Anglo-Hellenism in religious form: Anglicans and the Orthodox Part IIa. Diplomacy, commerce and scholarship after the Reformation

Before the creation of the Greek state in 1830, there were two periods, separated by a thousand years, when Greek and English interests in Christianity overlapped. In the seventh century, Theodore of Tarsus was appointed and consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury by Pope Vitalian, arriving in England to take possession of his diocese in 669AD. Part IIb of this blog takes a brief look at his career and his importance to the English church. In this piece I consider the contacts that arose in the immediate aftermath of the English Reformation and the particular forms that they took in the seventeenth century, a period of active, mutual interest between the Anglican and Orthodox churches. 

It is diplomacy that gives us the first window into English perceptions of Orthodoxy and Orthodox perceptions of Anglicanism. The earliest accounts by a Greek and an Englishman of travel to each other’s lands both come from the sixteenth century. In 1545-1546, Nikandros Noukios of Corfu visited England as member of a diplomatic mission from the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to the English king, Henry VIII; in 1599, the organ-maker Thomas Dallam made a long trip to Constantinople, with the diplomatic objective of bestowing a magnificent and costly gift from Queen Elizabeth I and the City of London on Sultan Mehmed III. Both men wrote about their diplomatic missions, and their wonderful accounts still survive. 

Nothing is known about Nikandros Noukios beyond what he tells us in the three books of his Travels / Ἀποδημίες. He was a Corfiot, living under Venetian rule. At Venice, sometime around 1545, he met Gerardus Veltuyckus, rector at Louvain University, who was heading towards Constantinople as ambassador of Charles V. Noukios managed to get himself attached to the mission, accompanying Gerardus to the Sublime Porte and returning with him across Europe to debrief Charles at his court in Brussels. Gerardus was then sent on diplomatic business to Henry VIII in London and Noukios once more managed to attach himself to the mission. 

 

The 1540s were a period of religious ferment across Europe and, as an Orthodox Greek with no personal investment in the turmoil, he took a keen interest in religious developments. In book 1 he writes - in a crabbed form of classical Greek - about the reforms of the Lutherans: their abolition of monasticism, liturgical simplification, abolition of holy days and so on. He also reports on the activities in Munster of the Anabaptists: the radical protestants who held all property in common. 

 

Book 2 of his travels deals primarily with England, but he also went to Scotland, in the company of Greek mercenaries from Argos, and had time to absorb the prejudices of Englishmen about Ireland. His account of religious developments in England isn’t always accurate and is told entirely from the perspective of the reform party in Henry’s court, but it throws light on how the English reformers presented and explained their actions to foreigners. It’s a very different account from Noukios’ report of the Reformation in German lands. The political opposition of the Papacy to Henry’s annulment; the alleged abuses and profanities of the English and Irish monasteries; the purportedly deceitful and corrupt religious cults and ‘superstitions’: all these targets of the king’s commissioners - whether or not overblown and self-serving - are recounted by Noukios in surprisingly neutral terms: surprising in that Noukios rarely even hints at the particular perspective an Orthodox outsider might be imagined to have on the events described. One could be a little unkind and say it’s all rather gossipy and short of breath. 

 

Perhaps only in the account of the dissolution of the cult of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury, which had happened ten years earlier, does Noukios allow a small note of censure to appear. He also relates a detail, which may or may not be true, about the dispersal of the saint’s remains that is not reported elsewhere. Given the laudable Becket exhibition currently being mounted at the British Museum, I quote this passage in full:

 

'Henry, as being successor to the kings of former ages, condemned Thomas as a rebel and a pest of his country, and gave orders to commit to the fire the coffin which contained his remains. Whence those appointed to this quickly fulfilled the order they had received. Wherefore one might see the remains, formerly honoured as those of a saint, and consecrated, both dragged along the public road and exposed to the gaze of the populace; and treated with every indignity, one might say, and committed to the fire in the middle of the city, and reduced to ashes; and, having put the ashes into a cannon, they discharged them into the air. And a decree was promulgated throughout England that no one should dare, as heretofore, to speak of him as a saint, but as Thomas the rebel, and one who had been disloyal and disobedient to the kings of England.’[1]

Noukios was, as we can see above, immersed in the Zeitgeist of English reform and he absorbed a lot of Henrician propaganda: nowhere is he more credulous than in relating what he heard from the court about where the wealth expropriated from the monasteries was going. But the whole account, however naïve and unquestioning it appears, is fascinating (copies can be found in second-hand bookshops). The manuscript in which it was written was unearthed by 1841 and had been owned by Archbishop Laud, whose interest in Greeks will concern us shortly. 

 

Five decades after Noukios’ trip to Britain, Thomas Dallam, an organ-builder, found himself heading to Constantinople on an unusual mission. In 1598, wishing to obtain trading concessions in the Ottoman Empire, merchants in the City put up funds to pay for a costly present, in the form of a pipe-organ that could be played both manually and, through a clock mechanism, automatically. The present was offered as a personal gift from Queen Elizabeth to Sultan Mehmed; it was dismantled and stowed on board the merchant ship Hector. The ship left Gravesend in February 1599 and arrived in Constantinople six months later, in August. Dallam was accompanied by the organ’s engineer, painter and carpenter, but it is his diary that has immortalised the journey and the successful presentation of the gift. 

 

Zakynthos Town

In April, the ship and its crew reached the Ionian Islands. On 20 April, the ship anchored off Zante (Zakynthos), which was then ruled by the Venetians, and the crew and passengers went ashore. It was Orthodox Easter. Dallam’s diary is the first account we have by an Englishman on Greek soil and it gives us the first report in English of Easter as celebrated in Greece. Dallam and his friends headed inland where they encountered Greeks commemorating the Resurrection and were made welcome, despite their lack of familiarity as protestants with the Orthodox liturgy - and particularly with the segregation of sexes at worship:

 

‘[Our host] bowed to me and took my hand and led me around the end of the house and through a little cloister into a chapel where we found a priest saying mass and wax candles burning. He sat me down in a pew, where I watched what the people did. There were about twenty men but no women, who were in a lower chapel by themselves, but they could still hear and see what was going on. Ned Hale came in but he didn’t see me and knelt down near the women, whom he didn’t notice. But they saw him and were surprised at what he was doing. I got up from my knees to look for him and saw two women laughing at him, as well they might, for he was making a fool of himself. Neither he nor I had ever seen any part of a mass before and we were none the wiser now. The chapel was very elaborately painted and decorated in a way I had never seen before.’ [2]

 

After the liturgy ended, the men were taken into the house to have lunch: ‘good bread and excellent wine and red eggs’. As a result of their curiosity, Dallam was thus the first Englishman to witness and record for posterity the Greek custom of dyeing eggs red for Easter. I will leave it to my readers to discover what happened when the group reached Constantinople: needless to say, more surprises lay in store for them.

 

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Dallam’s diplomatic visit to Ottoman lands in 1599 owed much to the foundation seven years earlier (1592) of the Levant Company in England: this was an early attempt by English merchants to muscle in on and exploit trade opportunities in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the following century, the activities of this company caused commercial contacts between England and the Greek-speaking world to grow; the company’s charter was subsequently confirmed and renewed by King James I in 1606 and King Charles II in 1661, respectively. 

 

Levant Company Arms

Out of its own revenues the Levant Company paid the salary of the Ambassador in Constantinople (he was appointed, formally at least, on behalf of the British monarch), and established consulates in key trading posts, particularly Aleppo, Smyrna and Constantinople itself. In Venetian-held Greek territories, the company appointed consuls in Zante (Zakynthos) and Cephalonia; in Ottoman-occupied Greek lands the company’s consuls operated in the Morea and on Chios, and, at later dates, on Crete and at the Piraeus. The Levant Company also appointed chaplains: one post was based at Constantinople and would, as we shall see, play an important role in Anglican-Orthodox contacts; the other chaplaincies were at Aleppo and Smyrna. 

In the Morea the consuls were usually based in Patras, where they superintended the large and important trade in currants (the English word ‘currant’ is a corruption of ‘corinthiaka’: meaning ‘from Corinth’). But between 1638-43, the consul Sir Henry Hyde established himself at Chlemoutsi, the site of the great Frankish castle of the Villehardouins. There he is reported to have ‘lived in great state, built a small church, and a fair house with many gardens and vineyards about it’.[3] Although its whereabouts is not, I think, now known, this ‘small church’ must have been the first Anglican church established in mainland Greece. It would be fascinating to know more about this church: what form it took, what services took place there.

 

The activities of English merchants in Venetian and Ottoman lands offered employment to Greek mariners, and the Greek merchant fleet was itself active in English ports, including London. Only a few years after the building of Henry Hyde’s small church in the Morea, the Greek community established in the English capital took its first steps to build an Orthodox church there. 

 

The efforts were begun in 1674 by Daniel Voulgaris, an Orthodox priest, who petitioned the king’s privy council for permission to build a church. Permission was granted within a year but the project languished. Efforts were boosted in 1676 by the arrival in London in exile of the Archbishop of Samos, Joseph Georgirenes; he set about raising funds and securing broad support for the building. The Bishop of London, Henry Compton, also supported the Greek initiative, while the king and his brother, James Duke of York, both contributed money to it. Land was acquired in Soho, in the Anglican parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, between what are now called Greek Street and Charing Cross Road (then Hog Lane), and building work commenced in 1677. Shortly after, Archbishop Georgirenes dedicated the church to the Dormition of the Mother of God (the dedication plaque is now in the Cathedral of the Divine Wisdom in Bayswater). 

 

The 'Greek Church' at the end of the 19th century

The experiment did not last long. The church proved to be in the wrong place for the Greek community; the Bishop of London expected the Orthodox priests to conform to the rites of the Church of England; and a case of embezzlement by one of the congregation embroiled the archbishop in unsuccessful litigation, which soon acquired an unhelpful political dimension. The Greek community gave up the church in 1682. For most of the eighteenth century, the congregation worshipped at the Russian chapel, which was under the control of Greek priests. For many years, the Greek Church in Soho (the name stuck, though the congregation had long since departed) was rented by the Anglican parish of St Anne to the French Huguenot community, then to Calvinist Independents, before being finally converted for Anglican usage in 1850. The building was demolished in 1935, its site now being occupied by Foyles bookshop. Its memory survives in the name of Greek Street.

 

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Commerce underpinned more systematic efforts to establish relations between the churches. The Levant Company’s chaplains in the East became a particular source of information and communication between the Anglicans and the Orthodox. In the second half of the century, two of the chaplains at Constantinople, Thomas Smith (1668-1670) and John Covel (1670-1676), were theologians and would go on to publish books that aimed to project authoritative views about the Orthodox Church. Runciman tells us that Smith’s account is ‘well-informed, frank but fairly sympathetic’; Covel’s much less so.[4] But this process of mutual enquiry, while slow to yield real fruit, had taken off in earnest in the first part of the century, when a correspondence began between George Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Cyril Loukaris, the so-called ‘Calvinist’ Patriarch of Alexandria. In 1617, the archbishop invited the patriarch to send four Greeks to England to study theology at Oxford, at the expense of the Crown. The first to arrive was Metrophanes Kritopoulos, from Verroia, who studied at Balliol from about 1621 and would himself become Patriarch of Alexandria, in 1634. 

 

Such experiments continued under subsequent hierarchs. Under William Laud’s tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury, a Cretan called Nathaniel Kanopios also studied theology at Balliol, from 1637-1648. He is famous for introducing the English to coffee, which, like Oxford students ever since, he used to brew up every morning in college. Because of his closeness to Laud, the Puritans forced him to leave Oxford, but he made a success of his ecclesiastical career, becoming in the course of time Archbishop of Smyrna.

 

Gloucester Hall, Oxford

By the time that Archbishop Georgirenes was being forced to abandon his Greek Church in Soho, relations between the Orthodox and the theological authorities in Oxford had matured sufficiently to lead to an ambitious and radical proposal. Sometime around 1682, Georgirenes wrote to William Sancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to propose a permanent scheme for educating a dozen Greek theological students at Oxford. At that time, Gloucester Hall in Oxford was essentially defunct (penniless and student-less); its principal, Benjamin Woodroffe, therefore took up the Greek suggestion with enthusiasm and offered Gloucester’s premises for a model Greek College. The scheme was to be funded by the Levant Company and the students chosen by the patriarchs of Antioch and Constantinople in alternation. The surprisingly enlightened scheme got off the ground and the first students arrived in 1698. But it proved short-lived and foundered on problems that sound all too modern: the Levant Company disliked paying for it (of what commercial use were these graduates?) and in 1705, the Phanar refused to send any more students owing to the ‘irregular life’ that some of them were living in London. Clearly, the attractions of the capital were more compelling to some than the grind of theological study in Oxford. 

 

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These exchanges and contacts had done much to create opportunity to deepen mutual knowledge between the churches of each other’s doctrinal and ecclesiological principles. But a little knowledge, coupled with the practical failures of the church- and college-building schemes, proved to be too much. The florescence of interconfessional relations in the seventeenth century is of great historical interest but left no real ecumenical legacy. For much of the eighteenth century, contacts between the churches cooled. It took the creation of the Greek state and the ecumenism fostered by the Oxford Movement in the Church of England to reawaken mutual interests, in the nineteenth century. And the process of creating effective institutional ecumenical structures didn’t really begin until the twentieth century. In the final piece in this blog, I will take a look at the activities of a Greek hierarch whose leadership of the English church, a thousand years before Archbishop Georgirenes arrived in London, really did leave a legacy that lasted many centuries and is still felt in the Church of England today.

 

John Kittmer

Feast of the Venerable Bede

25 May 2021

 

[1] This quotation comes from the only English edition (Greek text plus English translation) of Noukios’ travelogue: J.A.Cramer (ed.), The Second Book of the Travels of Nicander Nucius of Corcyra (London: Camden Society, 1841): 74-75. 

 

[2] This quotation is taken from an accessible, modernised transcription of the diary: John Mole (ed.), The Sultan’s Organ: The Diary of Thomas Dallam, 1599 - London to Constantinople and Adventures on the Way (London: Fortune Books 2012): 24-25.

  

[3] Robert Liddell refers to this in The Morea (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958) 69. His source is an early travel-book by an English merchant: Bernard Randolph, The Present State of the Morea (London: Wm. Notts et al. 1689³). Sir Henry Hyde would later be appointed Charles II’s Ambassador in Constantinople, but at the request of the Commonwealth Government he was sent back by the Sultan to England, convicted of treason and executed in 1650.  

 

[4] The standard account on which I have largely relied is by Runciman. For this reference, see Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968): 292-293.

Anglo-Hellenism in a Religious Dimension: Anglicans and the Orthodox. Part I. The establishment of the new Greek State

The creation of the independent Greek state in 1830 brought a new reality to relationships between Britons and Greeks and opened up mutual opportunities in both countries. In the course of the revolutionary war, the bicentenary of which we are celebrating this year, Greek merchants fleeing from massacres in Chios and elsewhere had set up shop in London and in Manchester and Liverpool, the great industrial and trading cities of the north. Greek and British political and financial interests had also converged. The Greek loans raised in the City of London (1824-5), the (rejected) Act of Submission (1825), the Treaty of London (1827), the Battle of Navarino (1827), the three protocols to the Treaty (1828-30), the Treaty of Constantinople (1832): all this intertwined the interests of Greece and Britain to a degree unimaginable at the start of the war. With the arrival of Otto in Greece as king in 1833, Britons and Greeks turned their energies to new diplomatic and trading possibilities; meanwhile, the establishment of an English party in Athens, under Mavrocordatos’ leadership, consolidated a certain political influence of England over Greek affairs, which would last, in one form or another, for over a hundred years.

St Paul's Athens

The ground was ready not only for growth in commercial and political relations, but also for religious exchange and spiritual developments. In the new Greek state and in the English cities of the new Greek diaspora, an impetus to build religious institutions emerged. 

On the Ionian Islands, which had been a protectorate of Great Britain since 1815, the English community had already established make-shift Anglican churches, sometimes taken over from earlier Catholic usage.[1] Cemeteries too had been established for protestant burials. In 1833, Athens had no such infrastructure. Until Otto decided to make it his new capital, Athens was little more than a small, decaying town, huddled around its sacred rock and much battered by the war. The arrival in Athens of the new Greek Crown and its government not only attracted Greeks in large numbers; it also brought diplomatic legations; commercial consuls, agents and traders; ever greater volumes of foreign travellers (embarked on the Grand Tour); and all the appurtenances of cosmopolitan life. The establishment of a secure, permanent English community, with the British diplomatic mission at its heart, made it inevitable that the Anglicans would want to build a church there for their corporate worship. 

 

The English community in Athens, supported by missions of the Episcopalian Church and the Church of England, bought a plot of land for their church in 1836; a separate plot of land closer to the Ilissos river was also purchased for a cemetery. The foundation stone of the church was laid by Sir Edmund Lyons, the British Legate (equivalent of the modern Ambassador), and John Green, the British Consul, in 1838. The cost of the land and building (£2800) was met partly by the English community in Athens, partly by the British Government. The church was consecrated in 1843 and dedicated to St Paul. The chaplaincy became part of the Church of England’s Diocese of Gibraltar in Europe, which had been established the previous year. St Paul’s remains on its site today, as the heart of the Anglican chaplaincies of Greece. For many decades now, the senior chaplain has also been the Archbishop of Canterbury’s representative (‘apocrisiarius’) to the Orthodox Archbishop of Athens and All Greece. Through thick and thin, the congregation has flourished for nearly 180 years of corporate religious life.

Cathedral of the Divine Wisdom, London

The opportunity taken by the Anglican community in Athens was no different from that which presented itself to the Orthodox in London, and in the other great British cities where Greek refugees had settled. The now established merchants and their families, and the continuous flows of transient merchant marines, all needed places for worship and the celebration of their corporate religious lives. In London the Greek merchants first established a small chapel, in 1837, at the heart of their commercial ventures, which were then concentrated on Finsbury Square. A few years later, in 1850, a church, also dedicated to Our Saviour, was built in Byzantine style at 82 London Wall. In 1842, an Orthodox cemetery was established at West Norwood - just down the road from where I now live. As the Greek community prospered, it moved west out of the City to more fashionable Bayswater. There the community built a larger neo-Byzantine church, dedicated to the Divine Wisdom, between 1877 and 1882. Greek communities in Manchester, Liverpool and Cardiff followed suit, building and consecrating their own Orthodox churches in 1861, 1870 and 1873 respectively. All four of these buildings still stand today, serving their Orthodox communities.  

The establishment of these places of worship testified to the stability of the new Greek state and the confidence of its diaspora; it testified also to a new spirit of religious tolerance in both Britain and Greece. But the presence in each other’s lands of Anglican and Orthodox congregations and their clergy inevitably posed a bigger question about the relationship and intercommunion (or lack of it) between the Orthodox and the Anglican churches. The Anglicans, moreover, had to negotiate with particular care the sensitivities of the Orthodox hierarchy about proselytization. (Aggressive evangelical protestant missions in the ancient patriarchates of the Middle East were much resented and caused general friction in relations.)

 

A dialogue began, prompted particularly by the Anglicans in the USA (the Episcopalian Church) and in England. In 1906, the Anglican & Eastern Churches Association, of which I am a member, was founded through a merger of two earlier organisations; in 1928, the Fellowship of St Alban & St Sergius came into being. Both organisations are ecumenical points of contact and association between the churches. The Great War, which placed Great Britain in effective control of the Holy Land and, briefly, Constantinople, was a particular spur to dialogue. Several conferences between the Orthodox and the Anglicans were held in New York and London in 1916 and 1918. In 1920, the Ecumenical Patriarch sent representatives to the Lambeth Conference of Anglican prelates - the first time that this had happened. With Anglican support, the Ecumenical Patriarch established the Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain in 1922 as an exarchate of the Patriarchate, with the Church of the Divine Wisdom as the cathedral: the first such effort in Western Europe. 

 

Permanent expatriate institutions imply the need for a permanent and structured approach to συμβίωσις, living together. As such, ecumenical conversations have grown and matured. Since 1975, the two churches have run an official dialogue, now organised as The International Commission for the Anglican–Orthodox Theological Dialogue. Five ‘agreed statements’ - the most recent in 2015 (at Buffalo) and 2020 (at Canterbury) - have now been produced: surely a good sign of co-operation and convergence. 

It is right, I think, to trace these modern developments to the impetus provided by the Greek revolutionary war and the foundation of the modern Greek state. But links and mutual curiosity between the English church and the Orthodox churches of the East certainly predate the revolutionary war. In parts IIa and IIb of this blog, I take a look at some of the deeper history.

 

John

7 May 2021

 

[1] The ruins of the English church on Kythera are still visible; it was converted from Catholic to Anglican usage during the British Protectorate; see further Paul Watkins, ‘An English Church on Kythera’, Argo: A Hellenic review 11/12 (2020): 44-46. On Corfu, the English built the church of St George in the garrison in 1840; after the British ceded the Ionian Islands to Greece in 1864, the church was converted for Orthodox use and the Anglicans were ceded the old Ionian Assembly for use as a church, Holy Trinity Church. The building was bombed in WWII and the Anglican community of Corfu now occupies only a small part of the restored Assembly building.