Two hundred years after the revolution of 1821 and a short time before the start of the official celebrations, one of the issues that have at least been explored in our country is the role that the Church played in the pre-revolutionary period and also in the establishment of the first independent Greek State.
The "theocratic" new State was based on the general admission that the Enlightenment did not come to our country in the same intensity as it appeared in other European states.
In 1821, the year we have associated with the beginning of the revolution, a Greek enlightened journal announced a competition in Paris on precisely these subjects. Specifically, the issue as posed by "Melissa" magazine was the following:
"What and how many are the evils that most of the high priests, from Photius the patriarch until today, caused and are causing to our unfortunate race? What are the main ways by which it is possible to abolish the destructive and horrible despotism of the unworthy successors of the philanthropist Jesus and savior?".
Today, the special committee of the KEPEK page (Panagiotis Gennimatas – acting vice-president of the European Investment Bank, Giorgos Oikonomou – Dr. Philosophy, Alexandros Sakellariou – Dr. Sociology, Minas Papageorgiou – journalist and writer), is being revived in collaboration with the Lux Orbis editorial series the competition of the Bee.
The modernized title is "The perennially controversial role of the Orthodox Church in Greece, from the 4th post-Christian century until today, the causes and ways of dealing with the problem today".
It should be noted that "KEPEK - Movement of Greek Citizens for the Secularization of the State", which is an online observatory of the developments regarding the relations between the State and the Church in our country.
"At some point we, as Greeks, have to look in the face of recorded history and ask ourselves if the saying "nation is the truth" really represents us", they note.
In addition, the proposal is addressed to all those who are troubled by the perennial relations between the State - the Church - Greek education in our country.
Those interested can find information and take part here
On the occasion of the revival of the News 24/7 competition had a very interesting conversation with the honorary vice-president of the European Investment Bank and member of the special committee of KEPEK, Panagiotis Gennimata.
In your opinion, what does this revival of the competition signify and how important is it in the year 2020 when we are still discussing the separation of State and Church in Greece?
It is surely an opportune reminder of the fact that the great teacher of the Neo-Greek Enlightenment, before any attempt to organize the independence of the slaves and any possible formation of an independent state, raised as a preliminary question the re-evaluation of the relations of the national subject under renovation with the Orthodox Church that in 1453 it had been incorporated into the Ottoman system of power.
In my opinion an evaluation of these historical relations remains pending. Perhaps in the context of the 200 years since the explosion of the national revolution something like this would need to be discussed more openly.
According to common confession, the Enlightenment did not come to Greece to the extent that it affected other states and political cultures. How important is this in the formation of the autonomous Greek State?
This backwardness is a form of cultural disability of the society which, with the liberation, was organized into a new independent state, under the influence in principle of the principles of the French revolution and of the European enlightenment which had inspired it but which state, as soon as it was formed into a rudimentary state existence probably deprived a large part of the specific directions and values.
With the death of Adamantios Korais, unfortunately, the extinguishing of the flame of Enlightenment in Greece also coincides. Since then, Greece has been struggling to gain quantitative and geopolitical sustainability with precarious educational and political orientations.
Can one talk about a "nationalization" of religion in Greece on a chronological level from the time of the formation of the Greek State until today? Where is this fact based systemically and what are the problems it has caused?
Certainly after 1850 the church as an institution was integrated into the national state structure, while its substantial contribution to the effort of national independence had never been substantially evaluated. The religious sentiment of the Greeks re-engaged the church institution in the new state and allowed the Eastern Orthodox Church to regain a substantial say in matters of education and life, and even, in some phases, international choices.
The regained weight of the traditional ecclesiastical discourse in Greek society and state has certainly fixed the way of thinking and living the life of modern Greeks in anachronistic models of perception of state life that have significantly slowed down the rate of overall cultural adaptation of the country in the environment where historically it was obliged to survive and grow.
How "Greek" is our identity in the end? Do the traditional national myths that are largely related to 1821 still influence our daily lives and if so in what way?
Certainly our identity contains fragments of a perversely mediated by Europeans and romantic neo-Greek archeologists of a postflamed classical identity. In the mixture, however, the historically more recent Eastern Orthodox and "Byzantine" element clearly prevails, as well as the ethno-popular culture of the "Leventian" thieving lawlessness of the years of the Turkish occupation.
This has consistently, in the two hundred years that have passed, interposed undeniable resistances to attempts from time to time to impose programs of national "modernization", the latter understood as institutional and functional adaptation to the model of the European state of law and "liberal" democracy and economy in general. With the catastrophic, of course, wider failure of the economic model of operation of European states during the last ten years, due to which Greek society paid and continues to pay enormous economic and social costs, the concept of European modernization, which is the official ideology of the Greek state in the last fifty years, it has clouded considerably.
This has encouraged ethno-popular psychology and critique to the point that it now takes on expanded forms of resistance Euroscepticism. No, I repeat gratuitously. However, today Greek society is ideologically faltering, which of course significantly paralyzes the political decision-making mechanisms.
You have written that "populism has prevailed as a national culture". Could it be that way from the beginning of the Greek State after all?
I don't know what you mean by the term "populism", which has been politically controversial for the last thirty years. I have nothing against the term or against the phenomenon of adapting political discourse and political action to the psychology of popular majorities, which today are suffering heavily.
Politics from above has always made compromises with popular sentiment, sometimes less, sometimes more and this is natural but also desirable in a democracy. But I am afraid that for a decade, since the manifestation of the financial bankruptcy, popular sentiment has been systematically despised and betrayed.
Through your own lens, what are the characteristics that should govern the 200 years since 1821? What should be the elements that will mark the celebrations?
I consider the term "celebration" unacceptable as long as the magnitude of the national humiliation and the granting of national independence to the lenders after 2010 is such that there is nothing to nationally celebrate in today's Greece.
On the contrary, we need manifestations of national reflection and national reflection on the imperative need to re-establish new national values, capable of facilitating our reorientation in a new international environment.
Despite the changes we have seen in previous years, the Church largely remains favored by tax exemptions. You have spoken about the economic dimension of the separation of State and Church. How different would things be today if the state was less "theocratic"?
Certainly if the state and society were less theocratic, society and the state would be guided by a different way of thinking, more sober and more critical.
Unfortunately, this is not the case.
What would Greece be like that you would envision in the future? Would it ultimately be a Greece of the West or of the East, as you have stated in your book of the same title? What should she keep from her two geographical "directions"? In general, what would be your counterproposal as a road map for tomorrow?
I can't be categorical anymore. We are going through a period of rapid transition to a way of life and work that is hard to read and virtually untraceable, the premise of which is overshadowed by heavy clouds. This certainly does not apply only to Greece. But we, weak and weakened as we are, have stronger reasons to re-evaluate and re-examine beliefs, values and historical political slogans with which we have lived for the last fifty years.
We have to see again how we want life to be in general, both ours, those who still have a future, and our children's. In other words, do we want a life of people with old-fashioned perhaps humanitarian values, or a life of technological activists, controlled by oligarchic centers of impersonal "database" operators? Do we want the Greece of our poets and a quality southern way of life, or do we want techno-economic stalling in prefabricated digital and Stakhanovite "Molecules"?
"Only the true should be national"
Regarding the topic of the competition and the role played by the Church in the period of 1821, the journalist and director of the publishing series Lux Orbis, as well as a member of the KEPEK committee, Minas Papageorgiou, tells News 24/7 :
"The Church's negative attitude towards the preparations for the Uprising of 1821 has always been a rather... "disturbing" chapter in the domestic Public Sphere, a fact that is directly related to the national myths that began to cover the history of the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary years, from the end, approximately, of the 19th century onwards.
The negative attitude of the highest hierarchy of the patriarchate towards the concepts of freedom and independence of the Greeks can be found, through the original sources, both in the anti-revolutionary circulars of the period 1798-1821 and the excommunication of the Revolutionaries, as well as in the violent anti-enlightenment practices that were expressed through letters, writings, burnings of enlightening works in Constantinople, the persecution of the Natural Sciences and those teachers who spread them in Schools in the Greek area, even... plans to kidnap Enlighteners with the aim of handing them over to the Ottomans, on the eve of the Revolution.
Bearing the foregoing in mind, the contemporary revival of the "Melissa" contest is of enormous historiographical importance, as it not only emotionally connects 1821 with 2021, but brings us directly into contact with the views of the Greek intellectuals of the Enlightenment circles of that time of the time, always in relation to the role of the highest hierarchy of the Church during the preparations for the great Race. Only the true should be national".
Recommended:
-Greece:West or East? The uncommunicated modernization in the modern Greek state - Work of Panagiotis Gennimatas.
-Read the work of Minas Papageorgiou, "Separation of State - Church | The necessity and the benefits for the citizen", which is a thorough research with the purpose of highlighting the necessity for the Separation of State and Church in our country.
-More about the publisher of "Melissa" magazine, Konstantinos-Agathofron Nikolopoulos, can be found here.
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