The Church after the Revolution of 1821

In 2021 we highlighted, through her His Black Book 1821, the letter sent in 1828, during the reign of Kapodistrias, by Agathangelos of Constantinople to the rebellious Greeks. Despite the clear - although not as strict as it might have been - answer given by the Greek governor, Agathangelos' text was nothing more than the last attempt on the part of the patriarchate to convince the ragiades to return to the arms of the Sultan, in exchange - between in others – the lifting of the excommunication imposed by Gregory V in 1821. Without a doubt, it was a clear involvement of the Phanar in the internals of the under-formation state organization, whose existence two years later, in 1830, was officially recognized by the Great Powers. This very meddling deeply troubled the authorities of the new state, who were considering possible similar future interventions of the patriarchy in the socio-political affairs of the country.

The role and position of the Church in the new Greek state, taking into account the negative pre-revolutionary attitude of the highest clergy towards the uprising of the Greeks, was from the beginning one of the hot issues that the leadership of Greece was asked to face.

After the death of Kapodistrias, in March 1833 and about two months after his proclamation as king (a fact which reveals the magnitude of the priority of the whole issue), King Otto – or rather the Regency, prominently George Ludwig von Maurer –, attempted to unravel the landscape, acting immediately and cynically. A seven-member committee was organized and tasked with working for the next two months with the ultimate goal of submitting a comprehensive report "about the state of the Greek Church and the monasteries within the kingdom». Members of the committee were Prime Minister Spyridon Trikoupis (chairman), Enlightener and cleric Theoklitos Farmakidis, Skarlatos Byzantios, Panagiotis Notaras, Konstantinos Schinas, as well as two refugee metropolitans, Elias Paisios and Armaderiou Ignatios.

The conclusions of the committee's findings were shocking, revealing a series of pathologies that characterized the church organization throughout time. At the same time, the text carried out a brave self-criticism regarding the relationship of the upper clergy and education before the revolution, always in relation to the preparation of the uprising against the Ottomans, a fact that is sufficient in itself to demolish a series of related national myths that began to appear over the next decades. Although the report in question remains unknown to most of our fellow citizens, even to several scholars of the Othonic period, it could nevertheless be characterized as extremely important for one reason only: The facts presented, as well as the conclusions drawn from it , were the main reason on the basis of which the birth of the Hellenic Church and its final administrative separation from the Patriarchate of Constantinople was decided. Such a violent change in the ecclesiastical happenings of the Greek area, which was practically the only project of the Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment that was finally satisfied post-revolution, it was a given that it would bring with it strong tremors, both in terms of the attitude of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and in the domestic game, with political and ecclesiastical factors, but also the Great Powers, participating in the coming years in a corrupting war of ideas in the Greek public sphere.

But what were the issues with which the members of the diligent committee grappled, in the document that was finally published under the title Comprehensive report of the current situation of the Greek Church and the monasteries within the kingdom, according to a plan of organization, concerning the improvement of the ecclesiastics, despite the commission appointed for this purpose by the Royal Decree of March 15) 27, 1833 and which I think are worth dwelling on in this introductory note?

A) Education. The members of the committee admit that ignorance had crept into the clergy during the period of the Turkish rule, while the Εκκλησία she was uninvolved in the progress of the Lights. "The most glorious feature of the Greek Clergy is not Education", is characteristically emphasized.

B) For the patriarch Gregory V, it is simply mentioned that he was killed by the Turks at the beginning of the revolutionary struggle, without the heroizations that begin to be recorded in the following years.

C) The thoughtless ordinations that took place by patriarchs and metropolitans throughout the territory are overemphasized, which in practice led to the buying and selling of bishoprics and therefore to heavy taxation imposed on the Greeks by the representatives of the Church, since the latter they now had silversmithing as their main goal to repay the expenses they had previously incurred. To achieve this, they employed a number of extortionate means, including edicts, abusive excommunications, and pardons to the people. The sentence recorded in the conclusion is extremely characteristic and states that "this abuse brought disastrous results as far as the prestige of the Clergy was concerned».

D) The numerical relationship between priests and monasteries in relation to the inhabitants of the Greek area is considered disproportionate.

E) The holy mountain. The committee maintains a critical attitude towards the Saints, speaking of monks who have been characterized throughout time by profiteering and money-grubbing, with the aim of spending the rest of their lives in comfort.

Beyond recording its pathogenesis Church, in the second part of its report the commission lists its proposals for the solution of the problems it points out. In this context, always descriptively, he proposes:

1) Her administrative secondment Church of Greece from the Patriarchate of Constantinople. "Subjecting her to that, she will never improve, because not even the one to whom she will submit and will improve, in that she is working under a nation of a different race and a different religion", the members of the committee typically comment. And below, stressing that with Autocephalus no ecclesiastical rule is violated, they use an argument that surprises, arguing that, as was the case during the establishment of the Church in the first post-Christian centuries, each "partial» Εκκλησία which was not under the umbrella of another larger one was a sample "true democracy»!

And something equally important and noteworthy, for which it is worth devoting a few lines of text quotation from the report itself. For Farmakidis, Trikoupis and their collaborators, the decision for the complete separation of the Church of Greece and the Patriarchate of Constantinople has already been taken since the beginning of the Greek Revolution. In their view, in their time the laws of Byzantium no longer have any force. We read features: But what we decide today is decided by the 1821 year; after that the Greeks ceased to have relations with the Church of Constantinople, and from considering the bishops sent from there to Greece after the martyrdom of the Patriarch Gregory as legitimately and regularly ordained, because even after that they political bond to the Sultan of the Turks. The bishops of Greece since then stopped commemorating the Patriarch of Constantinople, and instead commemorated him, as they commemorate (every orthodox bishopric); and according to this the whole Clergy and the whole people gathered, and wanted to riot, if they heard a memorial alone Patriarch, unrecognizable by him.

Hence the Church of the present Kingdom of Greece is considered and is truly independent from the Church in Constantinople, to which it was subject from the beginning of the Greek struggle, and this independence remains undisputed at all times.

It is considered to be so and rightfully so, because a') the Byzantine imperial laws do not obligate it even today, they were free and autonomous then. b') Regarding things not directly related to religion and doctrines and related Synodical Rules do not apply always and everywhere".

2) A second and highly important proposal of the committee members to the Viceroyalty concerns the operating status of the Church. Its independence from the secular power is considered dangerous, so the dominance of the royal power over the ecclesiastical organization is proposed. The king is characterized as the political head of the Church, while at the same time he is responsible for the appointment of bishops. This proposal and its subsequent acceptance by the Regency was historically the starting point for the tight embrace of state and power in the new Greek state. However, seeing the specific request with the eyes of that time, one realizes how dangerous an uncontrolled institution, with a source of supranational ideology, which for centuries cared about, was considered for the cohesion of a people enslaved for fourteen centuries

exclusively for his survival in whatever conditions were formed in each era. In short, in the eyes of Farmakis and his collaborators, the close relations between the State (kingdom) and the Church were a necessary evil.

3) For the committee, the adequate salary of the priests from the Greek state is a condition for avoiding phenomena of abuse or other illegal actions on the part of the clergy: "From where and how the Clergy of the Eastern Church was fed until now, and to how many abuses it fell into, became known from the predecessors. If in the future he remains unkempt by the government and does not enjoy the honor due to him, it is difficult for Hellas to obtain the destiny for which he was appointed from the beginning in the Church; for every man who dies in self worth and ability to any other work and profession more honorable and more profitable, he will prefer this to his classification in the Lot. When the Clergy has enough of its needs from the government, then it is obliged to avoid all abuse (…)". Nevertheless, the state payroll is proposed to be made only for the bishops and their entourage, while for the deacons and elders the sources of funding should be the local Christian communities, with the state intervening in case of insufficient social contribution. It should also be noted that for all deacons or elders who are ordained, the committee suggests that they have previously received the necessary education and schooling.

4) It is judged that the income from the exploitation of the monastic lands is spent unintentionally and unprofitably, while they could well be allocated to the bishops' payroll. The committee's opinion is that the number of monks and monasteries must be drastically reduced, while the confiscation of a large part of church property for the benefit of society as a whole is imperative.

One hundred and ninety-one years after it was communicated to Maurer and the young Othon, the publication of Exhibition of the Seven from the Lux Orbis Series, with a foreword by Professor Aristidis Hatzis, illuminates in the most characteristic way the particular political conditions of that time and above all the position of Church, as an organization, in the minds of the first officials of the new Greek state. In the next two centuries, the close embrace of State and Church in our country it was and still is the source of countless problems in almost every aspect of public life, a fact that causes - especially during the last decades - radical changes in the attitude of Greek society towards the hierarchy, as an institution. With the above in mind, I believe that the moment is not long before a new committee will recommend to a future government of the country the complete separation of the State and the Greek Church, above all as a result of a mature social request.

Minas Papageorgiou,

series director Luxury Orbis