Enlightenment and Revolution

Paschalis M. Kitromilides

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674727663
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Greece sits at the center of a geopolitical storm that threatens the stability of the European Union. To comprehend how this small country precipitated such an outsized crisis, it is necessary to understand how Greece developed into a nation in the first place, Paschalis Kitromilides contends. Enlightenment and Revolution identifies the intellectual trends and ideological traditions that shaped a religiously defined community of Greek-speaking people into a modern nation-state--albeit one in which antiliberal forces have exacted a high price.Kitromilides takes in the vast sweep of the Greek Enlightenment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, assessing key developments such as the translation of Voltaire, Locke, and other modern authors into Greek; the conflicts sparked by the Newtonian scientific revolution; the rediscovery of the civilization of classical Greece; and the emergence of a powerful countermovement. He highlights Greek thinkers such as Voulgaris and Korais, showing how these figures influenced and converged with currents of the Enlightenment in the rest of Europe.In reconstructing this history, Kitromilides demonstrates how the confrontation between Enlightenment ideas and Church-sanctioned ideologies shaped the culture of present-day Greece. When the Greek nation-state emerged from a decade-long revolutionary struggle against the Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century, the Enlightenment dream of a free Greek polity was soon overshadowed by a romanticized nationalist and authoritarian vision. The failure to create a modern liberal state at that decisive historic moment, Kitromilides insists, is at the root of Greece's recent troubles.

CHAPTER ONE

The Long Road to Enlightenment

THIS ESSAY ATTEMPTS to reconstruct a process of intellectual change and to identify the political problems that emerged from it by looking at the reception and fate of the ideas of the Enlightenment in the Greek cultural tradition. A number of important methodological issues, concerning the study of the history of ideas, arise from this project.¹ The primary focus of interest is on the effects produced by new ideas on the prevailing modes of thought in the culture that received them. The analysis proceeds by tracing the transmission of influences across cultures and the impact and manifestation of ideas in the collective thought of human groups as registered in the works of representative writers. These writers were not always original and most of their ideas were derivative. Much of their work consisted of translations or the popularization of ideas current in the great centers of learning of this period. Their work is, nevertheless, important because it expresses the aspirations, beliefs, and prevailing mentalities of a culture. Translations of foreign works, once made, published, and read, became integral possessions of the culture into which they were received. Finally, the works left behind by these literary representatives of the community may be important not simply as registers of collective mentalities, but in their own right as reflections on fundamental problems or as influential texts that shaped the cultural outlooks of certain groups and contributed to the process of intellectual and social change. As such they are important sources of insights into the period and into the cultural vision within which its problems were perceived.² Such is primarily the nature of the evidence on which the study of collective consciousness will have to be based.

Locating the terminus a quo, with which the explorations in the content of collective consciousness should begin, requires another methodological choice. The study of intellectual change requires a starting point in the crystallization of a certain mode of thought against and away from which subsequent evolution, caused by mutations in the intellectual presuppositions of social consciousness, will be traced. The end point will have to be a new pattern or configuration of ideas that will represent the transcendence of the original theory. Since this is a study of the influence and integration of the ideas of the Enlightenment into a culture other than those in which they originated, an acquaintance with the intellectual legacy of that culture and of its prevailing modes of thought and consciousness forms a necessary point of departure.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL HERITAGE OF THE GREEK EAST

In the Greek East, as in the Latin West, Aristotelianism had been the officially sanctioned philosophical doctrine inherited from the Middle Ages. Aristotle’s philosophical categories had been absorbed into Byzantine philosophy so effectively that they became an integral part of the Christian thinking and spiritual tradition in the Greek East.³ The prevailing Aristotelianism of Byzantine philosophy had been challenged in the eleventh century by Michael Psellos, who attempted to reinterpret Plato as a spiritual ancestor of Christian theology.⁴ The Aristotelian legacy was reinforced in the Byzantine East in the fourteenth century, however, as a result of renovating intellectual contacts with the West, which for the first time brought Byzantine philosophy into contact with the great synthesis of Christian thought and Aristotelianism in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. These contacts produced the first translation of Aquinas’s philosophy into Greek, by Dimitrios Kydonis in about 1354. The most serious challenge, however, came in the early fifteenth century, at precisely the time the Byzantine Empire was caught in its death throes, in the teaching of the Neoplatonist George Gemistos Plethon, who argued for a revival of Platonism, both as a spiritual and as a political doctrine, as the only hope for the dying empire’s salvation. Plethon, who during his stay in Italy on the occasion of the Council of Florence in 1438–1439 had contributed decisively to the orientation of Renaissance humanism toward Platonism, insisted that only a spiritual regeneration of Byzantine thought and society, through a recovery of Platonic mysticism and a radical political reform of the decaying empire to turn it into a Hellenic republic on the model projected in Plato’s Laws, could avert the impending final disaster.⁵

Plethon’s political theory was based on a quite novel conception that emerged in late Byzantine thought as a direct consequence of the contraction of the empire and the concomitant decline of the imperial idea of a universal Christian state. Under the impact of these new political experiences, some Byzantine intellectuals, especially in the Greek states that sprang from the breakup of the empire after the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204, discovered a new ethnic identity for themselves and for the Greek-speaking Christian people who had survived as the core of the multiethnic society of Byzantium. This new identity was defined in terms of the Greek language and the intellectual parentage these late Byzantines felt with classical Greek civilization. The Byzantine Christians felt that these cultural characteristics distinguished them not only from the heathen barbarians to the north and east of the empire, but also from the Christian barbarians of the Latin West and most notably from the non-Greek ethnic elements in Byzantine society. Thus in the rump Byzantine states like the empire of Nicea in Northwest Asia Minor and the despotate of Mistra in the Peloponnese, ethnic homogeneity and the spirit of resistance against the pressures of foreign enemies fostered the emergence of the first incipient signs of a new collective consciousness that might eventually have evolved into a Neohellenic national consciousness on a pattern similar to that of the nations of Western Europe.⁶ It was precisely at this time, out of the collapse of the medieval Christian commonwealth, that the trend toward distinct nationhood emerged in the societies that were to develop into the first dynastic European states (England, France, and Spain). Plethon’s movement was the bravest indication of similar tendencies that appeared under comparable conditions in the Greek lands. Significantly, Plethon had insisted that the inhabitants of the late Byzantine territories that survived in the ancient Greek heartlands were “Greeks by birth” as testified by their language and national culture.⁷

Such manifestations of the sense of a new identity among Greek-speaking Christians, which have been characterized as a modern Greek “protonationalism,”⁸ were submerged and dissipated by the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the fall of the remaining free Greek states to the Ottomans in 1460 (Mistra) and 1461 (Trebizond). Besides its crucial political, social, and intellectual consequences, which proved the decisive determinants for the development of Greek society and culture in subsequent centuries, the Ottoman conquest, by decisively sealing off the Greek East from the fledging Renaissance in the West, marked the triumph of a traditionalist outlook in the ideological controversies raging in Byzantium on the eve of the Fall. The movement of philosophical and political renewal inspired by Neoplatonism and the incipient articulation of a Neohellenic identity were obliterated.

Significantly, Plethon’s writings were ceremoniously burnt in Constantinople by his philosophic opponent George Scholarios, who was elevated to the patriarchal throne after the Fall. A champion of Aristotelianism and a determined enemy of the heretical West, Scholarios, renamed Gennadios II upon his consecration as patriarch in 1454, presided over the reconstruction of Byzantine ideology that was to provide the context of Greek thought in the centuries of Ottoman rule.⁹ Christian Aristotelianism triumphed in formal learning, and the East Roman ideals of universal monarchy and hierarchical society prevailed in political theory. The mantle of universalism was taken from the fallen empire by another supranational institution, the Orthodox Church, under the leadership of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The Ottoman conquerors invested the Orthodox Church with important political functions by relegating to the patriarch and his bishops civil responsibility in the governance of the subject Christian Orthodox communities. The Church became the mediating institution between the Ottoman Sultan and his Christian subjects. In this way, the Greek-speaking and other Orthodox nationalities of the Balkans, represented by the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, were integrated into the Ottoman social system of religious communities (millets) according to the stipulations of Islamic sacred law.¹⁰ The manner in which the Church accommodated its ideology to the new political reality is of great interest for the history of political ideas. After the fall of the Christian Empire and the disappearance of the Orthodox emperor, the Church reconciled itself to coexistence with the non-Christian wielder of imperial authority, recognizing his sovereignty with complete loyalty and according him the appropriate honors, though it omitted the terms “holy,” “Orthodox,” and “pious,” used formerly of the East Roman emperor as an element in the very existence and practice of the Church. After the conquest, the “king” continued to be a divinely ordained element of the natural order of things, of which the Church was part, though he ceased henceforth to be a vehicle of holiness and sanctity, or to participate in the internal life and worship of the Church.¹¹

The new Ottoman imperial authorities that replaced the defunct Christian Empire assured to the Orthodox Church their protection against the intrusions of Catholicism from without. The anti-Latin attitude, which prevailed in the Orthodox Church following the Great Schism and was solidified after the Fall with the triumph of the antiunion party in Constantinople, coincided with the suspicion and hostility of the Ottomans toward the European powers that might check their further expansion or even attempt to organize a Crusade in the East against them. This coincidence of political interests between the Church and the Sublime Porte resulted in a common front against the West. The protection that this alliance assured to the Church, both from Catholic religious propaganda and from the ideological pressure of new European currents of thought, combined with the official toleration that Islamic law accorded to the “religions of the book” (Judaism and Christianity), provided substantive arguments for the policy of loyalty that the Orthodox Church followed toward the Ottoman state.¹² This political tradition, inaugurated by Patriarch Gennadios Scholarios immediately after the Fall,¹³ was reiterated with vigor by the ecclesiastical leadership three centuries later in its battle against the Enlightenment. This was not simply a policy of expediency, but it could be justified on the strength of scriptural authority. By assuming this policy, the Church rendered unto Caesar what was Caesar’s while pursuing its own spiritual purposes. By submitting to the powers that be, the Church could not only claim that it had secured their toleration in preserving the faith unadulterated, but also that it had turned the tribulations of captivity into a collective spiritual exercise and martyrdom on earth that might open the gates of heaven. From its vantage point, therefore, the Orthodox Church was theologically in the right. The contradictions inherent in this position, especially regarding the alienation that temporal involvement of the ecclesiastical leadership of the subject Christian people meant for the inner spiritual and mystical life of the Church, could not of course cross the mind of or worry those critics of the Church who were later on to accuse it of collaboration with an alien despotic oppressor.

This was the formal ideological and institutional context of political and intellectual life in the traditional society of the “Orthodox East” under Ottoman rule. Despite the triumph of Christian Aristotelianism after the Fall of Constantinople, the devastating cultural consequences of the Ottoman conquest, of which the migration of the most distinguished Greek intellectuals to the West¹⁴ was only the most dramatic and best-known symptom, essentially resulted in an eclipse of learning and philosophy in the Greek East for a century and a half after 1453. The absence of manuscripts of philosophical works copied in this period¹⁵ offers unmistakable evidence for the decline of learning in the East at precisely the time that the West was experiencing the ferment of the Renaissance. Philosophy returned to the Greek East only when intellectual ties with the West were resumed in the seventeenth century. The main geographical channel through which these ties were resumed were the Greek territories possessed by Venice and the Greek colonies established in Italian cities, notably in Venice, since the end of the Middle Ages. In the absence of institutions of higher learning in the East after the Fall, Greek students from Latin-held territories (Chios, Crete, Cyprus, and the Ionian Islands) and gradually from elsewhere in the Greek world, gravitated toward the official university of the Venetian Republic, the University of Padua. Padua, immune from the pressures and intervention of the Inquisition and of the court of Rome, had become from the fifteenth through the seventeenth century a major intellectual center distinguished by a revival of classical studies and flourishing scientific research. In philosophy, the University of Padua had become the center of a flourishing Neoaristotelianism whose advent was due to the rediscovery of the original Greek texts of Aristotle brought to Italy by Greek scholars taking refuge from the Ottoman onslaught.¹⁶ The effect of this rereading of Aristotle was the abandonment of the medieval tradition of Christian Aristotelianism, which had its original sources in the Aristotelianism of Averroes, and its replacement by a concentration of interest on Aristotle’s texts on physics, which led to a naturalistic interpretation of Aristotelian philosophy. The Neoaristotelians of Padua attempted to remove the context of religious doctrine from natural philosophy and explained the natural world and its phenomena in terms of a strict causality.¹⁷ It was this philosophy that was transmitted to the Greek East by the Greek students of Padua.

The most important of the Greek scholars who introduced Neoaristote1ianism in the East was the Athenian Theophilos Corydaleus (1570–1646). At Padua, he had been a disciple of Cesare Cremonini, who had given an empiricist and naturalistic turn to Neoaristotelianism and had become known for his disputes with the Jesuits regarding freedom of scientific investigation.¹⁸ When he returned to Greece, Corydaleus was summoned by the Patriarch Cyril I Loukaris in 1624 to reorganize the Patriarchal Academy of Constantinople as a central institution of higher learning for the whole of the Greek East. Cyril’s initiative in the early part of the seventeenth century represented the first conscious program of cultural reconstruction undertaken by the leadership of Greek Orthodox society since the Fall of Constantinople. The patriarch’s motivation derived partly from a desire to arrest the inroads of Roman Catholic propaganda into the world of Orthodoxy, and for this purpose he entered into extensive contacts with Protestant churches and governments, especially those of Britain and the Netherlands.¹⁹ Cyril’s policies came to a tragic end with his own execution by the Ottomans in 1638, but his program of cultural reconstruction had one lasting consequence: the introduction of Neoaristotelian philosophy in Greek learning. This was the achievement of Corydaleus’s effective teaching at the Patriarchal Academy. He emancipated philosophy from theology and made Neoaristotelian studies, with emphasis on logic, physics, and the study of generation and corruption, the basis of higher education.

Corydaleus was a severe critic of medieval scholasticism, and in matters of religion he appears to have been a freethinker whose orthodoxy was held in question even by his closest disciples.²⁰ In the conflict between fides and ratio, Corydaleus seems, according to all available evidence, to have inclined toward the latter; and therefore he has been correctly characterized by his most authoritative biographer as the first “revolutionary thinker” in the Greek East and the initiator of free thought in Southeastern Europe.²¹ In his own lifetime Corydaleus suffered from these orientations of his thought. He was chased from the Patriarchal Academy after Cyril’s death, and to allay the suspicions of his orthodoxy, he accepted being consecrated archbishop of Nafpaktos and Arta in 1641 for one year only and subsequently returned to his birthplace, Athens, where he fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction to the American Edition
• Prologue: The Political Meaning of the Enlightenment
• 1. The Long Road to Enlightenment
• 2. The Formation of Modern Greek Historical Consciousness
• 3. The Geography of Civilization: From Adulation to Revolution
• 4. Enlightened Absolutism as a Path to Change
• 5. Ancients and Moderns: Cultural Criticism and the Origins of Republicanism
• 6. The Revolution in France: The Glow and the Shadow
• 7. The Enlightenment’s Political Alternative
• 8. The Enlightenment as Social Criticism
• 9. The Republican Synthesis: A Matrix for Nationalism
• 10. The Fate of the Enlightenment
• Epilogue: The Conditions of Liberal Politics
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index