Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (22 page)

Contrast the linguistic conservatism of the Greek Church with the attitude of the Church of England. When the 1552 prayer book came to be revised in 1662, the revisers declared in the preface: ‘It hath been the wisdom of the Church of England to keep the mean between the two extremes, of too much stiffness in refusing, and of too much easiness in admitting, any variations.’ They went on to say that the aim of the new version was ‘the more proper expressing of some words or phrases of ancient usage in terms more suitable to the language of the present times.’ It is a mark of their success that the 1662 version lasted virtually unchanged for another three centuries. Language does not have to be ossified to be preserved.

For the Greek Church the old forms of the language were an essential part of the Bible and the liturgy, but the patriarch also needed a language in which to speak to his flock on issues of the day. The Paternal Exhortation of 1798, enjoining obedience to the Sultan, is an example. The first part is in prose, deals with some complex theological issues, and uses many old forms. But the second part is a poem, in the galloping metre of a klephtic ballad. It uses very few old forms, and the message is much simpler: a ship has its captain, a house its master, bees accept the order of the hive, flocks follow the leading ram – likewise you should
obey the Sultan. It is as if an Anglican archbishop, to make sure he was understood, concluded his sermon with some simple cautionary verses.

‘We deem it a great achievement of the Church, that she preserved a pure form of the Greek language down to recent times.’ So wrote the church historian Theodore Papadopoullos in the 1950s.
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In the previous century Adhamántios Kora
ḯ
s, following Karl Schlegel and others, maintained that ‘Language is the nation.’ If you put those two statements together, you might conclude that it was the Church that preserved the Greek language through the centuries of Turkish rule, and by doing so preserved the Greek nation. But the deduction is, of course, not as simple as that. Language and nationality are not necessarily equivalent. As just one example, in the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey after the 1922 catastrophe it was religion, not language, that determined who left and who stayed. In any case the question of which language is said to be the nation is debatable, and was indeed debated hotly, especially in the nation-building nineteenth century. It has been variously argued that the nation is the ancient language, or the language of the common people, or even what Eric Hobsbawm calls ‘a sort of platonic idea of the language, existing behind and above all its variant and imperfect versions’.
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Others than the Church have been credited with the preservation of the Greek language in a less rigid form. There were the composers of popular ballads, as used by the patriarch himself for mass communication. There were the phanariots, the Greeks of the higher Ottoman civil service, using Greek in their communications and valuing education as their own passport to influence. Steven Runciman went so far as to say: ‘It was thanks to the Phanariots more than to anyone else that Hellenism was able to survive.’
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And there were the ordinary Greeks, passing on the language from generation to generation, in different dialects but still recognisably Greek. However, these others contributed to the preservation of Greek almost by accident, and only the Church did so by design.

There were other ways in which the Church can be said to have preserved Hellenism. One was by constant preaching against conversion to Islam, but it is not easy to determine how much of a threat such conversion actually was. Conversions may have been most common among country peasants, because their Orthodoxy was basically a folk religion, concerned with fertility, health, the weather and incorporating ancient pagan rites. To such people the travelling Muslim dervishes, present mainly in northern Greece, were very attractive. The dervishes also offered a folk religion, their rites too being connected with the basic factors of rural life. The dervishes, like the Orthodox, emphasised prayer
and contemplation, leading to a mystic understanding of Allah. Dervish leaders after their death might be venerated like Christian saints and credited with miraculous powers. The transition from folk Christianity to folk Islam would have been easy.

Throughout the centuries of Turkish rule there were cases, evidenced in the kadi courts, of Orthodox Greeks converting to Islam for personal reasons, often to do with the marriage of a Christian woman to a Turk. There is little evidence of mass conversion except, as we shall see, in the special case of Crete. Some Orthodox preachers believed that Christians converted simply to avoid the Christian poll tax. An example was the early eighteenth-century preacher Nektários Térpos, who fiercely told the apostatising members of his flock: ‘Because of some small financial need you separate yourselves from the sacred and pure faith of Christ and go to eternal Hell.’
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Conversion came at a high social price in this world, quite apart from a theological price in the next. It meant exclusion from the Orthodox rites celebrating birth, marriage and death, exclusion from the great Orthodox celebrations, and exclusion from the wider social group extending from the family to the whole local community. Above all it meant abandoning the Greeks’ badge of difference from their alien Muslim rulers.

The service of the Orthodox Church to the Greek people was therefore limited, in a number of ways. The education it promoted was confined to religious teaching, and even that was often not enough to provide educated priests. The language it preserved was an ancient form different from the language of the people. It devoted itself to condemning conversion to Islam, which was perhaps not a widespread danger. Apart from the limitations on what the Church did do, there are things about which the Church did little. The Church rarely protested against injustices committed by the Turkish authorities. Charitable work done by monasteries was limited – a theologian has recently placed it last in the list of monastic purposes
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– though the sixteenth-century patriarch Ieremías II had declared that ‘They sin who hope to be saved by faith alone, without right actions.’
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The question of the relationship between faith and behaviour was one that exercised one of the most innovative and controversial patriarchs, Kírillos I Loúkaris, patriarch between 1620 and 1635 and briefly again for the year before his death in 1638. He had seen more of the world than most patriarchs, having been head of the Orthodox Church in Alexandria, having worked with the Orthodox in Poland, and having friendly contacts with the Protestants of Holland. Loúkaris’ first aim was to improve education. He reformed the Patriarchal Academy and
put at its head a Padua-educated Greek who introduced more secular teaching. To provide books for the academy he set up a printing press in Constantinople, but some of its output was anti-Catholic and Jesuits successfully intrigued for its destruction. Undeterred, Loúkaris turned to the printing presses of Geneva, which published his translation of the New Testament into modern Greek, with the original in parallel, but this provoked a storm of disapproval from his bishops.

The main source of disagreement between Loúkaris and the Orthodox was his
Confession of Faith
, also published in Geneva. In this he declared that man is justified by faith alone; right actions cannot ensure salvation, though they are not to be neglected since they testify to faith. This was a subtle but distinct difference from the doctrine of his predecessor Ieremías II that faith alone is not enough because faith without right actions is dead. Moreover Loúkaris controversially maintained that the Eucharist bread and wine represented, but did not become, the body and blood of Christ, and that sacred images such as those of saints could be admired but not venerated.

Thus Loúkaris was at odds with various parts of his flock not only over his modernising efforts but also on three important points of doctrine: faith and behaviour, transubstantiation and holy images. He was deposed by the Holy Synod in 1635, anathematised as a heretic by an Orthodox council in 1636, nevertheless reinstated in 1637, but through Catholic intrigues was accused of treason against the Sultan and assassinated in prison in 1638. It was a tragic end to the patriarchate of a man who might have done much for the Orthodox Church.

The Church was regularly described as short of money, even though in the seventeenth century a wealthy phanariot paid off all the debts of the patriarchate and reorganised its finances. The poverty of the Church is often blamed on increasing payments by patriarchs to the Turkish treasury, both on accession and annually while in office. It seems that the patriarchate never found a strong enough negotiating position with Turkish authorities to get these payments reduced. Nevertheless these payments can only have been a small proportion of the wealth – in taxes on the Orthodox and from land – that the Church commanded. The patriarchate had in many ways become involved in secular matters, but had failed to acquire the most important secular skill: managing its own money.

One distraction for the Church was the frequent change of patriarch, each change, including reinstatement of a former patriarch, involving a payment to the Turkish treasury. The early years under Turkish rule were relatively stable: between 1495 and 1595 there were
nineteen patriarchal reigns, with few reinstatements. The turmoil was at its worst in the following century. Between 1595 and 1695 there were 61 patriarchal reigns but only 31 different patriarchs, so reinstatements were constant. Reigns were also often pathetically short: in 1679 Athanásios reigned for only ten days, others for less than a year, and the average length of reign was less than twenty months. Thereafter the situation somewhat improved, the period 1695 to 1795 covering 31 reigns by 23 different patriarchs. These constant changes are often ascribed broadly to intrigues by the Turks who, it is claimed, simply wanted to maximise the number of patriarchal payments on accession. But it takes two to intrigue. Direct intervention by the Turkish authorities was rare, and normally it was the Holy Synod that elected or deposed a patriarch. So a change of patriarch was possible only with the acquiescence, if not the active involvement, of the Church’s own electors.

Intrigues were happening not only between the Holy Synod and the Turks but within the Holy Synod itself. The Synod, and indeed the higher clergy as a whole, were involved in long-running and fiercely contested arguments about matters of doctrine, and factions formed around opposing views. The contested matters were not only the continuing
filioque
debate about whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father
and
the Son, but also the questions of predestination, the necessity of both faith and works, the existence of purgatory, and the listing of the three theological virtues and the seven deadly sins. Two matters were especially hotly debated. One was the doctrine of
epíklisi
or invocation, disputed for 50 years between 1640 and 1690. The argument was about whether the change of the communion bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ was effected only by the invocation of the Holy Spirit, or occurred when the words of Christ, beginning ‘Take, eat, this is my Body’, were said. The other controversial topic was the need for rebaptism of converts to Orthodoxy, for example of Greeks from Venetian territories baptised as Catholic but now accepting Orthodoxy. An early Church council of 1484 had ruled that such converts needed only to be reconfirmed, not rebaptised. But Catholic baptism was by aspersion, sprinkling of water, whereas Orthodox baptism was by immersion, so it was argued that the Catholic rite was not a true baptism and therefore rebaptism was necessary. It was also argued by some that Catholic baptism was not baptism at all, and that the convert must be baptised for the first time, not rebaptised. The debate was eventually settled in 1755 by a ruling of the patriarch that converts must be rebaptised, which remains the rule to this day.

Such arguments about theological niceties can seem bizarre in a secular age, and abstruse even to believers. But the tradition of passionate debate on such matters goes back to the early days of Christianity in Byzantium. A bishop who visited the city in the late fourth century wrote: ‘Everything – streets, markets, squares, crossroads – is full of those who are speaking of unintelligible things. I ask how many oboli I have to pay; in answer they are philosophizing on the born or unborn; I wish to know the price of bread; one answers: “The Father is greater than the Son”; I inquire whether my bath is ready; one says, “The Son has been made out of nothing.”’
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Furthermore these arguments spring from the basic orientation of the Orthodox Church towards communion with God through worship. From this standpoint the forms of worship are central, and they are fiercely debated because they are vitally important.

Even after making allowances for the restrictions on the Church under Turkish rule it seems clear that the Church did less than it might have done in the service of the faithful and of the Greeks as a whole. Education was largely neglected, there were few philanthropic initiatives, there was little attempt to make representations to the Turkish authorities on behalf of the Greeks, and the Church was preoccupied with questions of money, patriarchal succession and doctrinal controversy. The highest tribute to the Orthodox Church should probably be paid not to the upper hierarchy but to the Church’s humblest servants, the local priests, and many would have deserved the praise of one historian for the
papádhes
of Crete: ‘The real guardian of the villages was the ill-educated
papás
, like them wearing Cretan breeches and doing all the tasks in the fields, living an exemplary life with his family, adviser and leader of his fellow villagers, like a bird gathering beneath the wings of the Church its fledgling chicks.’
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