Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence

by David Brewer

  Finally, the Enlightenment was seen as an attack on religion. Enlightenment ideas were regarded as incompatible with religious belief, and Enlightenment thinkers severely criticised the corruption of the Orthodox Church, an institution largely revered by Greeks. As we shall see in the next chapter, the Church and its supporters responded vigorously to these threats.

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  The Enlightenment Attacked

  The attacks on the Enlightenment, its ideas and its representatives, were initially on religious grounds: the Enlightenment was denounced for promoting atheism. In the course of the decades preceding the Greek revolution the attack was broadened: the Enlightenment was held to undermine morality, and finally to lead to the bloody overthrow of the established order, as the French Revolution had shown. Of all the Enlightenment thinkers, the most often quoted, and the most fiercely denounced, was Voltaire.

  Voltaire was born in Paris in 1694. As a young man he quickly moved into the literary coteries of Paris and was soon in trouble for writing libellous poems, for which he was first exiled from Paris and then imprisoned for a year in the Bastille. From 1726 to 1729 he was in England, where he became friendly with the Walpoles, Congreve and Pope among others, and after his return published Lettres Philosophiques sur les Anglais, ostensibly in praise of England but by implication an attack on everything established in the Church and state of France.

  In 1751 Voltaire went to the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia, at Frederick’s invitation, but again Voltaire’s sharp pen got him into trouble and he left under a cloud two years later. Voltaire, now in his sixties and rich from his writings and some successful speculations, settled at Ferney just outside Geneva. It was in this period that he vigorously took up the cause of many who had been unjustly treated, of whom the most famous was Jean Calas. Calas’ eldest son had committed suicide, but Calas, a Huguenot, was accused on the flimsiest evidence of murdering him to prevent him becoming a Catholic. Calas was found guilty and executed by being broken on the wheel. Voltaire’s campaign against this injustice led, unfortunately too late, to Calas being declared innocent and to compensation for the family from Louis XV.

  In 1778, now aged 84, Voltaire returned to Paris, for the first time in 28 years, for the production of his new tragedy Irène and to a rapturous welcome. But the exertions were too much for him and three months later he died in the night, after sending away priests who had been summoned to administer the last rites.

  Voltaire’s literary output was vast, including plays, poetry, historical writings, stories of which Candide is the best known, and his prolific correspondence. His views on the Church, religion and society are most openly expressed in his Dictionnaire Philosophique. This is the collection of his hortatory and propagandist essays that were published in various forms, some as entries in the Encyclopédie, during the last twenty or so years of his life, with some manuscript works found after his death. It is a dictionary only in the sense that the entries are in the alphabetical order of their titles.

  The style is light, conversational, often ironic, and sometimes to make his point he uses fictional dialogues from the exotic past, such as the conversation in the ‘Chinese Catechism’ between a disciple of Confucius and a Chinese prince set two millennia in the past. As Voltaire wrote: ‘I think the best way to fall on the infamous is to seem to have no wish to attack it.’1 But on his major topics Voltaire makes himself abundantly clear.

  Voltaire makes a distinction between state religion and theological religion. State religion ensures that the Church is run in an orderly way and that the ministers teach good behaviour to the people. ‘Such a state religion can never make trouble. This is not true of theological religion. This is the source of all imaginable follies and disorders; it is the mother of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.’ He also asks, ironically, ‘After our holy religion, which is undoubtedly the only good one, which would be the least bad?’ and answers: ‘Would it not be the simplest? Would it not be that which taught much morality and very little dogma? That which tended to make men just without making them absurd? That which did not order one to believe in things that are impossible, contradictory, injurious to divinity, and pernicious to mankind, and which dared not menace with eternal punishment anyone possessing common sense?’2

  This simplest of religions is that of the theist or deist, who believes in god with a small ‘g’ but not the God of the Church. ‘The theist is a man firmly convinced of the existence of a supreme being. He does not know how god punishes, how he encourages, how he forgives, for he is not rash enough to flatter himself that he knows how god acts, but he knows that god does act and that he is just. The theist holds that religion consists neither in the opinions of an unintelligible metaphysic nor in a vain apparatus, but in worship and justice. To do good, that is his cult. To submit to god, that is his doctrine.’3 This religion is based on morality, not dogma: ‘There is no morality in superstition, it is not in ceremonies, it has nothing in common with dogmas. It cannot be too often repeated that all dogmas are different, and that morality is the same among all men who use their reason. Therefore morality comes from god like light. Our superstitions are nothing but darkness. Reader, reflect, spread this truth, draw your conclusions.’4 Voltaire was thus attacking everything in Church ritual or teaching that conflicted with reason, including God as portrayed by the Church. But he was not attacking belief in god – indeed he was advocating it. Voltaire was not an atheist.

  The same spirit of morality based on reason is evident in Voltaire’s view of society. ‘The sovereign who knows no laws but his own whim, who seizes the property of his subjects, and who then enlists them to seize that of his neighbours is called a tyrant,’ and Voltaire adds, again with tongue in cheek, ‘There are no such tyrants in Europe.’5 But these laws, which the sovereign must obey, are a shaky foundation for society. Voltaire gives some historical examples of irrational laws, and adds some fictional experiences of his own, and concludes: ‘Those little adventures led me to make fine and profound reflections about the laws, and I saw that they are like our clothes: I had to wear a dolman in Constantinople and a jacket in Paris. If all human laws are conventions, I said, we must make the best of them.’6 But the overriding law is tolerance: ‘What is toleration? It is the prerogative of humanity. We are all steeped in weaknesses and errors: let us forgive one another’s follies, it is the first law of nature.’7 The failure of tolerance can have appalling consequences, and Voltaire added an article on torture to a later edition of the Dictionnaire to publicise the case of La Barre, another victim of injustice whom he championed. ‘When the chevalier de La Barre, a very intelligent and promising young man, was convicted of singing impious songs and even of passing a procession of Capuchins without taking his hat off, the judges of Abbeville ordered not only that his tongue be torn out, his hand cut off, and his body burned on a slow fire, but they also put him to the torture, to discover exactly how many songs he had sung, and how many processions he had watched with his hat on.’8

  One might have expected Voltaire’s attitude to the Greeks under Turkish rule to be as clear cut as on other topics. The Sultan by his definition was a tyrant, and in 1771 Voltaire had published – and Voúlgaris had translated into Greek – Le Tocsin des Rois aux Souverains de l’Europe, calling on the powers of Europe to expel the Turks and liberate the Greeks and their other subjects. But Voltaire’s opinions on Greece were ambivalent and shifting, as is clear from his correspondence with Catherine the Great at the time of the Orlov revolt.

  For Voltaire, ancient Greece was a golden age. ‘Beautiful architecture, perfected sculpture, painting, good music, true poetry, even philosophy itself – even though unformed and obscure, all this came to nations only through the Greeks.’9 Their religion, though full of superstitious absurdities, was without dogmas and therefore humane and tolerant. But Byzantium brought Christianity and a Church that was the enemy of reason and justice. The Turkish rule that followed denied the Greeks their righ
ts, though Voltaire thought the Greek people had a tolerably good life: ‘The Greek families subsist in their country, debased, despised, but in peace: they pay only a light tribute, they engage in commerce and cultivate the land.’10 His main objections to the Turks were that they were barbarous, knowing neither how to read nor how to write, dance or sing, and that they were lording it over the land trodden by the heroes of ancient Greece – Miltiades, Leonidas, Alexander, Xenophon – and its thinkers – Plato, Sophocles, Demosthenes.

  Voltaire saw the Orlov revolt as a prelude not to an independent Greece but to a Greece enjoying law and justice under Catherine’s enlightened despotism. ‘Your Majesty’, he wrote to her, ‘will put on again her legislator’s clothes after having cast off her Amazon’s dress.’11 As the Orlov revolt faltered Voltaire urged Catherine not to abandon ‘these poor Greeks’, but when it collapsed he followed the opinion of Catherine and her commanders on the spot that the Greeks were to blame, writing to Catherine that ‘the Greeks are unworthy of the liberty they would have recovered if they had the courage to follow you.’ By 1773, three years after the end of the revolt, Voltaire’s enthusiasm for Greek regeneration had evaporated, and he wrote ‘I give up my good hopes of seeing the Mohametans chased from Europe, and eloquence, poetry, painting, sculpture, reborn in Athens.’12

  ‘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:

  Our youths are full of French ideas and atheistic dogmas,

  They say ‘We like French novelettes, but other books are boring.’

  So now the young have little time for churches, prayers and fasting,

  And praise Voltaire and Mirabeau although they’ve never read them.16

  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 Koraḯs 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 Koraḯs. 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 Koraḯs, 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 Koraḯs 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