The Greek Orthodox church & Anticlericalism /Ελληνορθόδοξη εκκλησία & Αντικληρικαλισμός

Greece, history of: The role of the Orthodox church

The Orthodox church was the only institution to which the Greeks could look as a focus. Through the use of Greek in the liturgy and through its modest educational efforts, the church helped to a degree to keep alive a sense of Greek identity, but it could not prevent Turkish (which was written with Greek characters) from becoming the vernacular of a substantial proportion of the Greek population of Asia Minor and, indeed, of the Ottoman capital itself.

The Orthodox church, however, fell victim to the institutionalized corruption of the Ottoman system of government. The combining of civil with religious power in the hands of the ecumenical patriarchate and the upper reaches of the hierarchy prompted furious competition for high office. This was encouraged by the Ottomans, for it was soon the norm for a huge peshkesh, or bribe, to be paid to the grand vizier, the sultan's chief minister, on each occasion that a new patriarch was installed. Thus, despite the fact that, in theory, a patriarch was elected for life, there was a high turnover in office. Some even held the office more than once. Grigorios was executed by the Ottomans in 1821 during his third patriarchate, while during the second half of the 17th century Dionysius IV Mouselimis was elected patriarch no fewer than five times. It was this kind of behaviour that prompted an 18th-century Armenian chronicler to taunt the Greeks that they changed their patriarch more frequently than they changed their shirt.

Bribes had to be paid to secure office at all levels, and these could be recouped only through the imposts placed on the Orthodox faithful as a whole. The clergy's reputation for rapacity led to the growth of anticlericalism at a popular level and, in particular, among the small nationalist intelligentsia that emerged in the course of the 18th century. The anonymous author of that fiery nationalist polemic the “Ellinikhi Nomarkhia” (“Hellenic Nomarchy”; 1806) was a bitter critic of the sloth and self-indulgence of the higher clergy, while Adamántios Koraïs (1748–1833), the intellectual mentor of the national revival, though careful to steer between what he termed the Scylla of superstition and the Charybdis of atheism, was highly censorious of the obscurantism of the clergy. What particularly incensed Koraïs and his ilk was the willingness with which the Orthodox hierarchy identified its interests with those of the Ottoman authorities. However, the views of men such as Anthimos, the patriarch of Jerusalem, who argued in 1798 that the Ottoman Empire was part of the divine dispensation granted by God to protect Orthodoxy from the taint of Roman Catholicism and of Western secularism and irreligion, were by no means unusual.

* "Greece, history of",
Encyclopædia Britannica 2010 (Encyclopaedia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite).