HELLENISM

HELLENISM. This term has two active senses within the present-day Orthodox Church. The first, and broader, refers to the patrimony of classical Greek and later Greco-Roman thought, the inheritance in particular of the great philosophers from Plato to Plotinus, together with the institutions of the later Roman Empire, especially the idea of Rome (q.v.) itself as a universal state. All of this constitutes that “Hellenism” that the Church Fathers (q.v.) breathed as their native air, and with which they struggled at every turn. Intellectually, this meant the great effort of Greek Christian-i.e., Byzantine-theology to recast the language and vocabulary of pagan thought into a vessel capable of bearing the Christian mystery. Spiritually, in the forge of asceticism and monasticism (qq.v.), it meant the hammering out and refining of that vessel, on the one hand, and the witness to the experience, on the other. The result of this effort, generations long, was, in the expression of Georges Florovsky (q.v.), that “Christian Hellenism” that constitutes the permanent vehicle of Orthodox Christian thought and culture.

While “Christian Hellenism” is the common inheritance of Greeks, Slavs, Arabs, Romanians, etc., having no nationalistic or ethnic connotations, the second sense of Hellenism is quite different. Modern Greek Hellenism, dating in particular from the late 18th c., and owing much to the Enlightenment and European Romanticism, is a type of nationalism. This ethnic vision, colored by appeals to a glorified ancient Greece, to blood and soil-in short, to race-is the philosophy of modern Greek nationalism, the Hellenic equivalent to pan-Slavism or pan-Arabism. Just as the other nationalisms of the Orthodox peoples, it has done the Church little good. At the hands of the Phanariots (q.v.) in the 18th c. and 19th c. it did great damage to the status of the Ecumenical Patriarch (q.v.) in the eyes of non-Greeks. It thus figures in the reasons why the Orthodox Church struggles today to find an appropriate response to the “diaspora” or dislocations of the 20th c.