THREE BOOKS ON MODERN GREEK ENLIGHTENMENT

Abstract

A widespread trend in Enlightenment studies is to emphasize the particular ‘national contexts’ within which key ideas were disseminated and appropriated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This may be one way to read the three books under review: on one level they appear to look at how three emblematic figures of Modern Greek Enlightenment (Adamantios Korais, Iosipos Moisiodax, and Veniamin Lesvios) transmitted ideological and philosophical tenets of Western modernity to the non-Western context of a country under construction: nineteenth-century Greece. Yet there is much more at work here. On closer study, these books collectively take an important step by suggesting a reversal of perspectives. The desideratum is an approach that no longer considers the Modern Greek Enlightenment (roughly extending from 1760 to 1821) as an a priori peripheral and dependent movement, but rather as a vehicle for elaborating on aspects of the Enlightenment as a transcultural phenomenon. Seen in this light, the space of the Modern Greek Enlightenment is not primarily geographical or geopolitical, but cultural and intellectual. Owing to the fluidity of borders and the mobility of intellectual agents inherited from the Ottoman imperial structures, the impact of the Modern Greek Enlightenment stretches across a vast area from south-eastern Europe to Asia Minor and from Transylvania to Kydonies. Interestingly, the same is true of the ideological and religious opponent of Enlightenment intellectual constellations in the Balkan peninsula: Orthodox Neo-Palamism. This spread from Mount Athos to Romania, offering a competing version of transnationalism and illumination with roots in Hesychast theology, rather than in the West. The emerging tension tested the application of Enlightenment ideas in ways alien to the West and shaped the outlook of intellectuals who are perhaps little known, but who merit a unique place in the broadly construed canon of Enlightenment thought.