The Greek and Eastern Churches/Part 2/Division 2/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
THE LATER GREEK CHURCH UNDER THE TURKS
The later history of the Greek Church need not detain us, for although Greece has never enjoyed the happiness of the country whose annals are dull, the page is no longer lit up by the presence of great men or fresh ideas. For more than two centuries the Church was dragged through the depths of degradation. The rapid succession of patriarchs was maintained at Constantinople, precarious, subservient. The provincial bishops—subject to the patriarch, who was subject to the sultan—were entrusted with a measure of local control over their flocks. Another order of Greek officials serving under the Turkish government consisted of the "Phanariots," who derived their name from the quarter of Constantinople which was their centre. These men had the charge of the taxation, the chief concern of the Ottoman government, which was often too weak to protect its subjects from attack and outrage, and wretchedly indifferent to the administration of justice, that should have been the first object of its existence, but always energetic in the collection of the taxes. This odious task was entrusted to local authorities drawn from among the Greeks, who were despised and hated by their compatriots, like the Jewish publicans in the time of Christ. After the bishops and the Phanariots, there were no people of any power or influence among the Greeks. Hospitals and charities disappeared for lack of support. The monks were so poor that they went about visiting the markets with icons and cattle for sale. Libraries were stripped of their treasures in ancient manuscripts, which were sold to any chance purchasers and so scattered in all directions beyond hope of recovery. In course of time the central government lost vigour and the result was atrophy of the extremities. A partial disintegration took place and local pashas ruled as despots; even the Phanariots exercised tyrannical power with little supervision, and, as men who had sold themselves to the foreign oppressor, proved more cruel to their fellow-Greeks than the Turks themselves. The extensive coast-line of Greece left much of the mainland as well as the islands dangerously open to piratical raids. For two hundred years the most characteristic feature of the history of Greece under the Turks consists in the repeated raids of the pirates, both Turkish and Christian, and the fights to which they gave rise among the peasants and islanders. The concerns of religion seem to be swallowed up in a struggle for bare existence.
One interesting series of events breaks the monotony of this story of suffering and humiliation, namely, the progress of the Venetian conquests. Venice had suffered in the general deluge that had swept over the wreck of the Byzantine Empire under the great Mohammed ii. But gradually she more than recovered the ground she had lost in Eastern Europe, though never her own civic grandeur. After a ruinous war, the Venetians succeeded in conquering the Morea (a.d. 1684). But while they were thus able to restore a portion of the Ottoman Empire to Christendom, their action was creating a fresh complication in the Greek Church. In the first place, they were Roman Catholics, with whose religious position the Greeks had no sympathy, having lively memories of the intrigues of the Jesuits and the attempts of the Uniats to capture the orthodox Church. Then the patriarch of Constantinople was a functionary under the Turkish government, and therefore officially bound to be opposed to the Venetian aggression. Nevertheless, Morosini, the able Venetian leader, contrived to establish such good order that a number of Greeks were drawn from the Turkish provinces in the north to share in the growing prosperity of the Morea. Even Mohammedans also yielded to the temptation, and some of them joined the Greek Church, without any interference on the part of the authorities.
The Venetians established the only liberal Roman Catholic government of the age. They left the Greeks free to practise their religious rites. In this respect the policy of Venice was wholly different from that of Rome and the Jesuits, by whom hitherto the Latin Church had been represented in the East. The Venetians restored to the Roman Catholics the churches which the Turks had converted into mosques; but the chief of these churches had been built by the Franks at the time of the Crusades or later. They did not permit the pope to interfere with the Greek Church, and they allowed it to retain all the powers and privileges it had possessed under the sultan. But the situation was awkward, because all the Greek bishops in the Morea were nominees of the patriarch of Constanstinople, who also appointed the abbots of many of the monasteries. The Venetians would not permit an exarch of the patriarch to live in the Morea or any patriarchal missive to be published by the clergy, and they invited the Greek communes to elect their own bishops. This can hardly be regarded as ecclesiastical tyranny; it was a political necessity, and, considering the odious position of the patriarch, a necessity not unwelcome to patriotic Greeks. The Roman Catholic priests, who of course were now free to enter the Morea, were men of higher character, better education, and more disinterested conduct, than the local Greek clergy, and as such they won respect from the inhabitants. Altogether the Venetian occupation was followed by an improvement in the condition of the conquered province.
Gradually Morosini pushed his forces farther north and took more of the Grecian territory from the Turks. In September 1687 he entered the Piræas, occupied Athens, and besieged the Acropolis. This led to disastrous consequences involving an irreparable loss to the civilised world. The Parthenon was then standing in all the glory of perfect Greek art, the grandest product of Doric architecture, bearing in its pediment and on its entablature the masterpieces of Pheidias, the most sublime sculpture the world has ever seen. Into this centre of classic splendour crashed the Venetian shells, reducing the temple to ruins, pounding some of the sculpture to fragments, and leaving the best of it in the battered and broken condition in which we see it to-day at the British Museum, where, in spite of the ill-usage from which it has suffered, it is still recognised as one of the wonders of the world under the title of "The Elgin Marbles."[1] It is humiliating to Europe to see that the ruin of the greatest relic of art in the city, that had been the crown and flower of ancient civilisation, was directly caused by men from the most beautiful city of modern civilisation, that it was the owners of St. Mark's who shattered the Parthenon. Here we perceive the mockery of war, which flaunts flags of glory and yet is in itself a shameful heritage of brutal barbarism.
The next hundred and fifty years afford little of interest to be recorded concerning the fortunes—or rather the misfortunes—of the Greek Church under the Turkish domination. Pirates still ravaged the coasts, and pashas and Phanariots continued to oppress the inland people who were beyond the reach of the wild sea-rovers. Simony was more rampant than ever. The clerical office was systematically bought for the sake of the power it conferred and the dues it commanded, and this evil continued in the Venetian territory of Greece also. But in the Morea under the influence of the Catholic priests education now made some progress. Thus Venice was sowing the seeds of a better future. Russia also, under the influence of Peter the Great, was stepping into the arena of European politics and preparing for her role as the protectress of the Oriental Churches. But the tsar was disappointed in not being joined by a general rising of the Christians when in the year 1711 he advanced to an attack of the Ottoman Empire, and he was compelled to agree to peace on humiliating terms. Thus Russia's first serious act of interference only resulted in mischief. The Porte, having discovered its power, proceeded to use it by expelling the Venetians from Greece. In 1715 the Turks seized and pillaged Corinth, making slaves of the Greeks they captured there. This led the terror-stricken Greeks of the Morea to prostrate themselves before their old enemies, and to invite them to come and drive out the Venetians. They must have seen good reason to repent of their short-sighted cowardice when they were suffering from the ravages produced by the janissaries in the process of reconquest. The reversion of Morea and other Venetian acquisitions to Turkey was confirmed by the treaty of Passarovitz, which followed the victories of Prince Eugene, and was signed on the 21st of July 1718. But Venice still retained possessions in Dalmatia and other parts.
After this, by degrees, Russia again assumed the proud position of champion of Eastern Christianity. In 1783 Catherine ii. expelled the Mussulman power from the Crimea, where it had held its ground with more or less tenacity from the time of the Mongol invasion; and about the same time she extracted a treaty from the Porte granting the Greeks of the Archipelago the right to use the Russian flag.
Meanwhile the Greeks had been doing nothing for themselves. But a new day was now dawning. After more than three centuries of humiliation and oppression, once again Hellas was beginning to realise her national existence. It has often been shown in history that revolutions do not occur when the people who revolt are suffering most severely from oppression. In those dark and dismal days the power of tyranny is too great to allow of any hope of successful resistance, and the misery of its victims simply benumbs their minds and paralyses their energies. It is with the beginning of better times that the fatal spell of despotism is broken, and daring projects of independence are engendered. Then the slumbering emotions of patriotism awake from their unnatural lethargy and the tyrant's slaves remember that they are men. Thus it was in Greece at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Already it seemed as though the Ottoman rule was on its decline, its vigour decaying, its power of mischief shrinking. There were isles of Greece that had become virtually self-governing. Even the mainland was certainly not worse treated than previously; its cruelest oppressors were not the self-indulgent Turks, but those disgraceful Greeks, nominally fellow-Christians—the Phanariots. Another influence made the goad of tyranny felt more acutely, although it was not being applied more vigorously. This was the stirring of the Greek spirit itself. Findlay points out that it began with education. Greece had been singularly behind the rest of Europe, not so much in the degree of education, as in its nature. The modern spirit, with its revival of classical antiquity, which rose in the West with the Renaissance, was not known in Eastern Europe. The East had neither Renaissance nor Reformation—those two mighty factors of the world as we know it. The vast significance of that double negation can scarcely be over-rated.
Greece was still back in the Middle Ages, or rather in the later, the decadent patristic period. Her intellectual development had been arrested with the death of John of Damascus, the last of the Fathers. Since then her education had not been neglected; for centuries it was far in advance of that of the rude and brutal West, and it was always maintained in some quarters with pedantic assiduity. But it was patristic education, ecclesiastical education, education in the dead theology of an effete Church. All life and soul, all adventure of speculation, all passion of poetry, had long since withered out of it. And while it harked back on the past it did not go far enough in that direction to find inspiration. It cared nothing for the glories of ancient Hellas. It prided itself in Chrysostom, not in Plato. Its boast was the orthodoxy of its Church, not the art, poetry, and heroism of its ancestry. It did not look back beyond Constantinople; it never found in Athens a name to conjure with.
Then a new spirit awoke. The Greeks were roused to remember that they were the descendants and heirs of the most magnificent classical antiquity. The educational reform was commenced by Eugenios Bulgares of Corfu, who introduced it to Joannina, Mount Athos, and Constantinople. This alarmed the conservative ecclesiastics and annoyed the time-serving Phanariots, whose influence with the sultan put a check to it. But it was welcomed in Russia, whither Eugenios was invited in the year 1775, and where he was made bishop of Sclavonia and Kherson. He wrote a book on religious toleration which still more irritated the dignitaries of his Church, and called forth a reply by Anthimus the patriarch of Jerusalem. This miserable sycophant congratulated the Greeks on having escaped the artifices of the devil to which Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists had all succumbed, and gave his version of the rise of the Ottoman Empire as a mark of the particular favour of heaven to protect them against the Western heresy with which the last of the Byzantine emperors were infected. Eugenios was followed by Adamantius Korais, a native of Chios, who settled in Paris, and put modern Greek into a literary form. At the same time, he urged the principles of religious liberty and endeavoured to rouse his people from the intellectual torpor of orthodox bigotry. Under these influences the Greeks began to realise their nationality and to dream dreams of the revival of their great past.
Nevertheless, the early chapters of the story of the struggle for Greek independence are grievously disappointing. The first leaders of the revolutionary committee which was working for this end, known as the Philiké Hetairia, were self-seeking men who deservedly lost the confidence of their followers. The movement did not make much headway till it was taken up by the peasants,[2] and then it was conducted in some places with savage ferocity. On the 5th of April, 1821, a thanksgiving service, at which twenty-four priests officiated while 5,000 fighting men gathered round, was held at Kalmata, in the open air, by the side of a rushing torrent, to celebrate the success of the Greeks in Messenia. Two days after this, Petrobey, the commander of the insurgent army, issued a proclamation in conjunction with a few primates—local Greek officials, corresponding to the Constantinople Phanariots—whom he designated the "Senate of Messenia." It was addressed to all the Christian nations, and its object was to seek their assistance in throwing off the Ottoman yoke. But the Greeks had to fight for their liberties. Dreadful scenes accompanied the popular risings which now ensued. Perhaps the worst case was that of the Morea, where the Greeks murdered the whole Mussulman population, amounting to ten or fifteen thousand peaceable men, women, and children, scattered over the peninsular, and quite helpless because overpowered by numbers. They first killed all they could lay hold of in the country parts. Some escaped to the towns. But one after another the towns were taken, and all the Turks who had sought refuge in them were also massacred. This was not a mere savage outburst; it was planned and instigated by the Hetairists. And it succeeded. The Morea was freed from the Turkish tyranny. The grim fact cannot be denied. The most damning evidence of the evil of despotism is seen in its destruction of natural human sympathies among the slaves it debases by its cruelty.
The savage method of seizing the prize of liberty had to be paid for at a heavy price. The sultan had already begun to take severe measures for the suppression of the insurrection. When the news of the massacre in the Morea reached him he executed sixteen of the Hetairists in one day. Then he had a number of Greeks of the highest rank seized as hostages, under the circumstances a sensible policy; several were beheaded. On the 22nd of April the despot's vengeance reached its climax in the execution of Gregorios, the patriarch of Constantinople, now an old man, much respected by his flock, who was hung from the lintel of the gate of the patriarchate with his sentence fixed to his breast. His body was exposed for three days and then given to the mob to be dragged through the streets and flung into the sea. Recovered by the Christians, it was conveyed in an Ionian vessel to Odessa, where it was received as a holy relic by the Russians and buried with great pomp. The accusation against Gregorios was complicity in the insurrection. It would seem that he had not taken any active part in it, but that, on the other hand, he had possessed some knowledge of what was going on which he had not reported to the government. Constructively, this was treason against the Ottoman power to which he owed his appointment, so that the sultan was justified in executing him; and yet to have betrayed his fellow-Christians would have been treason to his race and his religion. It was a terrible dilemma for a good man to be in. Few can blame him for the course he chose, which was that of silence. But this was one more evidence of the monstrous anomaly of the position he held as the chief pastor of the Eastern Church and at the same time an official of the Mohammedan government. Gregorios was a man of high character, and the calm and dignified way in which he died helps us to sympathise with the view of the Greeks who honour him as a martyr.
The violent death of so venerable a personage as the old patriarch of Constantinople sent a shock of horror through Europe. The Tsar Alexander withdrew his representative from the city. This was not merely a diplomatic move, since it appears that the Russian ambassador was in personal danger. Finally, the tsar proceeded to concentrate an army of 100,000 men on the borders of the principalities.
Meanwhile the conflagration of insurrection was spreading. When the monks of Mount Athos discovered that Russia was not going to support it they were reluctant to give it their sanction. Their predecessors had been wise in coming to terms with Mohammed ii., the conqueror of Constantinople. Although for a time they favoured the Hetairists, ultimately they too came to terms, believing that the privileges of the Holy Mountain would be better protected by the Turks than by the Greek revolutionists. The situation was very complicated; because in its origin the revolution was mixed up with demands for religious liberty. The orthodox Church, under the patriarch of Constantinople and the bishops who were responsible to the Porte, was in a way an appanage of the Ottoman government. Besides, it was hide-bound in conservative officialism. On the other hand, men who had tasted the sweets of liberty thirsted for it in Church as well as in State. But no Greek Churchmen were more conservative than the monks of Mount Athos. While as Christians they were opposed to the Mussulmans, and would naturally have sided with their fellow-Christians in endeavouring to free the Church from the yoke of Islam, they had the greatest antipathy to the spirit represented by the French Revolution, the infection of which had been caught by the Greek insurgents. A modern free-thinking revolutionist was more alarming to them than a stolid, old-fashioned Turk. So they finally decided that on the whole it would be best for them to go on as they were These monks have always enjoyed large privileges of selfgovernment, but little molested by the Turkish government. Their peculiar situation on their isolated isthmus has enabled them to live to themselves without interference from the great world beyond. But the judgment of the monks of Mount Athos was not without confirmation in other quarters. The primates and bishops discovered that the military leaders were not at all inclined to hand the powers of government over to them, so that they actually possessed less power under their fellow-Greeks than they had exercised under the Turks. The spirit of revolution is never sympathetic with officialism, whether lay or cleric.
It does not fall within the limits of this chapter to sketch the course of the final establishment of Greek independence. If there is much that is disappointing in the issue, let it be remembered that history cannot repeat itself. The modern Greeks could assume the names of Pericles and Demosthenes; they could not conjure into life again the genius and glory of ancient Hellas. Greece was now inhabited by a mixed population. Very early, shoals of Sclavs had poured over the Balkans into the south; subsequently Albanians had come in great numbers; in some places the actual Greeks were quite outnumbered by the alien immigrants. The resultant population is only Hellenic in geography, language, and religion, not at all in purity of race. The Greeks of to-day are not the Greeks of Solon, and Pericles, and Plato. They are a mixed race; which, however, is bravely striving to revive the ancient Hellenic traditions. We may well congratulate them on the liberties they have won and the progress they are still making, without burdening them with the absurd expectation that they will emulate in the twentieth century a.d. the deeds of their predecessors of the fourth century b.c.
After Greece had established her freedom, the connection of the Church in Greece with the patriarch of Constantinople was difficult to define. At first all mutual relations were broken off. This was inevitable, since the patriarch was an accredited official under the Ottoman government. The clergy ceased to mention the patriarch's name in their prayers, and in this respect followed the example of the prayers used in those parts of the Greek Church which were outside his recognised rule. The independence of the Church in Greece was not effected without opposition. Bishops from provinces of the Turkish Empire, encouraged by the monks of Mount Athos, came into Greece in order to support the patriarch's claim of authority; but the Greek bishops would not yield to their persuasions.
In the year 1833 a national synod decreed that the orthodox apostolic Church of Greece, while it preserves the dogmatic unity of the Eastern orthodox Churches, is dependent on no external authority and spiritually owns no head but the Founder of the Christian faith. In external government, which belongs to the crown, it acknowledges the King of Greece as its supreme head. The Holy Synod consists of prelates appointed by the king, and a royal delegate attends its meetings and countersigns its decrees, having a veto on its proceedings. Since the patriarch ignored this decision two parties now arose, one supporting it, the other siding with Constantinople. At length, after much negotiation, in the year 1850 the patriarch and synod of Constantinople published a decretal of the Oriental Church recognising the independence of the Greek Church under certain restrictions, the terms of which were adopted two years later by the Greek Parliament. According to this decision, the rights of the Greek synod in home affairs are recognised, but the patriarch can interpose in matters that affect the whole Church. In the year 1863, Prince George, a Lutheran, having become King of Greece, it was enacted that "The orthodox Church of Greece, acknowledging for its Head the Lord Jesus Christ, is indissolubly united in doctrine with the Greek Church of Constantinople and with every other Church holding the same doctrines."
The patriarch of Constantinople is the spiritual head of the whole orthodox Church, and the secular head of the Greek Church in the Turkish dominions.[3] He has jurisdiction over the whole of European Turkey, part of Bulgaria, Rumelia, Asia Minor, the Ægean Islands, and Crete. During the years 1843 to 1845 there was a great contest between the patriarch of Constantinople and the synods of the patriarchates of Jerusalem and Syria on the right to choose their patriarchs without reference to Constantinople, and the latter gained their point.[4] But the orthodox patriarch of Alexandria is still subject to the patriarch of Constantinople. He, however, is a merely titular official with but a shadow of a diocese, since the Copts of the national Church in Egypt are Monophysites, separated from the Greek Church. There are about 37,000 orthodox Greek Christians in Egypt, 28,000 under the patriarch of Antioch, 15,000 subject to the patriarch of Jerusalem.[5]
Melancholy as the story of the Greek Church during the later centuries of its history may be, it is cheering to observe signs of awakening life during quite recent years. These are to be traced in two directions.
In the first place there is a remarkable development of scholarship among the higher ecclesiastics. Learning was never allowed to die out in the leading monastic centres; but hitherto this has been patristic learning without the least recognition of critical scholarship. Now the criticism of the West is breaking into the mind of the East. Students from the Greek Church are now to be found in German universities. The result is that the studies of Berlin, and Heidelburg, and Strasburg are being transplanted to Constantinople and Athens. Already these studies have borne fruit, and the Greek Church is coming forward with its contributions to historical theology.
The other movement is of a more popular character. It consists of the formation of societies for Biblical study.[6] These societies are quite unecclesiastical in form and are chiefly maintained by laymen. At first they were frowned upon by the clergy. But their good effects in reformation of character are winning them recognition as truly Christian brotherhoods, that men who have the spiritual and moral welfare of the people at heart should welcome gladly. Unlike similar movements in Russia, which are almost confined to dissenters in formal separation from the national Church, these societies do not involve any such severance. We may compare them to the Bible readings of evangelical members of the Church of England, such as those that are fed by the fervour of Keswick. But they are more closely organised, and cannot but be recognised as indicating some return to the primitive idea of the Church.
The movement is spreading rapidly. At Constantinople there are more than ten of these brotherhoods. In Smyrna quite a new religious life is blossoming out among the associations. They have appeared at Ephesus, at Heleopolis, at Arreon. In some places the brotherhood has led to two preachings on the Sunday, one early in the morning actually in the church, the other in the club-house (Vereinhause) later in the day; for this second preaching, however, sometimes there is substituted a catechising of men, women, and children. In Athens there are two brotherhoods. One has been formed at Patros in Cyprus. Meanwhile the need of schools for the clergy is being pressed, and already there is preaching by the parish popes in some places and no longer only by visiting priests and bishops.
As early as the year 1818 a Greek society for the circulation of the Scriptures was formed with the approval of the patriarch Cyril vi., and in conjunction with the British and Foreign Bible Society. Nevertheless, the excitement which arose in the year 1901 on the translation of the Bible into the vernacular would appear to indicate a reactionary movement on the part of the obscurantists. But the case is very complicated. In the first place there is a strong clerical aversion to a translation promoted by laymen without any ecclesiastical sanction. Then the new passion for classicism is irritated by a seeming degradation of Scripture. It is said that no Greek vulgate is needed, as the children are now taught to read classical Greek in the schools. Behind all this there is the inveterate horror of innovations in the Greek Church, together with the superstition of the ignorant population in clinging to the old venerated form of the Bible.
Whether the brotherhoods will be able to remain in connection with the ancient Greek Church, whether they are the little leaven that is to leaven the whole lump—a consummation to be devoutly desired, or whether the garment of antiquity, stiffened with its threefold embroidery—doctrinal, ceremonial, disciplinary, will prove too inflexible to allow it breath and life, the future will declare. In the latter case we may see a Greek Protestantism breaking away from the old orthodox Church. But if that result can be avoided without stifling the new movement, we may hope that the old dream of More and Erasmus in the West may come true in our own day in the East, and an ancient Church be revived and reformed from within. With the sad history of that Church before us it is difficult to be sanguine of such a result. We cry with the sceptical prophet, "Can these dry bones live?" But at all events the new movement deserves warm encouragement from earnest Christian people, that the light thus kindled may not be quenched and the great Church of the East sink down again into dim torpor.
- ↑ So named because sent to England by Lord Elgin (after suffering later ravages of war), and thus at last saved from total destruction.
- ↑ See Findlay, Greek Revolution, vol. i. p. 195.
- ↑ See Silbernagl, Verfassung und gegenwärtiger Bestand sämtlicher Kirchen des Orients, p. 9.
- ↑ See Silbernagl, Verfassung und gegenwärtiger Bestand sämtlicher Kirchen des Orients, p. 24.
- ↑ Ibid. p. 26.
- ↑ Called σύλλογοι, or vereins.