The story is told that a young American couple decided to visit the land of their ancestors. All they knew was that their family was Greek-Catholic. So they booked a trip to – Greece.
Now Greece does offer a fine heritage. Classical Greek philosophy, art, literature and science, not to mention democracy, are fundamental to our Western civilization. True, our understanding of classical Greek culture is colored by our own presuppositions. There is always the danger of distorting it in the prism of a modern world view (see Robert Royal, “The God that Did Not Fail,” 2006, Chapter 1, esp. p. 8).
Our very language borrows heavily from ancient Greek, with its rock-hard syllables crunching along like pebbles underfoot, forming delightful words like “catastrophe,” “apocalypse” and (my favorite) “apocatastasis.” Earlier generations of Ukrainians studied Greek in school, as evidenced by their penchant for words like “korifei,” “palestra” (a word for “gymnasium” applied to the bar, where lawyers wrestled with their colleagues), and “ehyda” (“aegis,” a kind of shield, as in “aegis-bearing Zeus”).
They also learned Greek myths and legends. Tropes (figures of speech, from “tropos” – “turn”) like Achilles’ heel, Damocles’ sword and the Trojan horse were a part of everyday discourse. When Ukrainian cadets fell holding off the Bolsheviks at Kruty in January 1918, our forebears must have immediately recalled Thermopylae, where Leonidas and his Spartans perished staving off the invading Persians. Today, when semi-educated college graduates may fail to distinguish “parameter” from “perimeter,” language has lost some of its richness.
The chief rival of Greek is, of course, Latin. Partisans of Homer’s idiom look down on Latin as relatively clumsy and unrefined. What, after all, can match the sophistication of a language in which, in the 4th century, the “iota” of difference between “homoousios” (identical in essence) and “homoiousios” (similar in essence) could spark acrimonious and politically charged debates over the nature of Jesus Christ?
Esoteric as such questions may seem today, our “Greek” Catholic couple were on to something when they travelled to Greece. For the histories of Greece and Ukraine are closely tied. I may have sensed some of this when, on a student trip across the Peloponnesus in 1971, I experienced an almost mystical sensation of having been there before. Greek colonists appeared as early as the 8th century B.C. in Crimea and along the Black Sea shores. Cities like Panticapaeum and states like the Bosporan Kingdom came and went, but the Greeks remained, conducting trade between cities such as Miletus and Megara, where many of them originated, and whatever nomadic or agricultural peoples happened to be inhabiting the steppe interior at the moment.
Christians were present on the Crimea and the Black Sea coast already in apostolic times. The Roman capital from the 4th century, the “New Rome” of Byzantium (renamed Constantinople) sent missionaries to the barbarian polity that arose to the north in the 8th century and was known as Rus’. We all know the story of the Baptism of Rus’ in 987-989, which involved military aid by Grand Prince Volodymyr to the Byzantine Emperor Basil II and the former’s marriage to the latter’s sister Anna. This brought Greek clerics to Ukraine and, along with a Greek-based Slavonic alphabet developed by the missionaries Cyril and Methodius and their followers, a liturgical language and literature created in Bulgaria for the Slavs. It also brought a wealth of Greek cultural influence that continued even after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, intensifying during the 17th century Orthodox revival in Kyiv and ending with the subordination of the Metropolitanate of Kyiv to Moscow in 1685 (see Ihor Sevcenko, “Byzantine Roots of Ukrainian Christianity,” 1984).
The Greek merchant Vasilios Vatatzes, who travelled to Ukraine, and the Ukrainian Vasyl Hryhorovych-Barsky, who visited Greece, both contributed to the rich travel literature of the 18th century. Greek merchants prospered in Mariupol and Odessa in the 19th century, even establishing their own schools. The Greek independence movement simmered in Odessa after 1814. In the 1920s, there was a limited Greek cultural revival in Soviet Mariupol and Crimea, until Stalinist repression in the 1930s. After World War II, Russia’s continuing courtship of the Balkan peoples encouraged a communist uprising in Greece. Greek Russophilia remains a problem.
Both Ukrainian Orthodox and Catholic Churches have struggled to find the proper attitude towards “pagan” Greek philosophy. As Ihor Sevcenko noted, the importation of Byzantine Christianity entailed only limited elements of classical Greek culture (Sevcenko, op. cit., 14). But some have criticized the “intellectualism” that Greek philosophy introduced into Christian teaching (Jaroslav Pelikan, “The Melody of Theology,” 1988, s.v. “Hellenization”). St. Basil advocated studying the ancient authors, even if one did not accept all their notions (Ivan Kaszczak, “The Education of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Clergy (1882-1946),” 2005, pp. 176-77). Western Europe received Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotle, through Arab intermediaries, and St. Thomas Aquinas harmonized it with Catholic theology in the 13th century. By rejecting Thomism as too “Latin,” our Churches would seem to be shutting the door on an important synthesis of Christianity with the classical philosophy that our own tradition failed to inherit from its Greek sources.
“Byzantinism” was a point of controversy in the 20th century Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, with the Rev. Havryil Kostelnyk as its champion, Bishop Hryhory Khomyshyn its chief opponent and Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky as the advocate of a moderate course. By looking to Greek rather than Muscovite sources, “Easternizers” have avoided the charge of emulating Russian Orthodoxy, forging a “Kyivan Byzantine” tradition available to both our Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Today, the Byzantine Greek liturgy remains our model. Meanwhile, the Greek Orthodox have again attracted our attention, with the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew creating a new Orthodox Church of Ukraine and prominent Greek churchmen supporting it. Some experts warn, however, that Ukraine should reject the Byzantine model of church-state “symphonia” so faithfully copied by Russia.
In a sense, then, those young “Greek” Catholics were not mistaken. Greece is indeed an essential part of our heritage.
Andrew Sorokowski can be reached at [email protected].