Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule From the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence (42 page)

The difficulty with Kora
ḯ
s’ insistence that the beneficial effects of education must precede revolution was that the right time for revolution never seemed to arrive. How in any case could one tell in advance if education had progressed far enough to prevent revolution falling into the wrong hands, and to ensure that freedom was accompanied by justice? Kora
ḯ
s consistently argued that revolution must wait, saying so well before the revolution (1807: ‘our people need at least 50 years of education’), during the revolution (end of 1821: ‘the event has come too soon for our interest; if it had come twenty years later . . .’) and after independence (1831: ‘the Greek rising was fully justified, but inopportune; the right time would have been 1850’).
³²

Consequently Kora
ḯ
s became an increasingly severe critic of the revolution that actually happened. At first he was delighted, as shown in his preface to Aristotle’s
Politics
written only a few months after the revolution broke out. But in 1829, with the fighting virtually over and independence in some form assured, he wrote: ‘That the
revolution occurred before time was proved by the recklessness of the leaders of the revolution and by the continuing very foolish conduct of many politicians in Greece, conduct that gave rise to the flowing of so much innocent blood.’
³³
Kora
ḯ
s also believed that a later revolution under more educated leaders would have prevented foreign interference: ‘If the race had rulers adorned with education (as it certainly would have had if the revolution had occurred thirty years later) then foreigners would have been inspired with such respect that the wrongs suffered from the anti-Christian Holy Alliance would have been avoided.’
³⁴
By the ‘anti-Christian Holy Alliance’ Kora
ḯ
s meant the European powers, and the wrongs were their continuing influence on Greece, their contribution to Greek independence being ignored.

Kora
ḯ
s believed that Russia was the most threatening of these powers and that Kapodhístrias, the first president of an independent Greece, was Russia’s agent because he had once been joint foreign minister to the Tsar. From Paris Kora
ḯ
s encouraged opposition to Kapodhístrias and published pamphlets attacking him. The most intemperate was in the press awaiting publication when Kora
ḯ
s learned in October 1831 that Kapodhístrias had been assassinated. Instead of decently withdrawing it Kora
ḯ
s added an even more vicious preface and epilogue. Kapodhístrias was condemned for vile tyranny, breaking the laws of Greece, and opening the door to ‘a flood of Cossacks’. He had deserved to be expelled from Greece, and the assassins were at fault for saving him from that fate.
³⁵
This unworthy episode at the end of Kora
ḯ
s’ life marked the sad decline of a scholar, visionary and passionate supporter of his country to an embittered and vindictive old man whose nostrums others had failed to follow.

All the Greek followers of the Enlightenment whom we have considered faced several difficulties. One was the language to be used to get their message across. Voúlgaris had favoured Ancient Greek, the others some form of the common language, of which the
katharévousa
championed by Kora
ḯ
s was the most enduring. Another difficulty was how to disseminate their message. Greek newspapers were published in distant Vienna, and were closed down by the Austrian authorities on even the suspicion of subversion, as Rígas discovered. Books too were published abroad, mainly in Vienna, Venice or Paris, and were in any case expensive; it is doubtful if many Greeks even set eyes on them. Rígas’ solution was his plan, which he did not have the chance to execute, to take his writings to Greece himself. For the future his constitution, in the absence of printing presses in Greece, was to be on engraved copper tablets in every village.

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.

20

The Enlightenment Attacked

T
he 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 rights, 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