An essay in universal history from an Orthodox Christian Point ofView part the age of revolution

71. THE ORIGINS OF NATIONALISM: (7) GREECE

In his book The Idea of Nationalism (1944), Hans Kohn, a Zionist of Czech-German background, made an important distinction between two dominant categories of nationalism that has been summarized by Shlomo Sand as follows: “Western nationalism, with an essentially voluntarist approach, which developed on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, bounded on the east by Switzerland; and the organic national identity that spread eastward from the Rhine, encompassing Germany, Poland, the Ukraine and Russia.

“Nationalism in the West, except in Ireland, is an original phenomenon that sprang from autochthonous sociopolitical forces, without outside intervention. In most cases it appears when the state, which is engaged in modernization, is well established or is being established. This nationalism draws its ideas from the traditions of the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, and its principles are based on individualism and liberalism, both legal and political. The hegemonic class that engenders this national consciousness is a powerful, secular bourgeoisie, and it constructs civil institutions with political power that play a decisive role in the formation of liberal democracy. It is a self-confident bourgeoisie, and the national politics it fosters tend generally toward openness and inclusiveness. Becoming a citizen of the United States, Britain, France, the Netherlands or Switzerland depends not only on origin and birth but also on the will to join. For all the differences between national perceptions, anyone naturalized in these countries is seen, legally and ideologically, as a member of the nation, with the state as the common property of the citizenry.
“According to Kohn, the nationalism that developed in Central and Eastern Europe (the Czech case being something of an exception) was, by contrast, a historical product catalyzed principally from outside. It came into being during Napoleon’s conquests and began to take shape as a movement of resistance against the ideas and progressive values of the Enlightenment. In these countries, the national idea arose before, and in fact unconnected with, the consolidation of a modern state apparatus. In these political cultures the middle classes were weak, and the civil institutions they founded were deferential toward the central and aristocratic authorities…”⁴³⁶
While we may quarrel with some aspects of this distinction, the central point, that East European nationalism was influenced more by the more mystical, blood-and-soil nationalism of Germany than by the more civic nationalism of France, is valid. A particularly important influence coming from Germany was that of Johann Gottfried von Herder, whose concept of the unique essence of each nation was also to influence Russian Hegelian thinkers in the 1840s. According to Daniel P. Payne, “the importance of Herder for East European nationalism” has been demonstrated by Peter Sugar. “According to Sugar, Herder’s concept of the Volk was transformed in the Eastern European context. In the concept of the Volk, Herder simply meant nationality and did not imply the nation as such. In his arguments against the search for the ideal state, Herder maintained that the concept of liberty must conform to the needs of each particular nationality. Sugar notes: ‘This is a romantic and, even more, a humanitarian concept. It condemns those who place the state, even the ideal state, ahead of people.’ Consequently, in Eastern Europe this contextualization on the basis of each particular nationality led to a unique messianism in the particularization of each Volk. In this particularization a ‘confusion of nationality and nation, of cultural, political, and linguistic characteristics was further extended to justify the Volk’s mission. This mission could be accomplished only if it had free play in a Volksstaat, nation-state.’ Thus, the concept of the nation-state as it developed in Eastern Europe was very different from the Western understanding. In the East each Volk needed its own nation-state in order to fulfill its messianic mission rooted in the Volksville. Herder’s romanticism combined with the political ideas of the West, creating the form of cultural-political nationalism that is uniquely its own.”⁴³⁷
However, there were special factors that distinguished Balkan nationalism from German, Herderian nationalism. The most important of these was the role of the Orthodox Church. Whereas in Western Europe the Churches, with the exception of the Catholic Church in Ireland, played only a small role, in the Balkans the Orthodox Church played a decisive part. We have seen how it was Metropolitan Germanos of Patras who actually raised the standard of revolution in the Peloponnese in 1821, and the Church was equally important in the Serbian revolution. At the same time, the Church by her nature, being an international community with a universalist message, was opposed to the divisive tendencies introduced by the various nationalisms.
Thus on the one hand the Orthodox Church supported the struggles for national independence insofar as they were struggles for the survival of the Orthodox faith against Islam. The Ottoman Muslim yoke had a similar effect in stimulating nationalism in the Balkans as Napoleon’s victories had had in stimulating nationalism in Germany. And the Church was on the side of the people against the infidel oppressor.
On the other hand, the Church in the Ottoman empire could not afford to identify too closely with the individual national revolutions. And this for two main reasons. First, because the revolutions had caused atrocities – for example, the wiping out of every Turkish man, woman and child in the Peloponnese (57,000 people) – that the Church could not possibly approve of. And secondly because while the Orthodox Christian people of the Balkans constituted a single millet, or people, ruled by a single head – the Ecumenical Patriarch, the individual nationalisms competed with each other and even fought wars against each other. Thus Serbs fought Bulgarians, and Bulgarians fought Greeks – and all three nations fought the Turks, not together, but in competition with each other. Even the Patriarch, who should have been the symbol of Orthodox unity, tended to further Greek interests at the expense of those of his Slav parishioners. This encouraged anti-clerical tendencies among the Slav nationalists.
Thus Payne writes: “With the advent of nationalism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Eastern Europe, which led to the eventual dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the various nationalities revolted not only against their Ottoman overlords but also their clerical authorities, especially the Ecumenical Patriarch (EP). Under the leadership of the Greek patriarch, a process of Grecification had occurred to insure ecclesiastical unity in the millet. Instead of the use of Church Slavonic in the Slav churches, the Greek liturgy and practice was enforced, especially in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Additionally, the high taxes placed upon the Orthodox people by the hierarchical authorities to insure their positions with the Sublime Porte produced increasing anti-clericalism in the Balkan peoples. This anti-clericalism against the Greek bishops was also rooted in the Enlightenment ideas of Western Europe. Borrowing the Erastian model of church–state relations that developed in Western Europe, whereby the Church was placed under the authority of the state, East European secular nationalists, desiring their own independent churches, argued for the creation and subjection of national churches to the political authorities. As Aristeides Papadakis argues, ‘Significantly, one of the first steps taken by these independent states was to separate the church within their frontiers from the authority of Constantinople. By declaring it autocephalous, by “nationalizing” it, they hoped to control it.’
“At the time of the development of nationalism in the Balkans, there were two

differing opinions as to the direction of the polity to succeed the Ottoman Empire. On the one hand, many of the Phanariots believed that the Ottoman Empire eventually would become Greek, allowing for the resurrection of the Byzantine Empire. Thus, they did not support the various nationalist movements that led to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. Instead, they looked to its natural devolution. This understanding was supported by the traditional Byzantine political ideology of the oikoumene, which holds that the one empire has only one church. In a modified position, Rigas Pheraios Vestinlis articulated an understanding of an Orthodox commonwealth of nations in the succeeding empire, with the EP as its head. However, the Western-educated secular nationalists contested the vision of Rigas and what Zakynthos calls ‘neo-byzantine universalism,’ employing instead the Enlightenment ideas of Voltaire to articulate the development of independent nation-states with autocephalous national churches. Adopting the secular national vision of the state with its concomitant national church led to the transmogrification of the Orthodox understanding of the ‘local church.’

“Greek sociologist Paschalis Kitromilides argues similarly, using Benedict Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities,’ that the national historiographies smoothed over the antinomical relationship between Orthodoxy and nationalism. He states: ‘It was the eventual abandonment of the ecumenicity of Orthodoxy, and the “nationalization” of the churches, that brought intense national conflicts into the life of the Orthodox Church and nurtured the assumption concerning the affinity between Orthodoxy and nationality.’ The various national histories created imagined national communities whereby the Church’s opposition to nationalism was dismissed and its support as a nation-building institution was promoted. Kitromilides argues that the Church instead opposed nationalism and the Enlightenment ideas underlying it in order to sustain its traditional theological position of being the ‘one’ Church. However, under the influence of secular nationalism, the Church’s position eventually changed, assuming a nationalist position, especially in regards to the Macedonian crisis of the late nineteenth century…”⁴³⁸
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Modern Greek nationalism began shortly after the foundation of the Free Greek State in 1832. The question that immediately arose was: who were the Greeks? “Although,” as Roderick Beaton writes, “just about all the citizens of the kingdom with the exception of the king and his advisers who came from Bavaria, were united by the Greek language and the Orthodox religion, many more co-religionists and Greek speakers lived beyond its boundaries, in territories still under the control of the Ottomans. Since a state now existed, and the very concept of European statehood had previously been foreign to traditional Greek concepts of themselves, it followed that in order to live up convincingly to that concept, the Greek state would have to include all the Greeks. Greek irredentism is therefore as old as the Greek state, a logical consequence of the Romantic concept of nationhood used to define that state from the beginning.
“The inescapable requirement for the state to incorporate all its ‘nationals’ within its boundaries in order to justify its own self-definition, was first articulated in a famous speech to the Constituent Assembly in Athens in January 1844 by Ioannis Kolettis, a veteran strategist of the war of independence and soon to become prime minister: ‘Greece is geographically placed at the centre of Europe, between East and West, her destiny in decline [i.e. the destiny of ancient Greece] to spread light to the West, but in her rebirth in the East. The former task our forefathers achieved, the latter falls to us. In the spirit of this oath [i.e. to liberate Greece] and of this great idea I have consistently seen the nation’s representatives gathered here to decide the fate not only of Greece, but of he Greek race.’…”⁴³⁹
In the same speech Kolettis went on to say: "The kingdom of Greece is not Greece; it is only a part, the smallest and poorest, of Greece. The Greek is not only he who inhabits the kingdom, but also he who lives in Janina, or Thessaloniki, or Serea, or Adrianople, or Constantinople, or Trebizond, or Crete, or Samos, or any other country of the Greek history or race. There are two great centers of Hellenism, Athens and Constantinople. Athens is only the capital of the kingdom; Constantinople is the great capital, the City, I Polis, the attraction and the hope of all the Hellenes."⁴⁴⁰ So the revolutionary aim of the new nationalism was to unite Constantinople and Greek-speaking Anatolia – and perhaps even the whole of the territory formerly ruled by Alexander the Great and the Byzantine autocrats! - to the Kingdom of Greece, although Athens and Constantinople were disunited not only politically but also ecclesiastically. Fortunately, the ecclesiastical schism, as we have seen, was healed in 1852. However, the political schism was never healed because the revolution failed disastrously in 1922. The vast majority of Anatolian Greeks were indeed united with their Free Greek cousins, but only through an exchange of populations in 1922-23. Even after the collapse of the Ottoman empire, Constantinople and Anatolia remained in Turkish hands…
Sir Steven Runciman writes: "Throughout the nineteenth century, after the close of the Greek War of Independence, the Greeks within the Ottoman Empire had been in an equivocal position. Right up to the end of the Balkan Wars in 1913 they were far more numerous than their fellow-Greeks living within the boundaries of the Kingdom of Greece, and on average more wealthy. Some of them still took service under the Sultan. Turkish government finances were still largely administered by Greeks. There were Greeks in the Turkish diplomatic service, such as Musurus Pasha, for many years Ottoman Ambassador to the Court of St. James. Such men served their master loyally; but they were always conscious of the free Greek state, whose interests often ran counter to his. Under the easygoing rule of Sultans Abdul Medjit and Abdul Azis, in the middle of the century, no great difficulties arose. But the Islamic reaction under Abdul Hamit led to renewed suspicion of the Greeks, which was enhanced by the Cretan question and the war, disastrous for Greece, of 1897. The Young Turks who dethroned Abdul Hamit shared his dislike of the Christians, which the Balkan War seemed to justify. Participation by Greeks in Turkish administrative affairs declined and eventually was ended.
"For the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople the position throughout the century was particularly difficult. He was a Greek but he was not a citizen of Greece. By the oath that he took on his appointment he undertook to be loyal to the Sultan, even though the Sultan might be at war with the Kingdom of Greece. His flock, envious of the freedom of the Greeks of the Kingdom, longed to be united with them; but he could not lawfully encourage their longing. The dilemma that faced Gregory V in the spring of 1821 was shared, though in a less acute form, by all his successors. He no longer had any authority over the Greeks of Greece. Hardly had the Kingdom been established before its Church insisted on complete autonomy [i.e. autocephaly] under the Archbishop of Athens. It was to Athens, to the King of Greece, that the Greeks in Turkey now looked for the fulfilment of their aspirations. Had the Christian Empire been restored at Constantinople the Patriarch would indeed have lost much of his administrative powers; but he would have lost them gladly; for the Emperor would have been at hand to advise and admonish, and he would have enjoyed the protection of a Christian government. But as it was, he was left to administer, in a worsening atmosphere and with decreasing authority, a community whose sentimental allegiance was given increasingly to a monarch who lived far away, with whom he could not publicly associate himself, and whose kingdom was too small and poor to rescue him in times of peril. In the past the Russian Tsar had been cast by many of the Greeks in the role of saviour. That had had its advantages; for, though the Tsar continually let his Greek clients down, he was at least a powerful figure whom the Turks regarded with awe. Moreover he did not interfere with the Greeks' allegiance to their Patriarch. Whatever Russian ambitions might be, the Greeks had no intention of ending as Russian subjects. As it was, the emergence of an independent Greece lessened Russian sympathy. Greek politicians ingeniously played off Britain and France against Russia, and against each other and Russia found it more profitable to give her patronage to Bulgaria: which was not to the liking of the Greeks.
"We may regret that the Patriarchate was not inspired to alter its role. It was, after all, the Oecumenical [i.e. Universal] Patriarchate. Was it not its duty to emerge as leader of the Orthodox Oecumene? The Greeks were not alone in achieving independence in the nineteenth century. The Serbs, the Roumanians, and, later, the Bulgarians all threw off the Ottoman yoke. All of them were alive with nationalistic ardour. Could not the Patriarchate have become a rallying force for the Orthodox world, and so have checked the centrifugal tendencies of Balkan nationalism?
"The opportunity was lost. The Patriarchate remained Greek rather than oecumenical. We cannot blame the Patriarchs. They were Greeks, reared in the Hellene tradition of which the Orthodox Church was the guardian and from which it derived much of its strength. Moreover in the atmosphere of the nineteenth century internationalism was regarded as an instrument of tyranny and reaction. But the Patriarchate erred too far in the other direction. Its fierce and fruitless attempt to keep the Bulgarian Church in subjection to Greek hierarchs, in the 1860s, did it no good and only increased bitterness. On Mount Athos, whose communities owed much to the lavish, if not disinterested, generosity of the Russian Tsars, the feuds between the Greek and Slav monasteries were far from edifying. This record of nationalism was to endanger the very existence of the Patriarchate in the dark days that followed 1922."⁴⁴¹
The philhellene Russian diplomat C.N. Leontiev wrote in the 1880s: "The movement of contemporary political nationalism is nothing other than the spread of cosmopolitan democratization with the difference only in the methods. There has been no creativity; the new Hellenes have not been able to think up anything in the sphere of higher interests except a reverent imitation of progressive-democratic Europe. As soon as the privileged Turks, who represented something like a foreign aristocracy among the Greeks, had removed themselves, nothing was found except the most complete plutocratic and grammatocratic egalitarianism. When a people does not have its own privileged, more or less immobile classes, the richest and most educated of the citizens must, of course, gain the superiority over the others. Therefore in an egalitarian-liberal order a very mobile plutocracy and grammatocracy having no traditions or heritage inevitably develop. At that time [1821-32] the new Greece could not produce a king of their own blood, to such a degree did her leaders, the heroes of national liberty, suffer from demagogic jealousy! It, this new Greece, could not even produce a president of her native Greek blood, Count Kapodistrias, without soon killing him."
According to Leontiev, the Greek revolution, which continued throughout the nineteenth century, represented a new kind of Orthodox nationalism, a nationalism influenced by the ideas of the French revolution that did not, as in earlier centuries, seek to strengthen national feeling for the sake of the faith, but used religious feeling for the sake of the nation. This was the reason why, in spite of the fact that the clergy played such a prominent role in the Greek revolution, their influence fell sharply after the revolution in those areas liberated from the Turks. "The Greek clergy complain that in Athens religion is in decline (that is, the main factor insulating [the Greeks] from the West has weakened), and makes itself felt much more in Constantinople than in Athens, and in general more under the Turks than in pure Hellas."⁴⁴²
"The religious idea (Orthodoxy) was taken by the Greek movement only as an aid. There were no systematic persecutions of Orthodoxy itself in Turkey; but there did exist very powerful and crude civil offences and restrictions for people not of the Mohammedan confession. It is understandable that in such a situation it was easy not to separate faith from race. It was even natural to expect that the freedom of the race would draw in after it the exaltation of the Church and the strengthening of the clergy through the growth of faith in the flock; for powerful faith in the flock always has as its consequence love for the clergy, even if it is very inadequate. With a strong faith (it doesn't matter of what kind, whether unsophisticated and simple in heart or conscious and highly developed) mystical feeling both precedes moral feeling and, so to speak, crowns it. It, this mystical feeling, is considered the most important, and for that reason a flock with living faith is always more condescending also to the vices of its clergy than a flock that is indifferent. A strongly believing flock is always ready with joy to increase the rights, privileges and power of the clergy and willingly submits to it even in not purely ecclesiastical affairs.
"In those times, when the peoples being freed from a foreign yoke were led by leaders who had not experienced the 'winds' of the eighteenth century, the emancipation of nations did not bring with it a weakening of the influence of the clergy and religion itself, but even had the opposite effect: it strengthened both the one and the other. In Russian history, for example, we see that from the time of Demetrius Donskoj and until Peter I the significance, even the political significance of the clergy was constantly growing, and Orthodoxy itself was becoming stronger and stronger, was spreading, and entering more and more deeply into the flesh and blood of the Russian nation. The liberation of the Russian nation from the Tatar yoke did not bring with it either the withdrawal of the clergy from the political sphere or a lessening of its weight and influence or religious indifference in the higher classes or cosmopolitanism in morals and customs. The demands of Russian national emancipation in the time of St. Sergius of Radonezh and Prince Ivan Vasilievich III were not combined in the souls of the people's leaders with those ideals and ideas with which national patriotism has been yoked in the nineteenth century in the minds of contemporary leaders. What seemed important then were the rights of the faith, the rights of religion, the rights of God; the rights of that which Vladimir Soloviev so successfully called God's power.
"In the nineteenth century what was thought to be important first of all was the rights of man, the rights of the popular mob, the rights of the people's power. That is the difference."
Leontiev concludes: "Now (after the proclamation of 'the rights of man') every union, every expulsion, every purification of the race from outside admixtures gives only cosmopolitan results [by which he means 'democratization within and assimilation (with other countries) without'].
"Then, when nationalism had in mind not so much itself as the interests of religion, the aristocracy, the monarch, etc., then it involuntarily produced itself. And whole nations and individual people at that time became more varied, more original and more powerful.
"Now, when nationalism seeks to liberate and form itself, to group people not in the name of the various, but interrelated interests of religion, the monarchy and privileged classes, but in the name of the unity and freedom of the race itself, the result turns out everywhere to be more or less uniformly democratic. All nations and all people are becoming more and more similar and as a consequence more and more spiritually poor.
"In our time political, state nationalism is becoming the destroyer of cultural, life-style nationalism."⁴⁴³