The Black Book of 21 Troubles the Church - The Illuminators and the hanging of Gregory E

The Black Book of 1821 was a publishing event that coincided with the 200th anniversary of the excommunication of the Greek Revolutionaries and the Friendly Society by the Patriarch of Constantinople, Gregory V.

On the occasion of the publication of the study, from the book series Lux Orbis by iWrite publications, the Metropolitan of Fanarios Agathangelos succeeded in his text against Professor Thanos Veremis, who prefaces the work, but also against the publisher and director of the Lux Orbis series, Minas Papageorgiou . This is the first "official" reaction to the traffic, from the Church's side. Mr. Agathangelos, being the director of the Apostolic Ministry of the Church of Greece, on behalf of the Church (which has not yet been explicitly appointed) states among other things:

"Η ἰδεοληπτική ἔκδοση αὐτὴ ἀποσκοποῦσε σαφῶς νὰ ἀπαξιώσει τὴ μεγάλη συμμετοχὴ τόσο τοῦ Οἰκουμενικοῦ Πατριαρχείου ὅσο καὶ τῆς Ὀρθοδόξου Ἐκκλησίας, γενικότερα στὴν Ἑλληνικὴ Ἐπανάσταση τοῦ 1821 Με πλασματικὲς ἀβάσιμες ὑποθέσεις προέβαλαν ἀκρίτως τὶς δυτικόφρονες προσωπικὲς ἰδεολογικὲς προλήψεις, γιὰ νὰ ἀπαξιώσουν αὐθαιρέτως τὴν καθοριστικὴ συμβολὴ of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Church in general, at all stages and in all sectors of the Greek Revolution, that is why their judgments were completely ignored by the sensitive ethnic and ecclesiastical consciousness of the pious Greek people. in fact, in a discreet way, and by Professor T. Veremis himself, in order to obviously mitigate his baseless criticisms about the person of Patriarch Gregory V.

Indeed, he claims that "in the Patriarchate from 1797 to 1821 is - among others - Gregory V, an enemy of modern ideas, which invaded the space of his spiritual competence. Grigorios hated the French revolutionaries and by extension all the bearers of their views. His martyrdom and that of a large number of metropolitans was unwittingly his great contribution to the Greek Revolution. Thanks to his death, the hierarchs, and even his close collaborators, such as the Old Patriarch Germanos, joined the Agnos".

The uncritical ideological version of the "Black Book of 1821" has nothing to do with the Greek Revolution, since it is exhausted by the arbitrary, fictitious and provocative projection of their obviously incorrect and definitely anachronistic ideological anchors. In this spirit, "The Black Book" refers only to their own ideological prejudices and certainly not to the spontaneous, brave and decisive contribution of the Church to the Greek Revolution of 1821".

For his part, Minas Papageorgiou responds through a letter published in NEWS 24/7 . In it, he emphasizes that the Black Bible was cited as a bibliographic reference by the Catholic Archbishop of Corfu, Zakynthos and Kefallinia, Ioannis Spiteris during his written dispute with the Metropolitan of Piraeus, Seraphim, while criticizing the formulations of Mr. Agathangelos regarding the "removal". of the aphorism, and notes characteristics:

"To the rather naïve argument of how it is possible to hang a trusted collaborator of the Ottomans, the answer is obvious. He failed in his mission to keep the rascals enslaved to the Sultan, despite his chronic efforts in this direction (a fact amply demonstrated by the circulars included in the "Black Book"). Gregory V was hanged having the fate of several officials of the empire (Ottoman and not), who in those years failed in the role assigned to them".

At the same time, M. Papageorgiou deconstructs the argument that "the Greek Enlightenmentists were opponents of classical Greek philosophy" emphasizing that "we owe the opening of the road to Freedom to the Enlightenmentists and not to those who condemned and opposed throughout time every attempt at liberation. He is after all, it was also the reason that led the editors of the Parisian magazine Melissa to announce the related unfinished anti-clerical competition in the spring of 1821, which was revived last year by our Book Series, in collaboration with the Movement of Greek Citizens for the Secularization of the State". He also emphasizes that the most crucial element for the verification of what is recorded in the writing is the ecclesiastical/patriarchal texts of the time that are included in the publication, constituting in the end complete historical documents for a "cloudy" era. "Texts that make up 95% of the book's content and for which Mr. Agathangelos did not mention even half (I emphasize) a word in his text," as the editor notes.

On Enlightenment

The response to Fanarios Agathangelos from Minas Papageorgiou, director of the Lux Orbis Series, in detail:

"About a year after its release (March 2021), heading towards its 4th edition and having provoked dozens of reports, interviews and discussions on and off the internet, "The Black Book of 1821", from the Lux Orbis Series of of iWrite editions, was the subject of commentary by a representative of the Church of Greece. The book is a collection of hard-to-find anti-revolutionary patriarchal texts, written over a period of thirty years (1798-1828), which demonstrate the hostility, towards the possibility of liberation from the Ottomans, attitude of the highest leadership of the Church. It was preceded, last summer, by the mention of the work, as a bibliographic source, by the Catholic Archbishop of Corfu, Zakynthos and Kefallenia, Ioannis Spiteris during his written dispute with the Metropolitan of Piraeus, Seraphim, in his attempt first to respond through his article, to a sharp text of Seraphim, which was directed against the Pope and the Papacy (undoubtedly a worthy isolated event).

On February 7 of this year, a number of religious content websites republished a letter by Metropolitan Fanarios Agathangelos (Director General of the Apostolic Ministry of the Church of Greece), with the main theme being the attempt to diminish the historical value of the "Black Book of 1821", bringing it at the level of an ahistorical version characterized by “anachronistic ideological anchorings ", as is typically stated in the announcement. For Phanarios Agathangelos – and obviously for the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in Greece – the proposals of the Greek Enlighteners of the 18th and 19th centuries and particularly of their most important representative, Adamantios Korais, were “ideological visions and theoretical conditions ” of Western thinkers.

The author of the announcement decides throughout his text not to dwell on the "disturbing" presence of the original texts of the time, which stand - for the first time as a whole - as an irrefutable witness of the timeless pre-revolutionary position of the Church against the possibility of an uprising against the Turks, preferring to stick to the introductory texts of the "easy targets" of the book:In the foreword by the recognized academic Historian, Thanos Veremis and in the introduction of the subphenomenon, as director of the Lux Orbis Book Series.

In this context, Mr. Agathangelos refers to the alleged "secret lifting of the excommunication of Gregory V' ”, in 1821, a few days after excommunicating the Revolution and its instigators. In this way, he chooses to turn a blind eye to the relevant references that he read in the "Black Book of 1821":a) On the one hand, the legend of the lifting of excommunication is a church tradition, a phrase recorded in the middle of the 19th century, when this supposed secret initiative of Gregory V first appears (which, among other things, is not based on any relevant document or report of the time) and on the other hand b) the argument about the supposed lifting of the excommunication is definitively disproved, through the finding of the relevant reports made by two later patriarchs of Gregory, Eugene II in the summer of 1821 and Agathangelos in 1828. Both promise the revolutionary ragiades the lifting of the imposed excommunication, in case they cancel the revolutionary processes and return to the arms of the Sultan (both aforementioned circulars included in the "Black Book of 1821"). In the second case, in fact, the... namesake of the current Metropolitan Phanarios, attempts to torpedo the cohesion of the Greek state formed at the time, since he essentially calls the Greeks to civil war, causing the immediate reaction of the governor Ioannis Kapodistrias.

Another point on which - among others - Metropolitan Agathangelos stands, is that of the... pure and immaculate (according to him) way of electing patriarchs during the period of the Turkish rule, through the Patriarchal Synod, in his attempt to refute the the writer's reference to the three terms of Gregory V in the patriarchate, as a man of the absolute confidence of the Ottomans. To what the metropolitan writes, the communication specialist Sotiris Tzoumas (once the right-hand man of the archbishops of America Iakovos and Athens Christodoulou) could very well respond in his earlier article in the newspaper "To BIMA":"During the period of the Turkish occupation the interventions took another form. In order to be elected a patriarch, it was no longer enough to be elected by the Synod. He had to be approved by the Turkish government and also to pay them a large sum. Even if the patriarch did not cause a headache to the Turks, the sultan deposed him in order to collect the tax and also to keep the Romans under a regime of fear. In the election of the Patriarch of Constantinople, the rich Greeks of the time, Phanariotes, expatriate merchants, and guild leaders played a big role. They also raised and lowered patriarchs according to their interests at that time ". Anyone looking for first hand testimony on this particular issue? The Anonymous of the "Hellenic Prefecture" (1806) conveys them to us in even more detail:"The Synod buys the patriarchal throne from the Ottoman regent for a large amount of money, then sells it to whoever gives it more profit, and the buyer He calls a patriarch. He, therefore, in order to get back what he borrowed for the purchase of the throne, sells the provinces, i.e. the archbishoprics, whoever gives more quantity, and thus forms the archbishops, who also sell their dioceses to others. And the bishops sell the Christians, that is, they strip the people, so that they can take out what they have put out. And this is the way by which the subjects of the various orders are chosen, i.e. the gold" . There is no need, I think, to add anything more to refute Mr. Agathangelos' objections. To the rather naive argument of how it is possible to hang a trusted associate of the Ottomans, the answer is obvious. He failed in his mission to keep the rascals enslaved to the Sultan, despite his chronic efforts in this direction (a fact amply demonstrated by the circulars included in the "Black Book"). Gregory V was hanged following the fate of several officials of the empire (Ottoman and non-Ottoman), who in those years failed in the role assigned to them.

Mr. Agathangelos praises the choice of Professor Veremis to overemphasize "the obligatory opposition of the Patriarchs of Constantinople to the provocative anti-clerical, anti-church and anti-theistic tendencies of the Western Enlightenment and the French Revolution (1789), which the Francophiles Ad . Korais and the anonymous editor of the Hellenic Prefecture, as well as all the other Greek followers of the Enlightenment ". But in this way it falls into a logical contradiction, since on the one hand it stands against the cries of the ideas of the Enlightenment (among them, without a doubt, anti-clericalism is included) which were the intellectual engine of all the Revolutions and uprisings that took place at that time in the European continent and on the other hand he supports those who have been struggling for decades through their sermons to keep the Greeks enslaved, confusing the Orthodox faith with submission to the Sultan (indicatively see Patrical and Fraternal Teaching, ed. iWrite – Lux Orbis Series, 2021) . He even goes so far as to argue that the Greek Enlightenmentists were opponents of classical Greek philosophy (!), completely reversing reality and ignoring (?) a) the war of ideas that was set up in Greece during the period 1809-1821, with the establishment of the Orthodox Inquisition of Gregory V and Hilarion Sinaitis in Constantinople, b) the closing of a series of model schools that promoted new ideas and knowledge to Greek children, c) the war against the introduction of Natural Sciences, which were considered carriers of ungodly ideas, in the Greek schools (see indicatively "Heliocentric System and life in Space in 1821", ed. iWrite - Lux Orbis Series, 2020), d) the burning of books of revolutionary and pro-progressive content in the courtyard of the Patriarchate (see receptive "The Forbidden Books of 1821", ed. iWrite - Lux Orbis Series, 2021), e) the almost "Greek witch hunt" (with the plans to kidnap Greek Enlighteners from abroad and to to the Sultan) and f) the playful characterization of "philosophers" hurled at the Enlighteners by Christian scholars (such as the saint of Orthodoxy, Athanasios Parius), in their attempt to embellish the new trend for the study of ancient Greek philosophy.