Anglican intervention in the election of an Orthodox patriarch, 1925–6

Abstract

I am very sorry for being the instrument through which some of these unprincipled Greeks, for their own selfish aims, troubled our Archbishop’; in March 1926 Llewellyn H. Gwynne, anglican bishop in Egypt had good reason to feel sorry, though perhaps not quite as much reason as his critics supposed. His apparently maladroit intervention in the name of the archbishop of Canterbury in the election of a new Orthodox patriarch of Alexandria had been maliciously exploited to produce results entirely opposite to his intentions and caused serious embarrassment both to archbishop Davidson and to the British government. But his behaviour, though certainly injudicious, was not so entirely incomprehensible as it originally seemed. An examination of the episode in its context will not only explain Gwynne’s behaviour but more importantly shed light upon the complex set of circumstances, attitudes and assumptions which have conditioned relations between Greek Orthodoxy and the church of England in the twentieth century. Any such relationship involves also the relations of centre and periphery, of personal ambitions, party objectives, strategic processes and the larger international religious systems of anglicanism and orthodoxy.