How would you compare the Greek

Enlightenment to that which took place

in Western Europe?
Do the differences outnumber the
similarities?

Author: José Manuel Cordero Martínez

Course: HS2702, The Greek World from the Fall of Byzantium to the Rise of Nationalism, 1453-
1910

Teacher: Dr George Vassiadis

 How would you compare the Greek Enlightenment to that which took place in Western Europe?
Do the differences outnumber the similarities?

It wasn’t until the twentieth century that the Modern Greek Enlightenment ceased being
a neglected area of scholarship; the historical appreciation of the neo-Hellenic
Enlightenment, also known as diafôtismos or Diaphotismos, began with a Greek scholar
called Constantinos Th. Dimaras (1904-1994). Dimaras, and then Paschalis M.
Kitromilides (born 1949), gave the Greek Enlightenment the exposure it deserved
(Bowersock, 2014). But, what is the Greek Enlightenment and where and when did it
developed? With regards to its space and place of development, since there were no
‘Greece’ as a nation, unlike France or Spain, the neo-Hellenic Enlightenment should not
be restricted to geographical borders alone, Greeks communities should be considered
as well, for example, those on southern Russia or Hungary (Withers, 2008). On the
other hand, it certainly was developed later than the western Enlightenment; there is
always trouble with periodization in History, but we can accept the late seventeenth
century as the beginning and 1821 as the ending, if we consider, as Bowersock, that the
final aim of the Enlightenment was “to bring Greece out of the Byzantine age, orthodox
Christianity, and Turkish domination”.

Greek Enlightenment took the ideas and tenets from the main ‘Enlightenments’ in
western Europe, such as the French and English, which were born much earlier,
according to Munck (2000), it began in 1721 and ended in 1794, with the changing
direction of the French Revolution. However, this relationship between West and East
had not previously been like that: East hated West, it began with the Norman invasions
until the Fourth Crusade. Nevertheless, the fifteenth century witnessed the mental
reorientation of the Near East towards the West; there was a ‘Westernisation’ (Toynbee,
1922). Therefore, the question of to which extent Greek Enlightenment was influenced
by the western Enlightenment arises. In this essay I will try to compare both
Enlightenment, focusing on their origin and the role of religion and society, in order to
come to a conclusion and evaluate if the differences outnumber the similarities.

The first aspect that will be compared is the origin of each Enlightenment and their aim,
which constitute the initial difference. Western Enlightenment was born directly out of
the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, product of the
intellectual and scientific development of the Renaissance (Conrad, 2012, p.999) and it
was possible due to the demolition of borders of the Age of Discovery that allowed

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 How would you compare the Greek Enlightenment to that which took place in Western Europe?
Do the differences outnumber the similarities?

ideas to travel on the one hand, and the social unrest produced by the Old Regime in the
other (Bristow, 2017). Meanwhile, the Greek Enlightenment emerged in the University
of Padua due to the lack of institutions of higher learning, for the intellectual life in the
East experienced an ‘eclipse’ during the first century after the Ottoman conquest,
whereas the West was experiencing the Renaissance. During this ‘dark’ period, ties with
the West were restricted, and Greek students fled towards the University of Padua, in
the Venetian Republic, which benefited from the immunity from the intervention of the
Inquisition. Even though both Enlightenments had their own different aims, both were
born to diverge from the previous situation, the Old Regime and the Eastern Orthodoxy.
In the eyes of D’Alembert, one of the best exponent of the French Enlightenment, the
main goal was to achieve intellectual and scientific progress; for Kant its aim was to
release humankind from its self-incurred immaturity (Bristow, 2017). On the other
hand, the Greek Enlightenment aimed at a break of traditions of the Orthodox East,
resulting in a new frame of mind, non-Orthodox and increasingly secularised
(Kitromilides, 2010).

From the last statement, it may appear that the Enlightenment had anti-religious
connotations; a myriad of texts has been written discussing the role and situation of
religion during the enlightened era. There are authors that see the Enlightenment as a
reaction against religion; Peter Gay (1995) categorizes Enlightenment as ‘the rise of
modern paganism’, D’Holbach saw the necessity of abandoning religion to reconcile
oneself with ‘nature’; Voltaire ‒but he complained about ‘church’ and not religion‒, De
la Mettrie and other French thinkers were of the same opinion. This reveals that such
opinion was shared only by a few group of anti-religious thinkers, and that the anti-
religious idea did not concern most of the mass. Other authors were not as radical. For
instance, Keith Tomas argued that whilst Enlightenment was not an anti-religious
movement, the eighteenth century witnessed a shift in religious conceptions. For Hegel,
the Enlightenment was an inherently religious movement, specifically in France, where
the philosophes ‘carried out the Lutheran Reformation in a different form’ (Horkheimer
and Adorno, 1971, in Outram, 2013, p. 115), thus stating that Enlightenment and
Reformism contributed to the same objective; but he also thought that the
Enlightenment failed in producing a new set of beliefs to replace religious faith. In
addition, there was a rising ‘rational’ religion: miracles and superstitions, which were a
target for anti-religious thinkers, became the same to the supporters of the reasonable

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 How would you compare the Greek Enlightenment to that which took place in Western Europe?
Do the differences outnumber the similarities?

religion. Furthermore, there were attempts to harmonize science and religion; Newton
published the Principia, stating that even though the cosmos was subject to
mathematical law, it still needs the intervention from God. In Spain, Father Feijoo,
monk and scholar, supported scientific and empirical thought, rejecting beliefs based on
superstitions and myths during the Spanish ‘first Enlightenment’.

In the Greek world, the Orthodox church was stronger, staying resistant ‒at least at
first‒ to Protestantism and secularisation. Indeed, Protestant Reformation shook the
foundations of western Europe, but the East felt the trembling too. There are two figures
that can be mentioned regarding this issue: Cyril Loukaris (1572-1638) and Adamantios
Koraís (1748-1833). Loukaris, patriarch of Alexandria, battled against Latin propaganda
in Orthodox lands, and to do so, he made an alliance with the Protestant powers,
especially Britain and Netherlands. He felt attracted to Protestantism not only because it
helped with his cause ‒and with his battle against Jesuits‒, but because he saw that it
had open the path to Christian renewal (Kitromilides, 2006, p. 200). On the other hand,
Koraís got involved with Protestantism because he was taught conversational Greek by
Bernard Keun, a pastor of the Reformed Protestant Church in Smyrna (Zacharia et al.,
2008), and later, he studied protestant theology at the University of Göttingen, a
protestant institution. Consequently, he advocated a Greek Church liberated from the
Patriarchate of Constantinople and turn the Church into an arm of the secular state, on
the Protestant model (Kitromilides, 2013, p. 282).

In connection with an issue mentioned before, the Jesuits, both parts had to manage
with this congregation: in the Greek world, Theoplhilos Corydaleus fought against them
for the freedom of scientific investigation, and in Portugal, in the aftermath of 1755
earthquake and after Jesuits comments on how it had been a punishment for Portugal’s
sins, the Marquis of Pombal with the help of the Bourbon states opened a confrontation
that would echo in western Europe (Wright, 2008, p. 263).

It may appear that religion and Church are not the main issues when thinking about
Enlightenment, but it is an important area, especially in the Orthodox east. Whilst in
western Europe Christian religion kept being present in the life of the mass and the
common population ‒present in art, onomastic, festivities‒ the Church intervened more
overseas, in the colonies, spreading the Gospel. In the Ottoman territories, the Orthodox

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 How would you compare the Greek Enlightenment to that which took place in Western Europe?
Do the differences outnumber the similarities?

Church had an important role in the beginning of the Enlightenment. Molly Greene
(2015, pp. 134-135) divides the Greek Enlightenment into two phases, the first being
‘an elite project’. It is considered like this because it was the social elites who
contributed to the development of the Enlightenment, specially to its philosophical
thinking and to the spread of its ideas. The Orthodox Church was responsible for
initiating the educational renewal, directly opening the way to the ideas of the
Enlightenment. And it was not until 1789 that relations between the Church and the
Enlightenment tensed. The Church was willing to let pagan literature ‒such as
philosophy texts‒ in mainly because of Genadios II. He was interested both in
hesychastic theology and in Aristotelian philosophy, allowing the apparition of Greek
Neoaristotelianism (Kitromilides, 2010, p. 45) thanks to Corydaleus. However, the
Church stayed reluctant to modern science and rationalist philosophy.

In addition to the Church, the role of the printing press was very important. In Europe, it
contributed to the spread of ideas together with the social spaces such as coffee houses.
These new public spheres were product of the economic expansion during the
eighteenth century and the Industrial Revolution: with the division of labour came a
quicker production, allowing printing presses to print books and pamphlets in a cheaper
way. The number of translations and editions of books increased ‒as it happened in the
Ottoman territories, with authors like Koraís and Voulgaris‒ and suddenly, changes in
reading and in social positions of writers and publishers arose. The new culture of
literacy enabled the apparition of the ‘Republic of Letters’. However, in the east there
was not such a strong development. The use of the press was mainly restricted to the
Church and clergy: the first printing press in the Greek world was introduced to Istanbul
by Cyril Loukaris and used to print his religious works, mostly anti-Catholic tracts
(Kitromilides, 2008, p. 196). Later, the Jesuits expelled from Istanbul destroyed the
press. There were few cases on which the press was at the service of anti-religious
authors, for instance Christodoulos Pamblekis, who used the press to print Of
Theocracy, a controversial work where attacked the Christian faith. The patriarch
Gregory V, during his three patriarchates, revived Loukaris’ press to use it as an
effective instrument of the Counter-Enlightenment. In 1789, the patriarchal press issued
two pamphlets: the first one, Paternal Instruction, was an exhortation of the Ottoman
monarchy above the rest of the monarchies in Europe and attacking liberal thoughts.
Koraís responded to that pamphlets by writing Fraternal Instruction. The other one,

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 How would you compare the Greek Enlightenment to that which took place in Western Europe?
Do the differences outnumber the similarities?

Cristian Apology, constituted a piece of Christian literature adapting Counter-

Enlightenment thinking and western sources against Voltaire. Finally, during the third
patriarchal period of Gregory V, a pamphlet criticising the Church’s waste of money,
was burnt in a ceremony organised by the patriarchate, in answer to the chief censor of
the patriarchal press’ suggestion.

As this suggests, the press was a tool for Counter-Enlightenment in the Ottoman
territories, but this opposition to Enlightenment was not a feature only of the east;
western Europe endured too the resistant to the enlightened ideas, particularly since the
beginning of the French Revolution. The liberal ideas were spreading faster and the
ideological conflicts increased. Two figures that represent well the opposition are J.G.
Hamann and J. J. Rousseau. The former was an anti-rationalist Lutheran pietist that
went against Frederick the Great’s reforms to introduce French culture and economic
and social changes into East Prussia. Hamann was at first in favour of Enlightenment
ideas, but was shocked by a spiritual crisis which turned him against it; he began
publishing a series of polemical attacks, written in a style opposed to that of the one
‘French dictators of taste and thought’ used (Berlin, 2001, p. 7). The latter, Rousseau,
attacked and rejected the ‘republic of letters’, developing his ‘republic of virtue’. In his
opinion, the philosophes were responsible for the minimization of the deep tensions and
complexities of collective life and, amongst his criticism towards Enlightenment, there
is his theory that making science and philosophy popular was a symptom of moral
debasement since ‘the Sciences and Arts owe their birth to our vices’ (Rousseau, 1750,
cited in Garrard, 2003, chapter 6).

Until this part, each aspect brought into comparison concerned the Church or religion,
but there are two aspects more that makes Greek Enlightenment different from the
European one. Along with the Church, the two other actors were two secular powers:
the Phanariots and the merchants. The Phanariots were important to the political thought
and writing of that period, they made translation of European texts, for example French
texts and novels. However, they turned to a more conservative side after 1789. There
are authors, such as Cyril Mango (1977, p. 56) who suspect that Phanariots had
something to do with the publication of the Paternal Instruction and other reaction
tracts. Another example is M. P. Zallony’s declaration stating that the Phanariots,
amongst other conditions, imposed the clergy to declare the concept of political liberty

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 How would you compare the Greek Enlightenment to that which took place in Western Europe?
Do the differences outnumber the similarities?

inspired by the devil, whereas the Sultan’s Empire existed by God’s grace (Zallony,
1824, cited in Mango, 1977, p. 57). On the other hand, the merchants and merchant
colonies were the ones who helped to the new experimental science cause, making it
reachable to as many Greek as possible. They also founded schools and publication
programmes; furthermore, the mercantile Greek diaspora was affected by French
rationalism (Mango, 1973, p. 55).

To conclude, there is one aspect of the Greek Enlightenment that was not present in the
western Enlightenment and which eventually would cause the failure of the movement:
the burden of the traditions. They were many, from the Greek Church, slave of
Constantinople and Russian orthodoxy, to the Phanariots ‒to whom Enlightenment
ideas posed a thread‒, the canonization of classical Greek language and literature, and
the classical Greek Philosophy (Kitromilides, 2010). The conservatism and continuation
of Greek cultural tradition along with the counter-Enlightenment forces of conservatism
put an end to the neo-Hellenic Enlightenment, but the western Enlightenment failed too.
Both revolutions, Greek and French, dissolved quickly, resulting in new monarchies.
Eventually, both parts would get their reward and benefits would arise; in the
contemporary world we still have values that were born during the Enlightened, for
example the notions of reason, progress, civilization and tolerance (Floristán, 2015, p.
530).

The aim of this study was to compare the Greek Enlightenment and the European
Enlightenment in order to know if there were more similar than different, or vice versa,
but I believe that a concise answer cannot be given, for there are enormous aspects and
facts to take into consideration, and such a small work cannot come to such an
important conclusion. However, it seems reasonable to state that both Enlightenments
were similar in their most basic aspect such as origin and principles, but then each
Enlightenment has its own characteristics depending on a lot of factors, starting with
their area in the map. But this is an encouragement to keep researching in this field and
continue the ‘modern’ tradition of seeing the Enlightenment as a multiform event with
different features for each one and try to find the common denominator in order to find
their dissimilarities.

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 How would you compare the Greek Enlightenment to that which took place in Western Europe?
Do the differences outnumber the similarities?

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