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.