The great teachers of the Church and of the Greek nation, Makarios
Notaras, Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and Athanasios of Paros, who
lived and worked in the 18th and early 19th centuries, form a new
trinity of shining lights of the Church, like the three Fathers of the
Church in the past, relatively speaking of course and bearing in mind
the historical circumstances they lived through with their similarities
and differences. To these three must be added Neophytos of Kafsokalyvia,
who started the movement, although he was not as important or active as
the other three would later become, thus earning their place in the
Communion of Saints. They were nicknamed Kollyvades by their opponents
on the Holy Mountain because they objected to the transfer of the
memorial services (involving kollyva) from Saturday to Sunday in
defiance of tradition, rightly judging that services for the dead are
incompatible with the resurrectional and festal nature of Sunday.
This of course was a minor detail within their greater work of
renewal and enlightenment. It was deliberately stressed and exaggerated
in order to obscure the importance of their other work, and also to
denigrate them as being people who concerned themselves with petty
matters, as memorial services and kollyva supposedly were. Even today
there are scholars who belittle them and their work, seeing the whole
through the distorting prism of the memorial service controversy.
Fortunately in recent decades, during which Greek historical and
theological research has begun to free itself from Western ties,
dependency and influence, their work has been reassessed as an 18th
century philokalian renaissance. This renaissance had a decisive impact
in strengthening and reinforcing the education of the enslaved Orthodox
peoples and in preserving their awareness of who they were, not only
vis-à-vis the Ottoman conquerors but also vis-à-vis the Western
missionaries who spread out all over the Orthodox world, proselytising
by unfair means, and especially by exploiting the ignorance, enslavement
and poverty of the Orthodox faithful.
There was a great danger that the Orthodox would convert either to
Islam or to a Western form of Christianity. Indeed, the second was the
greater danger due to the West’s high level of civilisation, which made
assimilation easier, whereas the feeling of superiority to Islam raised
some barriers and reservations. There is the classic statement by the
other great teacher and saint of that period, St Kosmas Aetolos,
explaining why God allowed the Orthodox to be enslaved by the Turks
rather than by the Franks [Westerners]: “Three hundred years after
Christ’s Resurrection, God sent us Saint Constantine and established the
kingdom for 1150 years. Then God took it away from the Christians, and
for their own good gave it to the Turk for 320 years. And why did God
bring the Turk and not some other nation? For our own good, because the
other nations would have harmed our faith, but the Turk, as long as you
give him money, will let you do as you like.”
However, after the dark ages of ignorance and illiteracy of the
previous centuries, the roots of education were needed to raise a
barrier against conversions to Islam or Western Christianity, to prevent
a multitude of small streams becoming a river that would sweep away the
Nation. What St Kosmas Aetolos did by travelling around the country and
founding schools for the people, the Kollyvades Saints did at a higher
level by publishing and interpreting texts from Scripture and the
Fathers, Lives and Services of Saints, hymns, and even grammar, rhetoric
and philosophy textbooks and also ancient Greek and Western classical
writers. The aim was to enlighten the Nation and maintain it in its
faith and in the traditions of the Fathers, to preserve Greek Orthodox
culture. They wanted to ensure that in the schools, which were appearing
in increasing numbers, the teachers, monks and priests would be able to
understand Greek texts through school education, but also to publish
these texts, since the manuscripts were few and far between, either
hidden away in monastic libraries or looted by crafty foreign
travellers.
One can even discern in their truly impressive educational and
literary efforts a special emphasis on action to meet the danger of
conversions to Islam or Western Christian denominations. It is well
known that many Neo-Martyrs had as mentors, who supported them
psychologically on the road to martyrdom, Kollyvades Saints such as St
Makarios and St Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain. It is certain that what
many Neo-Martyrs proclaimed before the Turkish judges regarding the
superiority of the Christian faith to the religion of Muhammed, which
they disparage and reject, echoed the teaching of the Kollyvades Saints.
Many of these exchanges between these Neo-Martyrs and the Turkish
judges, which recall the martyrologies of old, were preserved by St
Nikodemos in his “New Martyrology”. The same interpretation must be put
on the anti-Western works of St Athanasios of Paros; “The Antipope”,
“The Judgement of Heaven”, “That Palamas” and other works on the
aberrations and errors of the Latins.
The contribution of the Kollyvades to education and culture was not
limited to raising the self-awareness of the Orthodox peoples vis-à-vis
the twin dangers of assimilation by East or West, which were very great.
It had another, equally broad, dimension, in which they appeared to
have less success, not because their teachings were without effect, but
because unfortunately, from 1821 the modern Greek state was violently
cut off from the Greek Orthodox tradition. It abandoned traditional
Greek Christian education and, guided by and in tutelage to the West,
turned against its Byzantine heritage, against the Saints and the Church
Fathers, against all that was holy for the Nation.
It is known that the Kollyvades Saints, and especially St Athanasios
of Paros, clashed with the European and Europeanising supporters of the
Enlightenment in modern Greece, who adopted the ideas of the French
Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and even the atheism of
Voltaire, and who attempted to direct the course of modern Greek culture
towards classical antiquity, extolling and stressing the worldly wisdom
and knowledge of antiquity while underrating or ignoring divine wisdom.
Rationalism, science, knowledge and freedom were the new deities in the
Enlightenment creed. The Byzantine synthesis, in which the healthy
elements of the ancient Greek spirit were preserved and strengthened and
pressed into the service of the divine message of love, humility and
reconciliation that derives from the teaching of the Gospel of the
Cross, was abandoned and disparaged. It was essentially a new form of
persecution of the church, similar to the attempts by the Emperor Julian
the Apostate in the fourth century to revive pure Hellenism in the
place of Christianity, and by Barlaam the Calabrian in the fourteenth
century to introduce into Orthodox Byzantium the scholasticism and
rationalism of the Western Renaissance, rejecting the tried and true
method of enlightenment and perfection used by the Fathers of the Church
which emphasised divine wisdom, but without rejecting worldly or human
wisdom. The three Fathers of the fourth century, Basil the Great,
Gregory the Theologian and John Chrysostom, with their fine classical
Greek education, like St Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century,
barred the way back to an unwholesome classicism that places the created
above the uncreated, human wisdom above divine wisdom, as was said by
the blessed monk Christoforos Papoulakos on observing the wrong course
taken after 1821 by westernised Greek scholars and clergymen, who
adopted in their entirety the ideas of the European Enlightenment.
It is worth noting that the revolutionary heroes of 1821,
Kolokotronis, Makrygiannis, Papaflessas and others, who had been brought
up in the spirit of tradition, felt betrayed on this point. They had
struggled to free the Greeks from the Turks in body, and now they saw
Greece becoming enslaved spiritually, surrendering her soul, to the
Europeans.
Latinisation returned in the form of Europeanisation and
Westernisation. The West, which had been unable to “enlighten” free
Byzantium with Barlaam the Calabrian, that is to plunge the Greeks into
darkness, because St Gregory Palamas reacted with the Hesychast
movement, nor again under the Turkish occupation due to the Hesychastic
movement of the Kollyvades, attempted again after 1821 by placing the
modern Greek state, education and culture under its spiritual tutelage.
It seems, however, that it is once again being defeated.
The Kollyvades, reviled even in the name they were given, profoundly
influenced Orthodox faith and life as true successors of the patristic
Hesychast tradition. Both the Holy Mountain, which bred them, and St
Gregory Palamas can be proud of these great teachers of Orthodoxy and
the Nation.
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