Orthodox Christianity in 21st Century Greece

The Role of Religion in Culture, Ethnicity and Politics

Vasilios N. Makrides, Victor Roudometof

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781032243344
• eBook ISBN: 9781317084938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

One of the predominantly Orthodox countries that has never experienced communism is Greece, a country uniquely situated to offer insights about contemporary trends and developments in Orthodox Christianity. This volume offers a comprehensive treatment of the role Orthodox Christianity plays at the dawn of the twenty-first century Greece from social scientific and cultural-historical perspectives. This book breaks new ground by examining in depth the multifaceted changes that took place in the relationship between Orthodox Christianity and politics, ethnicity, gender, and popular culture. Its intention is two-fold: on the one hand, it aims at revisiting some earlier stereotypes, widespread both in academic and others circles, about the Greek Orthodox Church, its cultural specificity and its social presence, such as its alleged intrinsic non-pluralistic attitude toward non-Orthodox Others. On the other hand, it attempts to show how this fairly traditional religious system underwent significant changes in recent years affecting its public role and image, particularly as it became more and more exposed to the challenges of globalization and multiculturalism.

PART I Orthodox Christianity, Greek Ethnicity and Politics

Chapter 1 The Evolution of Greek Orthodoxy in the Context of World Historical Globalization

Victor Roudometof

DOI: 10.4324/9781315599137-2

In this chapter, I discuss the evolution of Greek Orthodoxy within the context of world historical globalization and concentrate on the contemporary dominant mentality within the Orthodox Church of Greece. This chapter aims to shed light on the historical transformation of Greek Orthodoxy and subsequently place the historical path of the Orthodox Church of Greece within a broader historical landscape. Central to my argument is the image of globalization as a world historical process – as a historical phenomenon – and not simply as a purely contemporary ideology. It is important to specify from the outset that from the viewpoint of the conceptual lenses employed in this analysis, multiple modernities and their modernizations emerge in the context of broader long-term waves of historical globalization (Therborn 2000; Eisenstadt 2002). Although Eastern Orthodoxy is deeply committed to the preservation of tradition, it is mistaken to confuse rhetoric with reality; underneath an apparent image of inertia, considerable cultural and structural changes have taken place. In the early modern era (1492–1840s) and later on during the modern era (1840s–1945) of historical globalization, the major cultural shifts that took place in the Ottoman Balkans entailed the relativization¹ of the religious worldviews traditional to the Mediterranean world and their replacement by new ‘modern’ national identities (such as Greek, Serb, Bulgarian and, later on, Turk).

It is my contention that these changes reveal complex social processes and render simplistic explanations (such as ‘modernizers’ versus ‘reactionaries’) obsolete. For the purposes of presenting the encounter between globality and modernity, on the one hand, and Greek Orthodoxy, on the other hand, this chapter is structured around two main historical periods. First, there is the encounter between Orthodoxy and Western European modernity (as expressed by the Enlightenment and other similar Western European cultural projects). The second period involves the post-1945 period, in which a new rapprochement with the powers of globality and globalization is required. With this theme in mind, the argument pursued is that the contemporary developments within the Orthodox Church of Greece have to be explained through reference to the contemporary political, cultural and economic currents that fall under the rubric of globalization.

The Transformation of Greek Orthodoxy: From Universal Church to National Religion

Throughout the long centuries of Ottoman rule the Greek Orthodox Church remained a universalistic institution, fostering submission to the Ottoman regime and unity among the Balkan peoples (Stokes 1979). The Ottoman world empire was organized as a status society with religion serving as the major political cleavage demarcating access to positions of power. Of course, it does not follow that non-Muslims were reduced to the position of mere subjects. In accordance to both Islamic custom and also raison d’état, Ottoman rulers organized non-Muslims under their respective religious leaders. Hence, Jews, Catholics and Orthodox Christians became incorporated into the empire within their own confessional associations (millets) (for details see Stavrianos 1958; Sugar 1977; Inalcik 1978; Braude and Lewis 1982; Jelavich 1983; Sarris 1990). The dominant millet in the Ottoman Balkans was the Rum millet. Within it, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople became the central political and religious authority. The formerly political identity of the Roman subject became, under Ottoman rule, confined to the religious identity of the Rum millet. Its members called themselves ‘Christians’ or ‘Romans’ (Rum), whereas the Western Europeans referred to them as ‘Greeks’ (Greek Orthodox).

In order to avoid the fallacies of conventional historical perspectives on the Balkans, it is important to differentiate here between the sense of unity that was articulated within the ecclesiastical project of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and the sense of ethnic distinctiveness or awareness among the Balkan peoples. By all accounts, the sense of difference, or the awareness of belonging to different cultural units, was not erased.² In itself, this awareness points to the relevance of Anthony D. Smith’s concept of ‘ethnic community’ (1986), or ethnie, for understanding such cultural differences. But awareness of such differences did not entail attributing a national (or political) significance to them. On the contrary, in the fluid space created by the Ottoman employment of religion for the purposes of political classification and tax collection,³ the possibility of shifting labels was more than the result of personal preference; it was often a professional necessity (such as with the numerous ‘Greek’ merchants) or the result of upward social mobility, intermarriage and migration.

The traditional Mediterranean worldview assigned to various peoples the labels of ‘Greek’ (for example Greek-Orthodox of various ethnic stock), ‘Latin’ (for example Roman Catholics of various nations and ethnicities), and ‘Turk’ (for example Muslims of various backgrounds, including Muslim Albanians or Muslim Bosnians, two major examples where this label had nothing to do with race or ethnicity). In the Ottoman Balkans, the ecclesiastical Greek Orthodox project sponsored by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople cultivated a sense of religious–political unity that suited both the goals of the Ottoman political authority as well as the aim of universalizing the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate, reviving its former Byzantine glory under Muslim rule. But, it took several centuries for the Patriarchate-sponsored project to successfully gain undisputed supremacy in the Balkans. It was only in the eighteenth century that this project was so successful that the label ‘Rum’ was applied almost indiscriminately to all Orthodox Christians in the region (Konortas 1998: 299–303). The abolition of the autocephalous seats of Peć and Ohrid in 1766 and 1767, respectively, was the high point of this process.

However, at the same time, new ideological currents challenged this ecclesiastical project and eventually led to its collapse. The variety of cultural, economic and social changes brought about in the Old World after the Age of Discoveries drove a ‘harsh wedge between cosmology and history’ (Anderson 1991: 36). That is, these changes caused the gradual dissolution of script languages (like ecclesiastical Greek or Latin) and of societies organized around divinely ordained monarchs (like the Ottoman or the French). These changes also caused a decisive shift in the people’s understanding of temporality, whereby the origins of the world and of humanity were sharply differentiated. It was only in the aftermath of these major shifts that it became possible for humans to conceive of modern nations as conceptual categories of social existence.

These new social currents entailed the secularization of worldviews⁴ and arrived in the Balkans with the eighteenth-century Grecophone Balkan Enlightenment. An Orthodox Balkan merchant class provided the material support for the intellectuals who transferred the new ideas from Western Europe into the Balkans. It was a class relatively wealthy and open to communication with Western Europe. These strata, generally referred to as ‘Greek’ (Greek Orthodox), were of various ethnic stocks. Their designation as ‘Greek’ is an indication of the extent to which Greek cultural identity as such was subsumed under Orthodoxy (Svoronos 1981: 58). It was among these groups – most often expatriates and diasporic communities – that modern nationalism found its first proponents.

It is important to note the limits of the early (eighteenth-century) secularization trend. Within the Ottoman Balkans, the Enlightenment’s impact was related to the urban literate strata. With the exception of the Romanian boyar class of landowners, these strata were mostly Hellenized, Grecophone or ethnically Greek. In fact, the ideological domination of the Greek Orthodox millet by the Orthodox clergy was predicated upon the identification of ‘Greek’ (Rum) with Orthodoxy. During the second half of the eighteenth century, a new Balkan intelligentsia emerged. This intelligentsia was predominately Grecophone and aimed at the diffusion of ‘enlightened reason’ in the empire. The growing secularization and the influence of the French revolution led to the articulation of a new secular identity of Hellenism. For liberal intellectuals such as Korais, Moisiodax and Rigas Velenstinlis, Hellenism represented the secular facet of the Rum millet (Roudometof 1998a; see also Kitromilides 1994). For them, the confessional mode of social organization (the millet system), dominant within the Ottoman Empire for at least four centuries, was becoming increasingly outdated.

When, in the early nineteenth century, Greece and Serbia (and later on Bulgaria) were created as independent or autonomous states, the project of crafting national identities ranked high on the agenda of local intellectuals and statesmen. Establishing a clearly demarcated national identity in regions marked by centuries of Ottoman rule involved, by necessity, the transformation of religious identities and ecclesiastical institutions. As these modern national identities took shape in the course of the nineteenth century, religious markers and institutions had to relate to these identities and to adapt themselves to the emerging realities of the era of the nation-state. To do so successfully required both a cultural and a structural transformation. To a degree, these transformations operated synchronically as the one helped to bring about the other.

First, the cultural transformation involved the gradual shift of the meaning of religious affiliation and the redeployment of Greek Orthodoxy as a facet of the Balkan peoples’ national identity. To accomplish this goal required the production of national narratives that were gradually diffused throughout the population by means of the educational system. Between 1830 and 1880 a romantic Balkan nationalist intelligentsia shaped the Greek, Serb and Bulgarian version of the ‘nation’ via such devices as historical narrative, religious symbolism, the reinterpretation of folklore or the writing of nationalist literature and poetry. Cultural romanticism, the dominant literary genre in nineteenth-century Europe, shaped Balkan national narratives (for discussions, see Castellan 1985; Kiel 1985; Roudometof 2001). Consequently, religious symbolism was redeployed as national symbolism, thus facilitating the redeployment of Orthodoxy as part of the Balkan peoples’ national identity. Days of initially religious commemoration, ranging from St Vitus’ Day to Annunciation Day or to St Cyril’s and St Methodius’ Day, were transformed into occasions for national celebrations of the emerging Greek, Serb and Bulgarian nations (for details, see Roudometof 2001: 101–56). This cultural transformation of the religious worldview is observed not only in Serbia and Greece, where state authority was established in the early nineteenth century, but significantly, also in the Bulgarian case, where no state was established until 1878. Therefore, it cannot be accounted for as a predominantly state-sponsored process (see Hobsbawm 1990).

The Greek War of Independence and the establishment of the Kingdom of Greece provided the broader context for the articulation of the Greek ethnie as a nation and offered a powerful example for other Balkan nationalists to emulate. Given the predominately religious ties that connected the Balkan Orthodox population, it is not surprising that for Balkan nationalists the first step was to manipulate religious institutions so as to transform these ties into national ones (Castellan 1984). The reinterpretation of Orthodoxy was a central feature of Balkan nation-state building. The reasons dictating this reinterpretation were simple enough. For the overwhelming majority of people, religion was still the major cultural marker, even after the establishment of the Balkan nation-states. The impact of the earlier eighteenth-century secularization was confined to literary classes, influential but limited in numbers. Therefore, acculturating the ‘people’ into the national ‘imagined community’ entailed the transformation of the religious markers into secular ones. Moreover, the Balkan nation-states were all too eager to expand territorially into the rest of the European part of the Ottoman Empire. To do so required sufficient support from the peasantry. But the local nation-states did not have the luxury of a prolonged nation-state formation process comparable to that of Western Europe. Within a few decades, Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria had to build a state infrastructure and homogenize their societies (for a discussion, see Roudometof 2000). These time constraints required imaginative solutions: the shortest route for nation-building was to shift the meaning of church affiliation and turn it into an equivalent of national affiliation.

Second, the structural transformation of the religious institutions provided the necessary institutional infrastructure to bring about the nationalist objective of successfully turning church affiliation into national affiliation. The effective means through which this transformation was accomplished was the institution of separate national churches. Although the institution of territorial autocephaly is part of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the construction of national churches in the Balkans did not serve ecclesiastical purposes alone but, rather, provided the material and ideological infrastructure for the nationalization of masses. The new churches (Greece in 1833, Serbia in 1832 and the Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870) provided a medium through which the traditional cultural ties among the Orthodox Balkan peoples could be severed and new national ties could be constructed.

In the case of the Kingdom of Greece, it was the Regency of King Otto that instituted the Orthodox Church of Greece uncannonically (that is without the consent of the Ecumenical Patriarchate). This turn of events provided the fuel for a deep religious rivalry between proponents of religious unity with the Patriarchate and advocates of the state-sponsored Orthodox Church of Greece. The dispute lasted from 1833 until 1850, when the Patriarchate issued a Synodical Tome that formalized the relations between itself and the newly created Orthodox Church of Greece (for details, see Roudometof 1998b).

Only a couple of decades later, the establishment of the Bulgarian Exarchate (1870) represented the fragmentation of Eastern Orthodox universalism in its most visible and dramatic manner. In fact, patriarchal reaction entailed the official excommunication of the Bulgarian Church and its followers, who were considered heretics who rejected religious unity in favour of ethno-national bonds – defined in the church’s official language as ethnofyletismos (a term that is literally rendered as ‘ethnic-racism’ but practically means what is usually referred to as ‘ethnic nationalism’ today). The subsequent Greek–Bulgarian ecclesiastical schism (which lasted from 1872 until the 1940s) represented the recognition of a major shift in the nature of church affiliation with national secular identity gaining the upper hand against the earlier mixed religi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: Tradition, Transition and Change in Greek Orthodoxy at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century
• PART I Orthodox Christianity, Greek Ethnicity and Politics
• PART II Orthodox Christianity and Greek Culture
• Index