by David Brewer
Derived from these principles, and influenced particularly by the ideas of Rousseau and Voltaire, were the doctrines of liberty, equality and the rights of man – of particular relevance to the Greeks. In 1789 these doctrines were proclaimed in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens: ‘Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights. The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are Liberty, Property, Security, and Resistance of Oppression.’ The Declaration was drafted by the Marquis de Lafayette, who had served with distinction in America’s war of independence. He based the French Declaration on the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, which had been even more explicit about the right of the people to overthrow an unjust government: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.’
It will be clear from the names already mentioned of original Enlightenment thinkers that they came from many different countries including France, England, Scotland, America, Germany, Sweden and Italy. No such original thinkers came from Greece. Greeks were recipients of Enlightenment ideas rather than originators of them. Furthermore those Greeks who were influenced by the Enlightenment were a limited number of the Greek intelligentsia often living outside the territory of today’s Greece.
Those Greeks influenced by the Enlightenment fall, broadly speaking, into two categories: educators and revolutionaries. Educators include those who taught in Greek schools both in Greece and abroad, those who produced summaries of Enlightenment works or directly translated them, and those who produced Greek periodicals. Revolutionaries criticised the present state of Greece, often with particular animus against the church, and looked forward to Greek regeneration, revolution and independence. But the thinking of the two groups overlapped, since both educators and revolutionaries often saw better education as an essential preliminary to revolution.
One of the earliest of the Greek educators influenced by the Enlightenment was Evyénios Voúlgaris. He was born in 1716 in Corfu, and it was during his schooling there that he may have been introduced to the works of John Locke. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding had been published only a few decades earlier in 1690, and its novel approach to philosophy formed one of the main strands of Voúlgaris’ thinking. Another strand, of Orthodox religious belief, was evident when at the age of 21 Voúlgaris became a deacon. In 1742 he became head of a school in Iánnina and in 1750 of one in Kozáni, after a dispute with a conservative teacher at a rival Iánnina school.
An even more prestigious appointment followed in 1753 when Voúlgaris became head of the recently established academy at the monastery of Vatopédhi on Mt Athos. The academy had been founded by the reforming patriarch Kírillos V, one of whose objects was to improve monastic education, and it was open both to Mt Athos monks and to pupils from outside. The academy was housed in a special building of three floors on higher ground next to the monastery, and had about 170 small rooms for students as well as lecture rooms and a library. The more advanced courses, in philosophy and mathematics, were taught by Voúlgaris himself. Of all the schools then in Greece it probably had the most influential supporter in the patriarch, the best facilities, and in Voúlgaris one of the most progressive teachers.
Nevertheless, after only six years Voúlgaris abruptly left the academy, which thereafter went into decline; a visitor to the site in 1801 said that ‘its only inhabitant that we found was a solitary cock.’2 The reasons for Voúlgaris’ departure are not clear, but his patron Kírillos V was no longer patriarch and it seems that Voúlgaris’ modern approach to education offended the conservatives among the Mt Athos monks. But the years had not been wasted. Voúlgaris had taken over, from the previous incompetent head, only some 70 students and perhaps as few as 20, but by the end of his time the number was almost 200. And in a valedictory and somewhat bitter letter to Kírillos V he claimed that there were ‘large numbers of men whom I enlightened to the best of my ability and who are now making their appearance and being heard in so many communities, and those others who soon will be appearing and will be heard’.3
In the rest of his long life Voúlgaris never again either taught or lived in the territory of today’s Greece. After his time on Mt Athos he taught at the Patriarchal Academy in Constantinople from 1759 to 1762, but this post too ended in disputes, particularly with the then patriarch. From Constantinople Voúlgaris went to Halle and Leipzig where he arranged for the publication of his works. In 1772 he became librarian at the court of Catherine the Great of Russia and later an archbishop in the Ukraine. In 1781 he retired to a Russian monastery, where in 1806 he died at the age of 90.
As well as being a teacher, Voúlgaris was a prolific writer and produced a dozen or so substantial books. These were either direct translations of Enlightenment works, by Voltaire and others, or Voúlgaris’ own compilations of their ideas. The subjects covered logic, metaphysics, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. His own book Logic, which he used as his teaching textbook, gives a good indication of what influenced his own thinking and how he wished to influence those he taught.
The Logic is a massive work of 586 pages. It is divided into a long introduction on philosophical thinking followed by five parts, on ideas, thought, method, judgement and a final part on more general topics. The discussion is detailed and dense. Ideas, for example, are presented as changes of state, since new ideas change our view of the world. Voúlgaris maintains that there are three sources of these idea-changes. The first is God through revelation and is outside the scope of philosophy. The other two, following Locke’s ideas, are reflection – the source of judging and remembering – and reflection coupled with sensation, which enables us to think about cause and effect, pleasure and pain. Other Enlightenment thinkers besides Locke – Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz and others – are extensively quoted or referred to in the Logic, as well as Aristotle and Byzantine writers. This must have been extremely tough fare for Voúlgaris’ minimally educated pupils on Mt Athos – yet they flocked there in increasing numbers.
There were further barriers to learning for these pupils. One was that the Logic from which Voúlgaris taught was written in pure Ancient Greek, in his view the only possible medium for philosophical ideas. The resources of the popular language were, he said, mere ‘philosophical wordlets’, and ‘those booklets which profess to philosophise in the vulgar tongue are to be hooted off the stage.’4
Another difficulty was that during Voúlgaris’ teaching career all his writings, including the Logic, were available only in manuscript, and their later printing was all done abroad: the Logic was printed in Leipzig in 1766, most of his other works variously in Vienna, Venice or Moscow in the early 1800s. So the circulation of Greek texts in Voúlgaris’ time had not advanced since Stephen Gerlach acquired the manuscript of a patriarchal history two centuries earlier, and it was impossible for Greek education to make significant advances without widely available printed texts.
The two strands of Voúlgaris’ thought – philosophical enquiry and acceptance of divine revelation – never sat easily together. He rejected as ‘the merest suppositions’ theological explanations in physics to explain the attraction of bodies. On the other hand, he rejected the astronomical system of Copernicus because it was ‘against the pages of Scripture’. Perhaps his aspirations to rise in the Church hierarchy tilted the balance in favour of revelation, as in 1768 he maintained that ‘In the divine and mysterious dogmas of the faith, freedom of thought is brazenness.’5 As we shall see, the antagonism between the Church and the Enlightenment became increasingly overt and fierce.
Two other Greek educators of the period held views markedly different from those o
f Voúlgaris: his contemporary Iósipos Misiódhax (c.1730–1800) and the younger man Athanásios Psalídhas (1767–1829). Misiódhax was born in Wallachia in today’s Romania, a Vlach by birth and originally a Vlach speaker. His name is derived from the old Roman province of Moesia, which stretched along the banks of the Danube as far as the Black Sea. However, Misiódhax became completely Hellenised in language and outlook: he referred to Greeks as his kith and kin (omoyenís) and to Greek schools as ‘our schools’. He was educated in Thessalonika, Smyrna and at the Mt Athos academy under Voúlgaris, whose curriculum he thought was far too ambitious. He learned his physics and mathematics at the University of Padua, and from 1765 to 1777 taught these subjects as head of the academy of Iasi in north-east Romania, a return to his roots. But like Voúlgaris he fell foul of conservative opposition and gave up teaching to travel to Budapest, Vienna and Venice and to write. His writings, all published in Vienna, show the range of his interests: a treatise on the education of children, mainly derived straight from Locke, a Theory of Geography, and a more general Apologia. He died in Bucharest in 1800.
Misiódhax differed from Voúlgaris in a number of ways. Despite his earlier praise of Voúlgaris as a man of the first distinction as both writer and teacher, he later condemned Voúlgaris’ mathematics as a total muddle. Misiódhax was also far more critical than Voúlgaris of religion and particularly of religious observances: the pious offerings of ten or twenty people, he said, would be enough to set up a decent academy. Whereas Voúlgaris wrote in Ancient Greek, Misiódhax used and advocated everyday common language. He wrote that the use of the ancient language in teaching pupils produced ‘fearsome constructions in which their fathers conceal themselves in deep thickets’, and that ‘this culpable prejudice in favour of antiquity is the cause of our meagre and indeed our bad knowledge.’6 Misiódhax was firmly on the side of the practical. Logic and metaphysics he regarded as of little use or even interest, and mathematics and all the branches of science as much more important. The purpose of education, he believed, should be personal and social betterment, and the true philosophy was ‘a unitary theory which investigates the nature of things with the constant end of providing for and establishing the true happiness which man, qua man, can enjoy on this earth’.7
The last of this trio of educators was Athanásios Psalídhas. He was born in Iánnina in 1767 and was educated there until the age of eighteen. Then after two years in Russia he went to Vienna, where he studied medicine, philosophy and science. It was here between 1791 and 1795 that he published his main surviving writings, including Alithís Evdhemonía (True Happiness) and Kalokinímata (Moves Towards Progress). In 1795 he returned to Iánnina as a teacher and became head of the progressive school where Voúlgaris had taught. Here Psalídhas’ classes included philosophy, history, geography, mathematics and the rarity of experimental science, for which he brought the equipment from Vienna. Psalídhas came under attack from the head of the conservative school in Iánnina as Voúlgaris had done, and Psalídhas was accused of atheism, Voltairism and other heresies. As well as teaching, Psalídhas became an adviser to Ali Pasha, the semi-independent ruler of Iánnina and of large tracts of northern Greece. In 1822, the year of Ali Pasha’s downfall and death, Psalídhas left for Corfu, where he became an honorary doctor of the Ionian Academy, involving himself in the affairs of the war of independence and corresponding with its leaders. He died in Corfu in 1829.
Psalídhas made clear his reliance on Enlightenment thinkers – Locke, Leibniz, Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant among others. He told Greeks living abroad to ‘imitate the Europeans, the civilised and enlightened nations in which you are living’.8 Nevertheless his philosophy was far from rigorous. He criticised Voúlgaris’ three sources of ideas – revelation, reflection and sensation. Revelation, Psalídhas declared, cannot be a source of ideas since it is outside the realm of reason. Reflection, which Psalídhas equated with the activity of ‘the soul itself’, was dismissed because the soul cannot produce any idea just by itself. There remains only sensation, and in ‘True Happiness’ Psalídhas wrote: ‘All the ideas we possess we must acquire through the senses.’9
So far so coherent. But in ‘Moves Towards Progress’ he maintains that there are four truths essential to the good life, the first of which is that God exists. God is infinite, and ‘The mind can neither acquire nor represent to itself the idea of an infinite being.’10 Yet the mind does have such an idea, and must do so to live aright. So the idea of God must come through revelation, and revelation was supposed not to be a source of ideas. Psalídhas had failed in his attempts to ride two horses at once, and his proposals for reconciling revelation and reason were no more successful than those of Voúlgaris.
Psalídhas attacked both Voúlgaris’ thinking and Voúlgaris the man. He criticised, with some justice, Voúlgaris’ use of Ancient Greek. He pounced on mistakes by Voúlgaris, who had written that the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle was equal to the sum of the other two sides, not their squares. He maintained, again with some justice, that Voúlgaris’ Logic is badly disorganised. But Psalídhas attacked Voúlgaris personally as well as professionally. The whole output of Voúlgaris, he wrote, displays ‘his vanity, his egotism, his pride and arrogance, and in consequence the emptiness of his reputation’, and in a final outburst: ‘Despising his country and all his own race, he has taken himself off on the slightest of excuses to barbarous foreign lands, letting patriotism come second to pleasure and greed, and without putting either his life or his substance at risk for the sake of his people.’11 The progressive Greek followers of the Enlightenment had more than enough difficulty with conservative traditionalists. Their efforts to improve Greek education might have made more progress if there had at least been solidarity among them.
The second group of Greeks influenced by the Enlightenment were primarily revolutionaries rather than educators, and they looked to the overthrow of Turkish rule and the establishment of a free and independent Greece. Two names are prominent: Rígas Pheréos, also called Velestinlís (1757–98), and Adhamántios Koraḯs (1748–1833). Both also looked to education, in one form or another, as a prelude to Greece’s regeneration.
Rígas was born in the Thessalian town of Velestíno, ancient Phére, hence his two toponyms. His father was wealthy, and Rígas was well educated, first by a village priest at home and later at local schools. After a few years as a schoolmaster in Thessaly he left for Constantinople some time between 1777 and 1780 when he was in his early twenties. There he continued his studies, learning French, Italian and German. He also became friendly with the families of the phanariots, the Greeks who filled higher posts in the Ottoman bureaucracy and also served as governors of the semi-independent principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia in today’s Romania. In 1785 Rígas became private secretary to the phanariot Alexander Ipsilántis, who two years later was appointed governor of Moldavia, and was the grandfather of the Ipsilántis brothers who played important roles in the war of independence. For the rest of his professional career Rígas served as secretary to a succession of senior officials, mainly in Bucharest or in the Austrian capital Vienna. In Bucharest Rígas became friendly with Misiódhax, and shared with him a commitment to communicate in the language of the people, not in Ancient Greek.
Rígas’ companion and biographer Christóphoros Perrevós described Rígas’ appearance and character when he was in his thirties: ‘He was of average height, with a thick neck, a round red-and-white face, fair moustache, rather broad nose, wide forehead, bulky temples, large ears and a decidedly large round, powerful head. His merits were charm and intelligence, a lively nature, articulate, industrious, of simple habits, sympathetic; the persuasiveness on his lips attracted everyone to his advice.’12
Rígas was still in his twenties when his first works were published in Vienna, and these show that he was already well aware of Enlightenment thinking. One was his Anthology of Physics published in 1790 in 24 chapters that covered, as well as physics as understood today, the su
bjects of minerals, plants and animals, including man. The most important source was the French Encyclopédie. At the same time Rígas was translating Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois, though this translation was never published. A curious work by Rígas, also published in 1790, was the School of Delicate Lovers, a Greek translation of 6 of the 261 stories, many salacious if not pornographic, by the French writer Retif de la Bretonne. It has often been asked why Rígas spent time on such frivolity, but Rígas’ choice of these six stories points to the answer. Each deals with love between young people of very different class: in two the humble lad loves his employer’s daughter, and in the other four a rich aristocrat loves a poor girl. The message was clearly that equality overrides all social divisions. The stories were also moral lessons, advocating hard work, no sex before marriage and not even forwardness on the part of girls. Rígas himself wrote that the book aimed to provide ‘both amusement and a kind of moral improvement’.13
Rígas’ works of the following years had a more pointed revolutionary message and can be divided into two groups. In the first group the message was only implicit. It included an engraving of the head of Alexander the Great, with a lengthy inscription in both Greek and French, clearly intended to remind both Greeks and foreigners of Greece’s glorious past. There was also a series of detailed maps, covering twelve sheets, entitled Map of Greece Including its Islands and Part of its Many Outposts (apikíes) in Europe and Asia Minor, and including commentaries on historic sites and battles. Greece was shown as including Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria and parts of Turkey, and again the implicit message was clear: a greater Greece would supplant the Ottoman Empire in Europe and even beyond. Finally there was a Greek translation from French of parts of the Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis by Jean Jacques Barthélemy, the story of a Scythian prince of the fourth century BC who goes to classical Greece to be civilised. Greece, it was to be understood, had laid the foundations of European civilisation and deserved to be restored to her ancient pre-eminence.