for medical and philosophical studies, and a professorship of Greek was established there in 1463. Padua has been called the alma mater of the entire captive Greek nation.
The great difference between the Italian city-states and Greece was that in Italy education was state funded. The state needed the doctors and lawyers that the universities produced, and universities were supported by special taxes, in Rome on imported wine, in Padua, bizarrely, on prostitutes. By contrast the Greek Church was chronically short of money for education. The effect can be seen in a letter from a teacher in Iánnina at the end of the seventeenth century, who wrote: ‘Three years have now gone by, and no money has arrived at our school. I want to leave. I am unable to work, borrow or eat.’8
It was money that began to revive Greek education in the later eighteenth century, money that came from the increasingly prosperous Greek merchants. This prosperity was a result of the treaties that ended the Russian–Turkish war of 1768–74, which gave Greek merchant ships access to the Black Sea, and merchants on land freedom to trade in all the Habsburg territories. During the Napoleonic wars blockade-running also proved lucrative. Merchants not only had the means to promote education, but also could appreciate its value when handling complicated international trade and dealing with sophisticated foreigners. But this meant a revolution in education: it had to become secular, not church bound.
The results were obvious to the Reverend William Jowett when in 1818 he visited the Greek school at Kidhoniés on the Anatolian coast. The school had been established fifteen years earlier, and had 200 students, a library of over 7,000 books, and many scientific instruments. Jowett attended a class in which the teacher was explaining Newtonian astronomy, as part of a three-year course. ‘I liked the pupils’ practice of putting questions to him,’ wrote Jowett, ‘though some asked very absurd ones,’ and he concluded that ‘the scientific part of education in Greece is evidently in its infancy.’9
As revolution approached, the westernised Greek intelligentsia began to see education as the necessary key to success. The French Revolution, said Adhamántios Koraḯs, was the result of education,
and a Greek revolution too would be based on it. Kapodhístrias, first president of independent Greece, wrote that the Greeks should devote themselves exclusively to education, declaring that ‘All other object is vain, all other work is dangerous.’10 But for Koraḯs the purpose of education was to inspire the young with the glories of the past, and for Kapodhístrias education was primarily about moral teaching. For neither was it the very limited education that the Church had more or less preserved for the previous four centuries.
These limitations of church education are to some extent understandable. The Church did not see its function as providing training in skills – that was the job of the multifarious trade guilds – nor in equipping the young for material advancement in any sphere. Nor did it have any interest in the wider teaching of philosophy or science, which could undermine religious belief. Its mission was the maintenance of Orthodoxy, and a crucial part of this was the preservation of the Greek language in its original form.
The language to be preserved was koiné (kiní) a form of the Attic Greek used by the great prose writers and dramatists of the fifth century BC, adopted by Philip of Macedon, and spread by his son Alexander. It became the lingua franca of the Greek world, and is the language of the Greek New Testament and of the liturgy of the Greek Church up to present times.